By Fareed Khan
I live 8,965
kilometres from Gaza, in a country that claims to be a defender of human rights
and international law, and professes to be a moral leader on the world stage.
Yet every day for more than two and a half years, I have seen images and read
stories coming out of Gaza that have hollowed out something inside me. I have
seen bloodied bodies, children with limbs torn away, parents carrying what
remains of their babies in small plastic bags because an Israeli missile or
bomb left nothing else to bury. The people of Gaza are not soldiers or
combatants. They are Palestinian civilians—families—targeted by the military of
a fascist, genocidal state that has long ceased to see them as human beings, a
people who have been abandoned by Canada and other nations that claim to
champion human rights, but refuse to intervene when the crime of
crimes—genocide—is being committed by Israel in front of our eyes.
Despite
all I’ve seen and read, despite my knowledge of the cruelty inflicted by Israel
on Palestinians for decades, nothing prepared me for the story of the
Palestinian father trapped beneath the rubble of a building bombed by and
Israeli fighter jet.
I first
saw the image last night on social media, of a man with only his head sticking
out of the rubble, and read the short description that went with it. In the quiet of the night, I read about
rescuers digging frantically through the debris trying to save him. Above a
small gap in the rubble was a look of agony and terror on the father’s
face. His body was pinned beneath the
ruins of what had once been his home. His daughters were deeper below, their
small hands still clinging to his fingers in the darkness. He could hear their
fading breaths and their grip weakening. When the rescuers began to dig away at
the rubble around him he looked at them with a gaze so full of exhaustion and horror
that it pierced through the screen and lodged itself in my chest.
“Leave
me,” he told the rescuers. He told them
his daughters were also under the rubble, holding his fingers, and that he
didn’t want to leave them alone.
These
words haunt me. They echo in my mind and when I tried to sleep last night I
couldn’t. So I decided to write about this Palestinian father, the nameless man
in the social media post, whose face is now imprinted on my brain.
By the
time you read this, and hopefully share it on social media, I will be trying to
live a normal life again, as I have so many times since the Gaza genocide
began, as I’ve heard or read a particularly horrific story. But what is considered normal in such a
scenario? I wonder, what parent—what human being—could bear to survive while
his children die beneath him? What words can capture the agony of someone who
feels the life draining from the small hands they once held while crossing the
street, while tucking them into bed, while promising them safety?
And
as I sat with the weight of his plea to the rescuers—to be left under the
rubble so he could die beside his daughters—I found myself thinking of the tens
of thousands of Palestinian parents who have endured this same nightmare.
Not only during the current genocide, but in the years before, every time
Israel sent its warplanes to bomb homes, apartment blocks, and refugee camps. I
thought of the parents who have carried the limp bodies of their children
through the streets, their faces frozen in shock. I thought of the children who
have clawed through rubble with their bare hands, screaming the names of their
mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters. I thought of the Palestinians who have
found only fragments of their loved ones—pieces so small they could fit into a
shopping bag. And I thought of the fathers and mothers who have buried entire
families in mass graves, not because they wanted to, but because they had no
choice, because even in death, they could not risk gathering for a proper
funeral without fearing another Israel bomb or missile would land on them.
This is
not an isolated tragedy. It is a pattern, a system, a deliberate and calculated
destruction of a people, in full view of the world.
As a
human rights activist living in the safety of Canada, I ask myself: How can Western leaders live with this
knowledge? What is so broken in them that they can’t take action to stop
the non-stop carnage committed by Israel? They receive daily briefings. They
see the same images the public sees. They know that the vast majority of those
killed in Gaza are civilians. They know international human rights
organizations have documented war crimes and crimes against humanity, and have declared
Israel’s actions as a genocide. They know that Israeli soldiers themselves
have admitted in recordings posted to social media that they “felt like Nazis” while carrying out
operations in Gaza. They know all of this and yet they do nothing.
How do
they sit in their offices, smile as they shake hands at political events, hold press
conferences, and speak of democracy and human rights, while Palestinian children
are deliberately shot, and babies suffocate under the rubble of a bombed
out building? And how can we, living
safely in Canada, go about our days as though nothing is happening? How do can
we casually sip our coffee, scroll through our phones, and laugh at trivial
things, while a father in Gaza begs rescuers to let him die so he will not
abandon his daughters in their final moments?
I don’t
ask this with without judgment. I ask it with grief, with bewilderment, with a
sense of moral disruption that has become impossible to shake.
Because all
of us who fight to uphold and defend human rights cannot live normal lives
anymore. We carry the weight of every image and video we’ve seen, every scream
and cry of grief we’ve heard, every story we’ve read. We carry the trauma of being
witnesses to genocide in real time, played out on the screens of our devices.
We carry the depression and anger that comes from shouting into a void where
leaders pretend not to hear what we’re saying. We carry the despair of knowing
that morality—once claimed as a Western virtue—is a lie and has been traded for
political convenience and military alliances.
For the
past two and a half years we have marched, we have written to our political
leaders, penned op-eds, held media conferences, commented on social media,
protested, pleaded for our leaders to find their humanity and take action. Yet
still, those who lead our governments refuse to listen or act.
If this
is now the norm—if this is how the world responds to a fascist state committing
genocide—then what hope is there for how nations will respond to other
conflicts where the innocent are slaughtered? What hope is there for humanity
when the most powerful nations on earth, who have the power to stop Israel’s
crimes, watch and do nothing as children, women and men are murdered simply for
who they are? What hope is there when museums dedicated to human rights, like
the Canadian
Museum for Human Rights, face pressure to silence Palestinian history because
the stories of Palestinians are deemed too “controversial” by Zionist groups
who cannot tolerate the true story of their suffering and subjugation, or being
portrayed as human beings? What hope is
there when even our grief and the truth about history is policed?
The
father under the rubble will haunt me for a long time because he represents
more than one man’s tragedy. He represents the collapse of the world’s moral
order and the degradation of international law. He represents the unbearable
truth that Palestinian suffering has been normalized, minimized, and dismissed
for generations, but especially now. He represents the question that should
shake every conscience on this planet:
How much more Palestinian pain must the world
witness, how many more bodies must be buried under Gaza’s rubble, before it
hears the cry of the Palestinians who live there?
As a
Canadian, I am both angry at and ashamed of my government’s complicity in
Israel’s genocidal crimes. As a human rights activist, I am exhausted by the
endless fight to make the people in power care. As a human being, I am
shattered by the knowledge that Palestinians are still dying, despite a
so-called ceasefire which Israel
has violated thousands of times since last October, while the world debates
their worth.
But as someone who refuses to give up, I say this. To Palestinians suffering under the longest and most brutal occupation of modern history—you are not forgotten. You are loved. You are never alone, and your courage in the face of ultimate evil will go down in history. There are millions around the world who stand with you, who carry your grief in their hearts, who refuse to let your stories be erased. Your suffering is not invisible. Your resistance is not in vain. And your humanity shines brighter than the darkness that seeks to destroy you.
© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
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