In one of Gaza City’s neighborhoods, the night was heavy, but the home of journalist Marwa Muslim and her brothers remained a small refuge in the heart of the storm. They had nothing but the walls of their home to shelter them from Israel’s relentless bombardment. Suddenly, there was an explosion, and the roof collapsed on top of them. A thick silence fell, as if the city had stopped breathing.

For forty-four days, silence was the only companion to their bodies buried under the rubble. No one approached, no one dared, as the bombing surrounded the area and the siege closed the roads. Every night, the cement dust grew heavier on the bones, and every day, life went on outside while they were slowly erased from view.

When people were finally able to reach the house, they found neither Marwa nor her brothers’ faces, nor even recognizable features. They found only skulls and bones bearing irrefutable testimony to unimaginable brutality, and a silence that screamed what words could not say.

Marwa Muslim: gone, but not forgotten

Marwa Muslim, who carried a camera and a pen to write about the pain of Gaza, ended her life as part of that pain. She went from being a witness to the tragedy to a testimony written with her body under the rubble. Her story encapsulates what thousands of civilians in Gaza are experiencing: they are killed in their homes and left for days and weeks under the rubble, without rescue, without farewell, without justice.

This story is not an exception, but a reflection of a whole approach.

Human rights and international reports describe what is happening in Gaza as a full-fledged genocide: the bombing of homes, schools, and hospitals; neighborhoods wiped off the map; and numbers that only tell part of the truth. The majority of the victims are women and children, and thousands are still missing, as if life here is written in erasure rather than survival.

As for journalists, who are supposed to be witnesses to the tragedy, they themselves have become part of it.

More than 270 journalists have been killed since the war began, the highest number in a single conflict in decades. Cameras lie broken among the rubble, and the voices that sought to convey the truth have become names on lists of martyrs. In Gaza, words are assassinated along with their authors, and narrators are killed along with their stories.

Her story is a witness to Israel’s genocide

Marwa Muslim and her brothers left after 44 nights of silence, but their story remains a witness.

It was not written by a pen, but by rubble, blood, and bones.

It is an open cry to the world, saying that what is happening here is not a passing war, but a human tragedy that repeats itself every day.

Marwa, who wanted to write the story with her pen, saw her life become the story itself: the story of a people buried alive, resisting with their voices until their last breath.

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