Opinion

Palestinian mothers holding their dead babies’ bodies can’t look away. Neither should we

The intensity and persistence of images I am currently seeing from Gaza surpasses anything I have ever witnessed

Hana Abdelrahaman al-Rai, a four-year-old child suffering from malnutrition and displaced from Gaza City's eastern suburb of Shujaiya. Photograph: Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty
Hana Abdelrahaman al-Rai, a four-year-old child suffering from malnutrition and displaced from Gaza City's eastern suburb of Shujaiya. Photograph: Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty
Razan Ibraheem
Sun Jun 09 2024 - 06:45

In 2011, I left Syria after witnessing six months of relentless war. I never imagined that the war would persist for so many years or that I would find a new place to call home. Yet here I am: Ireland has embraced me and become my sanctuary, and for that I am grateful.

After completing my master’s degree at the University of Limerick, I moved to Dublin, where I began working as a journalist and later as an editor for a social media news agency for more than seven years. My role involved verifying and authenticating content shared on social media from conflict zones, primarily in Syria, my homeland. I verified raw videos from eyewitnesses and citizen journalists reporting from the heart of the conflict.

I bore witness to unfiltered footage of children being dragged from under the rubble in Aleppo, rescue workers gathering the remains of tender babies’ bodies in Idlib, heart-wrenching cries of mothers mourning their loved ones in Homs, children starved to death in Madaya or bombed to extinction with chemical artillery in Ghota, near Damascus.

But though it was hard to see, my work gave me a sense of purpose; I helped audiences make sense of what happened by promoting accurate information and upholding human rights by highlighting the realities and truths of war. I felt I was documenting history in real time.

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Such scenes of unimaginable suffering continue to haunt me years later. I see glimpses of them day and night. Faceless bodies roam round my breakfast table sometimes, and in those always troubled Proustian moments between wakefulness and sleep, I see gaunt, bodiless faces howling. They shake me to the core still, as if they happened only yesterday. Of course I wish I could go back in time and somehow unsee them; of course I wish they never happened. But they did, and I saw them, and I’m proud I didn’t look away: they are the only evidence we have, and I had to be an eyewitness to the truth of what was happening in my country, even though I was miles away in my safe Dublin haven.

Despite the truth, no one has been held accountable for these atrocities. None of the heinous crimes has been punished. I had hoped the mounting evidence would somehow force the international community to somehow turn that resounding call of “never again” into a reality. I had hoped that western democracies would somehow prevent similar horrors from ever happening again.

But in the eight-month war in Gaza I have once again seen echoes of Syria.

The intensity and persistence of images I am currently seeing from Gaza surpasses anything I have ever witnessed. They’ve gone beyond the beyond of any human comprehension. All of these events are unfolding over just eight months. But we can’t look away, because the Palestinian mothers holding their dead babies’ bodies do not look away. The children watching their own parents dying cannot look away. No Palestinian in Gaza can afford to look away. In Rafah, I watched a man holding up a baby without a head, while tents burn in the background. I saw another man lying among coffins, crying: “Her head is decapitated, nothing is left of her.” Among the charred bodies of people burnt alive in their own makeshift homes and refugee tents, I saw the mothers carrying their mutilated babies’ bodies. I saw the skulls squashed, the faces deformed, the agonised mouths wailing, the horrors reflected in terrified eyes. I heard screams, cries, pain and prayers. I saw the devastation on the faces of people who witnessed the atrocities in real time. Watching these children while I am miles away is like watching your own children dying, powerless to do anything. It leaves you feeling utterly helpless and hopeless.

No politics on either side can ever justify a single child’s body being harmed, dismembered or burnt to ashes

I vividly remember the day one of my stories about Syria was rejected because people had “Syria fatigue”. Fifty deaths a day had become un-newsworthy after years of relentless violence. I fear the same fate awaits Gaza and Palestinians. We cannot allow this to happen.

Palestinian journalists have also experienced the agony of war first-hand. Some of them sacrificed their own lives to ensure the truth was told. Their refusal to look away ensures that the world remains informed about the atrocities. Without their commitment, the extent of the devastation and human suffering would remain unknown to the outside world. They are the eyes of the world in Gaza. These brave journalists did not look away; could not have looked away. And neither should we.

No politics on either side can ever justify a single child’s body being harmed, dismembered or burnt to ashes. For this war, like other wars, is not about the “good guys” versus the “bad guys”, not about the “civilised” versus the “human animals”. It is first and foremost about the lives of human beings. The lives of children, women and civilians.

The more than 36,000 Palestinians killed so far, and the many more thousands featuring in the painful videos I’m seeing are not nameless numbers. Their humanity deserves recognition, empathy, and justice. Each image of their pain and every cry they utter is a testament to and a test of our shared humanity.

Razan Ibraheem is an Irish-Syrian journalist specialising in content verification and disinformation