Ellis Merkelijn

There is no internet. No signal. No sound. No world beyond this cage. I walked thirty minutes through ruins and dust. Not in search of escape, but for a fragment of signal, just enough to whisper, “We are still alive.” Not because anyone is listening, but because to die unheard is the final death. Gaza is silent now. Not with peace, but with obliteration. Not a silence of stillness, but of smothering. They severed the last cable. No messages leave. No images enter. Even grief has been forbidden. I passed the corpses of buildings, of homes, of men, some breathing, some not. All of them erased by the same hand that erased our voices. This is not a siege of bombs alone. It is a siege of memory: a war against our ability to say, “We were here.” The bombing never stopped, especially in Jabalia. They shell the streets where children beg for food. They shell the lines where mothers wait for flour. They shell hunger itself. No food. No water. No exit. And those who try, those who reach for aid, are struck down. People die here, and no one knows. Not because the killing paused, but because the killing of connection succeeded. The internet was our final breath. It was not a luxury; it was the last evidence of our humanity. Now it is gone. And in the dark, they massacre without consequence. I found this faint eSIM signal as a dying man finds a flicker of flame. I stood beneath a broken sky, risking death, not for rescue, but to send this. A single message. A last resistance. If you are reading this, remember: we walked through fire to say it. We were not silent. We were silenced. And when the cables are restored, the truth will bleed through the wires, and the world will know what it chose not to see.