Wars bring shattered lives and lost futures.
Somewhere in Gaza, a girl is learning to sleep with her shoes on. She doesn’t call it fear; she calls it ‘being ready’.
Her windows no longer look out over the street, but onto the rubble where her cousin’s shop once stood.
These are the fragments of lives that continue to exist in the darkness, and which rarely survive the broadcast cycle.
Numbers are easy to say: Hundreds. Thousands. Millions.
However, they are a necessary but incomplete way to understand the scale of the horror.
The death toll has now climbed to over 60,000. This isn’t just a statistic: it’s an entire society being erased.
It’s a generation of children whose earliest memories are of explosions and whose favorite places to play have disappeared.
Over 100,000 people have been injured — a reflection of the collapse of the healthcare system, where hospitals have been bombed and doctors killed, leaving the injured to die from treatable wounds.
Elsewhere, a man keeps the key to a home that no longer exists.
He carries it in his pocket like a talisman; the metal is worn smooth by the constant rub of his thumb.
The house is gone, the street is gone, the neighborhood is gone — but the key still opens the door in his memory.
This man is one of nearly two million people who have been displaced, their neighborhoods reduced to rubble.
The humanitarian crisis is a constant, gnawing presence.
Famine is not a fear, but a reality. The struggle for clean water is an everyday battle, and simply trying to access aid can mean facing death.
The psychological wounds are as deep as the physical ones.
A girl who describes her fear as ‘being ready’ is a child whose mind has been warped by trauma.
According to a UNICEF report, 80% of children in Gaza are showing signs of severe emotional distress — a generation robbed of their innocence and forced to confront death daily.
Dreams of becoming an engineer or a doctor are replaced by the more immediate need to survive.
The intergenerational trauma caused by this conflict will have an echoing effect for decades, making it difficult for communities to ever truly heal.
Wars create divisions. Humanity builds bridges. However, these bridges are fragile and can collapse under the weight of propaganda, the tidal pull of grief and the cold machinery of politics.
In the collapse, the truth is often buried alongside the dead.
While the international community promises aid, the assistance usually amounts to little more than a drop in the ocean compared to the scale of the need.
The challenges of rebuilding are immense: the financial cost is in the tens of billions and the amount of rubble that needs to be cleared is staggering.
This society is being asked to rebuild without the necessary tools, money or political stability.
Strip away the flags, the speeches and the declarations, and what is left?
People — always people — are caught between forces that are too big to stop and too distant to see.
There is a woman sweeping dust out of her doorway because she refuses to live in ruins, even though her life already feels like one.
A boy sketching football players in the margins of a notebook because that is one thing the world hasn’t yet taken from him.
These are not headlines.
They are fragments of lives that continue to breathe in the dark.
And the most brutal truth? The cameras will leave before the wounds have healed.
The story will fade before the people do.
Somewhere in Gaza, someone will still be waiting — not for the war to end, but for the rest of the world to remember that they exist.
