Yesterday, I watched a woman smile as she explained how mothers in Gaza respond when their children are killed: They have more children. The more Israel kills, she said, the more determined people become to marry and have children. As though grief were an equation. You kill one child. We have another. She is one of those figures the war turned into a social-media celebrity. She left Gaza early in the war, but found a large audience abroad willing to listen to her explain what Gaza supposedly feels. And there she was, speaking lightly about something I have watched destroy people I love. This rhetoric is not new. Versions of it have even come from Hamas leaders: the cold idea that those who are killed can be replaced by those yet to be born, as though a Palestinian woman’s womb were a reserve for replenishing the losses of war. Perhaps a grieving mother has said something similar in the first hours after losing her child. I would never judge her for that. Sometimes shock forces the mind to invent meaning simply to survive the unbearable. But wait until the funeral is over. Wait until everyone goes home. Then ask her whether another child could ever replace the one she buried. My cousin was killed early in the war. His mother still cries for him, not only on anniversaries, not only on the days when grief is expected. She cries for him in the middle of ordinary life. She sees young men his age and imagines the years he should have lived. She watches his friends grow older. She cooks something he loved and remembers his face, his voice, the way he ate, his place at the table. To the world, he may have been one more Palestinian among thousands killed. To her, he was her son. That particular human being. She could have ten more children, and not one of them would be him. Children are not replaceable. A Palestinian woman is not a womb designed to replenish those war kills. A mother in Gaza does not possess some different kind of heart that makes burying her child hurt less than burying yours. And that is why I have no patience for someone romanticizing death, presenting this cruelty with a smile, and selling it to the world as Palestinian “strength.” There is nothing beautiful, heroic, or resilient about teaching people that Palestinian mothers can replace their dead children. It is a polished form of dehumanization. Because once you convince yourself that Palestinians experience death differently, their dead become easier to look at. They are different from us. They can bear it. They will have more. But my cousin’s mother does not want “more”. She wants her son. She wants him to open the door again, sit in his place, eat the food she made, and grow older alongside his friends. That is all most parents in Gaza ever wanted. Not heroic deaths. Not children turned into numbers in someone else’s cause. They wanted their children to live. Perhaps one of the cruelest things about this war is that killing Gaza’s children was somehow not enough. Afterward, someone still had to create a mythology in which their mothers could simply give birth to replacements. But ask my cousin’s mother. Gaza could give birth to a million more children. He will never be born again. #SurvivalTestimony

Since yesterday, Israeli media has been consumed by the Haaretz report alleging that Netanyahu received a warning roughly ten days before October 7: that Yahya Sinwar was preparing a major operation that could lead to bloodshed and destabilize the entire region. According to the report, the warning originated with Sinwar and was relayed through Palestinian and Emirati intermediaries before reaching UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed, who then allegedly conveyed it directly to Netanyahu. Since the story broke, Israelis have been arguing relentlessly: Who knew? What did Netanyahu know? Why was nothing done? Who should be held responsible? Politicians and journalists are demanding investigations and accountability. Some are calling for Netanyahu himself to be held responsible. And as I watch all of this, I cannot escape the bitter irony: If Israelis, as the people who were attacked, believe they have the right to question their leadership about every decision that preceded October 7, then we in Gaza have that right a thousand times over. Because we paid the greatest price for everything that followed. We buried our children. We lost our homes. Our families were scattered. We endured displacement, hunger, and fear. And we are still paying that price today. Perhaps we will carry it for the rest of our lives. Yet on our side, the questions themselves are treated as almost forbidden. Who planned October 7? What did they know? What did they expect Israel’s response would be? Was there any plan whatsoever to protect more than two million people from the consequences they knew could follow? Were those two million lives even part of the calculation? Asking these questions is not betrayal. These are the questions of those who paid in blood. I refuse to be told that I must sanctify an act whose consequences my family and my people have paid for so brutally. I refuse the idea that we must applaud those who made the decision while the people who endured its consequences are forbidden from questioning the calculation behind it. You can believe completely in the justice of the Palestinian cause. You can condemn what Israel has done to Gaza in the strongest possible terms. And you can still refuse to turn October 7 into something sacred, beyond criticism, scrutiny, or accountability. For us, it should be exactly the opposite. The greater the price, the greater the victims’ right to ask who made them pay it, and why. Living societies do not sanctify the decisions of their leaders after catastrophe. They open the files. They ask questions. They investigate. They hold people accountable. But when people are buried, their cities destroyed, and those who remain alive are told to stay silent out of loyalty to a narrative, that is no longer merely an escape from accountability. It is asking the victims to sanctify a decision whose consequences became part of their tragedy. #SurvivalTestimony