Image by Hendra via Adobe Stock

On October 7, 2023, I was just about three months pregnant. As a genocide unfolded before our eyes in the weeks that followed, I reflected a lot on the parallel lives mothers live on both sides of this dystopian world.

Like many others, my social media feed exposed me to countless images of the Israeli military’s atrocities in Palestine. Images of shrapnel seared into the bodies of innocent Gazans are seared into my brain like scars: a woman silently mourning as she tightly hugs a child-sized body bag. A damaged incubator containing shrivelling babies. A girl hanging limp over the window of her destroyed home. Wide-eyed toddlers shaking uncontrollably as they begin to process the trauma that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Many of these images were censored, black squares politely asking me whether I still wanted to view the photos that they concealed. Apparently their contents were too heinous to set eyes on, and yet not heinous enough to end in reality. There was always the occasional image that slipped by uncensored. In those moments, I wished I had not logged on. I cried often. I was pregnant, but these tears were not hormonal. They were human. I often had to force myself to move away from the screen to limit the horrors I was viscerally absorbing, as if to protect the baby that was living through me.

It was an unusual time to be pregnant, to be growing a new life as I witnessed the lives of others being ended so mercilessly. Over the span of three months of genocide, 20,000 babies were born in Gaza. As I planned for my son’s future, over 16,000 children were killed, futures completely obliterated. Of the nearly 1.1 million children in Gaza, those that survived now faced malnutrition, disease, physical disability, and psychological trauma. As I received excellent care in Toronto through regular prenatal appointments, I read about the horrific and life-threatening conditions that 50,000 expectant mothers in Gaza endured, birthing in unsanitary conditions on rubble-filled floors with limited access to medication. As I felt the pain from the stitches of my C-section for weeks, I remembered the mothers who were forced to have emergency C-sections with no anesthesia. I cannot conceive of their unfathomable pain and the trauma that will forever be bound to the memories of how they welcomed their babies into the world. As one mother from Gaza, Um Raed, told Al Jazeera, “Since the birth, I’ve not known whether I should be focusing on my contractions or on the sound of warplanes overhead. Should I be worrying about my baby, or should I be afraid of whatever attacks are happening at that moment?”

Though my pregnancy felt challenging, my baby boy arrived, healthy and present. When I caressed and gently wrapped his little body in soft swaddles, I kept getting intrusive flashbacks of those babies whose tiny bodies were maimed before their first birthdays, and of those who did not even reach this milestone at all, wrapped in white shrouds. While I had the privilege of enjoying my baby’s first winter through a festive holiday season, I also got chills thinking about the infants in Gaza who have frozen to death.

I often wondered about the purpose of bringing new life into this world full of anger and injustice and pain. But if there is anything I have learned from the Palestinian people, it is their deep-rooted resilience, one that stems from the same faith that I share with them as a Muslim, but has been put to the test in ways I can’t comprehend. They provide us with an important lesson on finding purpose in a world littered with inhumanity: we all have a responsibility to be active agents, building a more just world for all. From the articles and poems we read and write to the dinner table conversations we partake in using the knowledge we choose to seek, from the silent donning of a keffiyeh to the ways in which we raise and speak to our children about the world and its people, we all have, within our own skillsets and capacities, in our respective spheres of life, the ability to partake in this global, growing tide of activism.

Over the course of a year, we contributed what we could. Never has the world been so vocal in its support for a free Palestine. Boycotts have proven successful, careers have been put at stake, and a new media outlet, Zeteo, has emerged, questioning the status quo and bringing challenging conversations to the forefront so that we no longer have to tiptoe carefully around the subject of an ongoing genocide.

Despite the signing of a ceasefire deal 465 days later, we will continue to learn, speak, cry, create, call out, and call it like it is. In doing so, we will watch the tide continue to rise, from the river to the sea, in all ages and stages of life, until injustice is entirely swept away.