Emma Patchett

The night did not fall. It broke. A sound tore through the silence, not like thunder, but like something deeper collapsing, something within the world itself. News came: an entire residential block crushed into dust. We ran. We didn’t speak. There was no room for thoughts, no space for hope. We moved patients from beds to chairs, from chairs to floors. Anything to make space. The ER transformed into a corridor of shadows. And then, they came. Waves. Ambulances screeched like some beast in agony. Doors slammed open, stretchers collided. Blood smeared across the floor, across the hands of the living. Screams echoed, not cries, but something more terrible, like truth made sound. People begged for names. Others wept without knowing what they’d lost. We treated the ones whose lungs couldn’t hold air. Those whose blood refused to stay inside. Broken arms could wait. But death, death could not be reasoned with. It barged in. It took whoever was slowest to flee. One man died while I held his hand. Still warm. I whispered something, I don’t know what. I told security to take the body. We needed the bed. I needed the bed. And then, the girl. She was five. Curled on a bed like a forgotten doll. Not screaming. Not even speaking. Just a soft, continuous sob, like someone apologizing for being alive. Another doctor had checked her. Stable vitals. Left aside. I passed again. She was still crying. Still no one with her. “What’s your name?” I asked. “Dima Awad,” she whispered. I shouted into the corridor: “Whose daughter is this? Who is with her?” Silence. I moved on. We all did. We kept moving. That’s the horror, not the screams, but the fact that we move on. That we must. Time becomes something else. Something sick. An hour passed. Then another. I returned to her. Still there. Still crying. I examined her, a fracture in the leg. Orthopedics came. Still no name. No family. Someone called neighbors of the Awad family. No one recognized her. Three hours passed. Then a young man came with lab results. “You asked for these,” he said. “I don’t know the patient,” I replied. He pointed to her. Her name was Lana Muqbil. Her whole family, gone. Mother. Father. Brothers. Aunts. Uncles. All of them. Vaporized. Not even remains to identify. Just dust and a name she barely knew how to spell. The young man? Not even a cousin. Just a neighbor. He remembered her face from somewhere. And because the dead were beyond help, he sat beside the only one who was still breathing. This is Gaza. This is what war truly is. Not the speeches. Not the maps. But a child sobbing in a corner, surrounded by people who are too busy keeping others alive to sit and hold her hand. This is not strategy. This is not defense. This is a mechanism of destruction, cold, calculated, eternal. It eats memory. It devours names. It is the silence after a child says her name and no one replies. #GazaGenocide‌