If this dear brother can sift through the rubble, we can bear witness to his pain. Here, a Palestinian father sits in the ruins, sifting dirt and rubble—slowly, carefully—looking for fragments of bones from his wife and children.
This is what genocide looks like. I’ve seen it all my life.
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The video comes from Palestinian journalist Ramy Abdul. In his words, the world is busy celebrating Trump’s “colonial mandate council for Gaza,” while Palestinian bodies are left to decompose—without forcing Israel to stop killing, allow recovery equipment, or let the media in. He identifies the man in the video as Abu Ismail Hamad, gathering what remains of his family.
Family… I don’t even have elegant language for this. This is what genocide looks like at ground level. Not the speeches. Not the slogans. Not the “both sides” cowardice. Dirt under fingernails. A sieve in shaking hands. A father trying to locate his children in the earth.
And I need to tell you something honest: when I saw it, I immediately thought of Rwanda and Bosnia—not because the histories are identical, but because the human posture is the same. In Rwanda, survivors returned to mass graves and muddy hillsides, searching for what could still be found. In Bosnia, families spent years waiting for the smallest identification—a bone fragment, a scrap of clothing, anything that could turn “missing” into “mourned.” When genocide happens, the dead don’t just die. They are made to disappear—and the living are forced to do this unbearable work of recovery.
That’s what this father is doing.
And I want to say this clearly, because people love to pretend “international law” is some abstract idea for professors and diplomats. It isn’t. It’s supposed to be a basic guardrail for human decency. The laws of war—the Geneva Conventions, the rules meant to limit suffering in conflict—require that parties search for the dead and allow their collection. In plain English: you don’t get to bomb people into dust and then block the tools and access needed to retrieve them. You don’t get to turn families into rubble and then force loved ones to sift the wreckage like it’s their new job.
And yet this is Gaza, now—a genocide that has been ongoing for over two years—with the world endlessly “concerned,” endlessly “monitoring,” endlessly issuing statements that do not stop a single bomb, do not open a single gate, do not return a single child to a parent.
I’m angry because this isn’t hidden. It’s being documented. It’s being uploaded. It’s being watched.
And still, the most powerful governments on earth keep funding it, arming it, shielding it, and laundering it with language like “security” and “complexity.” Sisters and brothers, there is nothing complex about a man looking for his children’s bones. The moral truth is sitting right there in front of us, in the dirt.
If you’re in the United States, I need you to feel the weight of this: our tax dollars are part of the machinery that keeps Gaza trapped in this cycle of destruction and denial. You may not have chosen it, but we cannot pretend we’re uninvolved.
And to the people who can watch that video and still talk about “plans” and “councils” and “mandates” like Gaza is a real estate project—may your understanding of humanity be put on trial inside your own soul.
Please don’t scroll past this like it’s content. Sit with it. Share it. Say his name. Say his children mattered. Say this is not normal.
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Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother
Shaun
