I am not a journalist, but through my role as the spokesperson for Gaza Municipality, I have been in close and constant contact with the community of journalists since the very beginning of the Genocide. I still remember the morning when Anas Al-Sharif and Mohammad Qraiqea were assassinated. When I gathered my fellow reporters and journalists that day, I felt something break inside them, a quiet, devastating shift I hadn’t seen before. I think that moment was the final crack in their spirit. For days afterward, whenever we met, I would asked them to be careful. And every single one of them gave me the same answer: “It doesn’t matter anymore. They’re going to kill us all.” Today, as we mourn five more assassinated journalists, I know now just how true their words were. #Israel is relentless, intent on silencing them one by one. Sometimes I wonder if this world even deserves the sacrifices of our brave journalists, who have given their blood and their lives just to show the so‑called civilized world what’s happening in a land of genocide. And yet, the world remains deaf. To our heroic journalists: we do not ask you to stop. You are the noblest among us, you are our voices, our eyes, and our messengers. Continue to tell the truth. Not for this blind and indifferent world, but for us, for Gaza, for our memory.

The idea of losing #Gaza forever has driven people here to madness. They would rather die than be torn from it. They would rather be killed “literally on Gaza’s land” than see our city turned into nothing more than a memory. We are the ones who know this city best. We are its people, its children, its lovers, its rightful keepers. We have carried its stones in our hands, breathed its sea breeze, felt both its tenderness and its harshness. We have lived its beauty, its longing, its wounds. No one belongs to Gaza more than we do. So leave us, just leave it to us. Let us be the ones to grieve it. Let us be the ones to weep for its martyrs. But leave us here, just leave us here.