What Hind Rajab’s death taught me about grief and Gaza

It’s been 1051 days, or I should say, it’s been 28,589 days, since history started repeating itself. Where seemingly innocent civilians have been killed all because they loved their land too much. All because the young children who grew up on that land were feared by some minority group, feared they were “eventually” going to become terrorists. So what happened? Naturally, millions of innocent people lost their lives simply because a minority group feared the possibility of children growing up to become something they weren’t yet. Where a whole car of 7 family members was shot 355 times because the inoperable car was “moving” toward them. Where the 7th member was a five-year-old child, drenched in the blood of her own family, trapped in a fear the responders had no control over. Where a printing press was ransacked because it produced news that didn’t follow this minority group’s opinion. Where over $60 billion in damage was done to a city because it was feared a few “terrorists” lived there. Where if you held a funeral every single day for the next 53 years, it still wouldn’t be enough to cover the number of children who have died in this war.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, let me remind you: the minority group here is Israel. The young children are Palestinians. The five-year-old girl is Hind Rajab. The printing press is Dar Al-Islam Printing House. The city is called the Gaza Strip. Shall we keep going?

I’m late to this. I recently watched The Voice of Hind Rajab, and it tore me apart. Not only because it was the true voice of a terrified young girl desperately asking for help. Not only because the Palestinian Red Crescent Society was scrambling to find a greenlight for a route they got double-crossed on. Not only because Rana Hassan was crying her eyes out because she desperately wanted to swap places with Hind. But because it was a call to all of humanity. “Come get me, I’m scared” wasn’t meant for the first responders. It was meant for the world. And what did we do with it? We sat there long enough for the pain to be carved into an internationally renowned film. And here we are, in kumbaya, crying for a pain that happened to someone else, as if it happened to us.

Here’s the thing about the number 28,589. It’s not just a bigger, more dramatic version of 1051. It’s how long it’s been since Al Bassa, 1948, a massacre most people reading this have never heard of. A bus carrying Palestinian men and boys, Yusuf’s father among them, was driven onto a landmine and detonated, killing more than twenty people in a single blast. Whatever life Yusuf went on to live after that day, however many decades, however much distance he put between himself and that road, he carried it. That’s what a massacre becomes over enough time: not a headline anyone remembers, but a grandfather’s silence at the dinner table, a flinch at a loud noise nobody in the room can explain, grief passed down without ever being formally named.

It’s been 1051 days since the world started watching. It’s been 28,589 since it started happening.

Those aren’t two separate tragedies 75 years apart. It’s one story, still being told, in the same land, to the same people, and most of the world is only now finding out it has a name.

Are we crying because Hind was killed? Or are we crying because we couldn’t do anything about it? Or are we crying the way Yusuf’s family cried at Al Bassa, the same grief, recycled, seventy-five years later, just with better cameras this time? Sit in that question for a second before you answer it. Because if the honest answer is “we’re crying because we felt helpless,” that’s not the same as grieving for Hind. That’s grieving for ourselves, and it’s worth knowing the difference before you decide what to do next.

I’m not sure how to describe or say this, but: learn, folks. Ask questions. Use your mind for where it could take you next. We hear so much misinformation and propaganda that even the AI tool I used to clean up this piece’s grammar did an absolute terrible job conveying my words. It kept trying to soften things that weren’t supposed to be soft. Where are we as humans? How can this happen to us, and keep happening, and still not be the thing that moves us?

The best thing to do here is translate that pain into knowledge and application. Without both, you’re malleable to whatever comes at you next. With knowledge and no application, you become a gatekeeper and a hypocrite. How can knowledge sit inside you and not move you to act? With application and no knowledge, you’re drilling into a wall made of iron and steel; it will not penetrate no matter how hard you try, because you don’t understand what you’re actually up against. But with knowledge and application, you become someone who acts because they understand, not despite not understanding. You study the history so you stop repeating someone else’s propaganda by accident. You correct misinformation when you see it, even if it changes nothing that day. You give what you’re able to give, not because it fixes anything, but because withholding never has. You show up: to a vigil, a fundraiser, a dinner table where your kids ask what’s happening and you actually have an answer for them. None of that brings Hind back. None of it undoes Al Bassa. But it’s the only one of the four paths that doesn’t leave you either frozen or useless.

There’s a teaching most of us grew up hearing and maybe stopped really listening to: that when you see a wrong being done, you change it with your hand if you’re able to. If you’re not able to, you change it with your tongue. And if neither of those is within your reach, you hold it in your heart and refuse to make peace with it. That’s understood as the weakest expression of faith, not a comfortable place to stop. Most of us don’t have a hand that reaches Gaza. Some of us have a tongue: a platform, a vote, a paycheck we can redirect, a conversation we can have honestly instead of politely. All of us, at minimum, owe this pain a heart that refuses to look away.

As Muslims, we believe this isn’t the final destination, and that Allah is in control of everything. But don’t let that certainty become a reason to stop asking the question. At the very least, let this pain wake something up in you, enough to ask: what has really happened to us? And then, don’t just ask it. Do something with the answer.