A plate of food. Breaded chicken, mashed potatoes, fusilli slicked with cheese sauce, green beans, a handful of blueberries and grapes. A dinner spread I set down for my four-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter.

“Daaa-Daaa,” my daughter groaned. “I don’t like this.”

My son chimed in, “Me neither.”

I stared at their plates. Do I tell them? Would they even understand? If I said out loud what I was thinking, would they see this as more than just dinner? Or would their hearts break, like mine?

Because thousands of children their age in Gaza are starving. Children with bodies too frail and stomachs too empty to handle even half the food sitting untouched on my kids’ plates.

What is happening in Gaza is not a conflict. It is the systematic destruction of a people. For nearly two years, the assault has played out in real time on our phones and news feeds — an ethnic cleansing carried out by Netanyahu and the Israeli army, with backing from Donald Trump and the United States. This is genocide.

Yesterday (September 16), the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released a 72-page report concluding that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. The Commission found Israel guilty of four of the five acts prohibited under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

The UN is hardly alone. The International Association of Genocide Scholars, Doctors Without Borders, CARE International, Save the Children, Norwegian Refugee Council, and Islamic Relief Worldwide have all said the same. Israeli human rights groups — B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights — agree. So do Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, Defence for Children International, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. The conclusion is unavoidable.

Netanyahu himself stripped away any pretense: “Israel wants to destroy Gaza City, not occupy it.” And Gaza City is, right now, being reduced to rubble.

At this point, there are no new words left. The only ones that matter belong to Palestinians themselves. These are the civilians, the doctors, the families struggling to survive inside the ruins of Gaza.

Narges Ashour, Gaza City resident: “I wish someone would look at us, the Palestinian people, in a human way. In European countries, there are animal rights, taking care of the animals and the birds. No one is looking after us, the people of Gaza. They are not looking for these children. Our children either die from hunger or strikes, or either they’re displaced from the north to the south in harsh conditions. We are approaching winter, in tents. Tents don’t protect us in the summer during the heat; in the winter, nothing.”

Abu Tarek Habboub, Gaza City resident: “I have nothing. My 10 children and I are walking in the street heading south. We don’t know where we’re going. We don’t have mattresses or blankets. We don’t even have money or anything. … Maybe death would be better than what we’re living through. I have children who slept in the street yesterday.”

Maged Sukkar, Gaza City resident: “Four tons of explosives hit the tower. Our belongings flew in the air. Our tents are gone. Our money is gone. Our conditions have gotten worse. There is no shelter for us. What does Trump want? What does Netanyahu want?”

Mahmoud Ad-Dabbs, Gaza City resident: “We are attempting to delay death a little longer. We have been displaced approximately 30 times, moving from one death to another, but we are trying to postpone death a little. What is the fault of these children? Why is this happening to this child and that one? O Arabs, Muslims, negotiators, please find a solution for us in any possible manner.”

Somaya Mikdad, Gaza City resident and relative of a family hit by an Israeli air strike that killed a pregnant woman and her unborn baby: “The woman was getting ready to deliver a baby. Here are the diapers for the baby, the baby’s clothes, in the month she was due to deliver. What is her fault? This is a people’s tent. What is their fault? Is it a war against Hamas, or is it a war against the people?”

Sabreen al-Mabhuh, Gaza City resident: “He was martyred. He was hit by a strike inside his room. They killed him with his wife and children. They erased them all. No one is left for me. Yesterday he was with me. He told me, ‘I have your back. I will not leave you. Whatever happens to you happens to me.’ But, no, he’s gone and left me alone. To whom are you leaving me, my brother Mohammed? To whom are you leaving me?”

Khaled al-Masry, Gaza City resident: “I want to find a place where I can stay with my sons and daughters. I don’t know where to go. Moving out requires money. I can’t even find something to eat. It has been two months without food. I don’t know where to go. I borrowed money from here and there. No one is standing by me to give me anything. No one is standing with the Palestinian people.”

Mohammed al-Bayari, interviewed as he was preparing to leave the city with his family: [translated] “It is an issue of fear. I fear for my little ones only. I do not fear for the army or anyone. Death is death. But the little ones, the little ones, they scream. We are used to the sound of shelling, to the sound of gunfire. We are used to it. It has become the norm. But the little ones, I cannot bear seeing them like that, torn apart.”

Displaced Gaza City mother: [translated] I was sitting, preparing some food for the children. People came and said that we have to evacuate the school. We took our things and put them outside. Minutes later, they started to strike the school. We only could get what we’re wearing. I’m sitting in a tent, nothing left for my children. I have no pillow, no blanket, nothing. Should I sleep in the streets with my children? Where should I go?

Another displaced Gaza City mother: [translated] My home, my safety, my life. My whole life has been spent in this house. It’s the safety of my children. Now I can no longer feel safe for myself or my home. I don’t know where to go. I’m standing here with nowhere to go. I have no place in the south, no place in Gaza. I have found nowhere. Where do we go? Someone, please tell us where to go. There is no safe place. Everywhere they say is safe, but the bombing continues, and death is everywhere.

Dr. Kathleen Gallagher, general surgeon and military veteran who served as a medic in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as volunteered as a surgeon in Honduras and Ukraine: “And as a parting message to my folks back home and to my fellow Americans, this is no longer a political issue. This is — this is a question of right and wrong. And I encourage everyone at home to use any avenue possible to reach out to your representatives, to implore them, to beg them to do the right thing, to be a source of justice in the world and to pressure the Israeli government to stop this senseless killing.”

When asked by Democracy Now’s Juan Gonzalez how her experience compares to her work as a volunteer medic in Ukraine and Honduras, as well as in the U.S. Military in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gallagher responded: “This is worse than anything I’ve ever seen. The scale of destruction is something that I couldn’t even comprehend before I got here.”

Dr. Mohammed Saqr, director of nursing at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza: “This must end and stop soon. This is — this is like a shame on humanity to make camps like this, focusing people and concentrating people in, like, this way, million, more than 1 million in 25 kilometers, and killing them inside these camps…This is insane. This madness must stop.”

Muhammad Shehada, writer and analyst from Gaza City: “Like, there is apocalypse. There’s catastrophe. There’s disaster. There’s genocide. And then there is Gaza. It’s beyond anything that the human language can capture at this moment.”

The world is not short on evidence. We are drowning in it. The reports, the rulings, the footage, and the words of the survivors cry out to a world that refuses to act. History is watching. And one day, my children, who complained about the meal I placed in front of them for dinner last night, will ask why, knowing, we did nothing while Gaza burned.

Right now this is happening— another child. Another bomb.

My Miles, who put a metal straw through drywall — Sharpied on the sea foam green.

My Maxine. She “retrieves” her headband from the third floor — Wrote stories on vintage greeting cards.

Someone else’s Miles — someone else’s Maxine.

Who is doing this? Would I stop — fall to the earth? Yes. Will they continue? How, Mr. Big Guy? Are you comfy? Do you have what you want? Are we great?

No one subscribes here. I know — A mother’s face winces. A father’s eyes — hollow. Tenderness, and something harder to name, slips through tears.

Right now — while you sit on your couch — anguish, for the ones who loved Miles and Maxine.

Don’t you also go about your business in this lopsided world with that constant, soft nagging in the back of your mind, whispering that things are not all right? That stomach-dropping, aching sense that your once solid sense of belonging to the human species is, weirdly, expiring?

In a society designed to rob you of obtaining real connection with the earth, other forms of life, happiness, and other humans, it is difficult to notice. But it is there, like a parasite in your blood, circulating through your consciousness pleading “help!” from a dark corner of existence and despair you never imagined we were capable of creating.

I don’t know when it all went sour — my heart, my hope, my wonderment.

Maybe it was when I was 24. My best friend and my girlfriend of four years showed up at my parents’ house to tell me they were in love. No warning, really. Just a green VW pulling into the driveway and my entire reality collapsing under the nightmarish weight of betrayal. I told them to leave. Then I fished a Camel Light from my sister’s purse and stepped outside to ruin my lungs. That’s when the numbness started.

Maybe it was after the betrayal, when I bolted to California. I took whatever jobs I could and pieced together rent, convinced I could outrun my sadness. I had a safety net if I really needed it, back in Cleveland. But I was so hellbent on not going back that I would’ve rather slept on the sidewalk. Indeed, I almost did.

It was there, in California, that I got a real taste of how systems in the U.S. treat people experiencing poverty. How every day is a battle. How it seems to cost money to be poor. How they fuck you over.

People look at you with fear and disgust. Like you’re contagious. Your presence alone makes them physically uncomfortable. Like you’ve already asked them for something before you’ve even opened your mouth.

Once, I was stranded in Santa Rosa with my Kelty backpack, stuck between San Francisco and Mendocino. I was searching for the bus stop, hoping I hadn’t missed the last ride back to my futon on the floor of a bare apartment. The inland summer air began to chill. The sky was turning purple, and streetlights began popping on one by one. I had no watch — just a growing sense of dread that I might sleep on the sidewalk tonight.

Then, a glimmer of hope: a well-to-do, middle-aged woman, dressed casually, sauntering down the sidewalk. Maybe she could tell me the time. Maybe I could make it.

I approached her with a smile and offered a hello. But before I could ask anything, she scrunched her nose, looked me square in the face, and fired, “Leave me alone!” That look stayed with me. It’s quietly one of the most crushing things about struggling in public.

Or maybe my heart just wore down over time — between the betrayals, the months I spent barely getting by, and the long drag of untreated depression I kept mistaking for incompetence.

I found love again. But the part of me that believed in people and compassion on a larger scale started to fade after California. And by the time I started my master’s in social work, it was barely hanging on.

This is when all my disheartening observations about society — its policies, inequities, and broken systems — were confirmed by cold, hard facts.

None of this is accidental. This was always the plan. Redlining was mapped, block by block. Mandatory minimum sentencing didn’t target “crime” — they targeted Black neighborhoods. The school-to-prison pipeline isn’t a metaphor. It’s a flowchart.

Voter suppression. Gerrymandering. Segregated schools funded by segregated taxes. The goal has always been the same: control the outcomes by controlling the inputs.

Then, as a licensed clinical school social worker working with traumatized kids in North St. Louis County, I saw it up close. Kids living below the poverty line, stuck in survival mode. Not focused on math or science. Just surviving. Fight or flight.

I saw caregivers with hollow eyes, nervous systems shot from living inside chaos too long. Gun violence wasn’t just trauma. It was a receipt. Names, dates, totals. I saw foster care as a game of hot potato.

This was when I realized the support networks meant to help them were struggling to keep up. The assistance programs available to my students were confusing, underfunded, and barely accessible. Abuse and neglect reports went into a system so overloaded, so flooded, it might take years of repeated reporting before Children’s Services even considers intervening in any meaningful way.

This was me, inside the aftermath of 300 years of racist policy — wading through generational trauma in the form of silence, suspensions, and suicidal kids.

It’s been almost six years in this job, and now my heart is numb.

Oddly, though, something in me keeps showing up. Maybe that’s the glimmer.

I know I’m good at my job — and not because it’s easy, but because when I walk through those doors in the morning, something sharp switches on. All of a sudden, I know what I’m doing. I’m present. I’m listening. I’m steady in crisis.

I know which kid’s silence means something’s about to break. I know when a meltdown isn’t about the line order or who got the red marker. I know a crisis is coming before the voice even hits the radio just from the way the static shifts.

And when I’m not at work, I walk through this wrecked world beside a seven-year-old who feels everything too much — sometimes too sharply.

She once described a classmate’s glare as, “She shot me a look,” like she was narrating a tense lunchroom thriller.

She says things like, “I dropped off to sleep,” and, “The remnants of my name are still visible on there,” pointing to a half-worn-out scribble on an allergy bottle.

If you knew her, and I told you she’s already listening to book six of the Harry Potter audiobooks, you’d understand. She’s long since passed Cedric Diggory’s death, keenly aware good people die in this world.

She already knows some things just happen. She figured that out long before I did.

And then there’s my three-year-old, who thinks roly-polies are sacred and mud is a reason to exist. Who jams up the sidewalk in front of our house with orange cones and insists it’s under construction.

If you knew him, and I told you our shampoo was modified with lotion and hand sanitizer, you’d understand.

Once, he stopped me on his scooter to announce, “Dada? I just saw a person with a vagina — a big mama — blowing a cigarette.”

He observes our community literally. The workers across the street are the “people with the brown cheeks.” Our friend down the block is the guy “with the black skin.” Before he’s been told not to describe the world, he’s just telling us what he sees.

He allows it to exist without pointing out it’s broken. I get to look through his eyes, and that makes my hopelessness feel optional — even if only for a moment.

I’m not sure I believe in much else anymore. Not justice. Not systems. And I often feel this place hasn’t earned the privilege of their existence. But I believe in them. The world is only better with them.

And that is enough. For now.

This genocide is televised. We’re watching war crimes in real-time, on our phones. This isn’t just personal despair — it’s global. It’s systemic.

According to Al Jazeera, as of May 27, the Palestinian Ministry of Health has confirmed at least 54,056 people killed — 17,400 of them children.

Hospitals have been bombed. Schools, targeted. Refugee camps and “safe zones” leveled. Thousands more — many of them children — are still buried beneath the rubble.

Democracy Now reports that half a million Palestinians are facing starvation under Israel’s blockade. No food. No clean water. No medicine.

And there’s an unbearable contrast I live with every night.

The images on my phone — grieving families weeping over the lifeless bodies of their children. Toddlers pulled from rubble, screaming. Dust-covered, wide-eyed, trembling in hospital beds. Starving people with hollow faces. Bodies wrapped in bloodied cloth.

None of it resembles my reality.

Here, in the safety of my home, it’s warm and quiet. My two children sleep soundly in their bunk beds, bathed in the soft glow of a nightlight.

I wander into my backyard, blank and stupefied, and lie on the swing, staring up. The trees I planted ten years ago — back when I still believed my heart could guide something toward peace — whisper in the wind. The branches sway, slowly, almost like they know:

Something is ending.
The world is poisoned.
Rotting.
Venomous.

My tax dollars — the same ones cast in the shadow of Never Again — aren’t just complicit. They’re funding this genocide.

As recently as April, the Senate voted 82–15 to reject a resolution that would have blocked $8.8 billion in weapons to Israel— fully aware of what those weapons are doing.

What comes after this?

I went back inside and kissed my dreaming kids. That’s all I could do — stunned that the universe allows me the privilege of this moment, and not the Palestinian people.

What makes us different from them?
Nothing. Not really.
What can I do to stop this?
Nothing. Not really.

So I wrote this.