A Dispatch from Gaza by Dr. Ezzideen
A widely shared reflection by Dr. Ezzideen has been circulating on social media, capturing the stark intersection of survival, duty, and dignity in Gaza. His account offers an unfiltered look into the daily moral burdens carried by civilians and medical workers amid the ongoing humanitarian crisis.
By Dr Ezzideen.
@ezzingaza
“
For days I had been preparing for this one day, not with strength, for I have little left, but with what remains of faith. Faith not in salvation, nor in men, but in duty, the stubborn, almost irrational duty to go on living when everything around you calls for death.
I had resolved to reopen the clinic. It was not a grand act, no, God forbid, but perhaps one small act of defiance against despair. For is it not true that even a spark trembles more brightly when surrounded by darkness?
At seven in the morning, I stepped into the street. The air smelled of dust and fatigue, and I felt both pride and shame, pride that I still walked, shame that I still could. We opened the doors, and people came, limping, pale, wordless. They carried their pain as if it were a second skin. And we worked, my hands trembling, my thoughts somewhere between heaven and madness. We had little medicine, yet we prescribed hope as though it were a drug that might trick death itself.
Until two in the afternoon, the world was reduced to one sound, the sound of suffering met with trembling compassion. A mother’s cry, a child’s shiver, a man’s silence. How strange that such a day, filled with pain, could feel almost holy.
When the last patient left, I wanted to rest. But rest, here, is indecent, a sin against those who cannot. So I walked to the market, following a rumor, the kind of rumor that, in our city, has replaced faith. I searched for medicines I could not find. I returned home empty-handed, empty-stomached, my body exhausted but my mind restless, burning, alive.
And then came a call.
“There’s a supermarket selling frozen chicken,” said the neighbor, his voice trembling like that of a man announcing salvation.
Without thought I ran. How absurd, how profoundly human, to run for a piece of meat while people lie dying. Yet I ran, as though my life depended on it. For perhaps it did.
I stood in line for over an hour, surrounded by faces that looked like mirrors of my own soul, faces of those who have lost everything yet still believe in the redemption of a small thing: food, warmth, survival. When my turn came, I bought two chickens. Only two. Yet in my heart it felt like I had won a war.
At 7:06 p.m., I returned home. My hands trembled. My back ached. I placed the two frozen bodies on the table and sat in silence.
And then the question, cruel, childlike, inevitable, rose within me:
Which was the greater victory today?
That I reopened the clinic and touched the wounds of the living?
Or that I brought home two dead birds for my family to eat?
Tell me, who among us can still tell the difference between the sacred and the absurd, between mercy and survival, between the healing of bodies and the feeding of mouths?
Here in Gaza, the smallest act is transfigured into a moral weight unbearable to the soul. To save a patient or to find food, both demand the same courage, the same humiliation, the same grace.
And so I sat there, my eyes fixed on those two chickens, and I felt, I swear I felt, that they were staring back at me, cold and mute, yet filled with the same mystery that governs all existence.
Perhaps this is how man survives: by assigning holiness to the trivial, by finding God even in the marketplace, even in hunger, even in absurdity.
Tonight, I am both doctor and beggar, both savior and fool. And if God still walks among us, He must walk disguised, perhaps as a man clutching two frozen chickens, refusing, in his own small way, to surrender.”
The full post can be accessed at the link below.
https://www.facebook.com/laura.londen.3/posts/by-dr-ezzideen-ezzingazafor-days-i-had-been-preparing-for-this-one-day-not-with-/25614730664798589/