On a Tuesday that began like any other in Gaza City, the sky brought not rain but precision. Israeli strikes, we are told, have claimed eleven lives. The numbers are tidy, devastatingly so.
They arrive in a press release, a news ticker, a ministerial statement from London demanding “immediate de-escalation”. And yet what does that word mean to a family now missing a father, a mother, a child? I spent the morning talking to friends in Gaza.
They describe a rhythm we in comfortable capitals cannot comprehend. A rhythm where the sound of a drone is a metronome for daily life. Where children have learned the difference between a sonic boom and a direct hit.
Eleven is a statistic to us. It is a room of people to them. The UK’s demand, so cleanly typed in Whitehall, travels the distance of continents.
But it lands in a place where de-escalation is not a policy option but a longed-for impossibility. The cultural shift is not in Gaza, where loss is a constant companion. It is here, in our living rooms, where we have become fluent in the language of remote tragedy.
We watch, we issue statements, we move on. The eleven will be counted, named perhaps, and then absorbed into a larger sum. That is the true human cost not just the dead, but the living distance between their deaths and our response.
