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www.ainnbeen.blogspot.com
📅 July 9, 2025
✍️ By Malik Mukhtar
“Her eyes are red. Her voice cracked. Tears flow freely,”
writes Haaretz journalist Tom Levinson, describing a young Israeli soldier breaking down as she recounts her time in Gaza.
“We’re not the same people anymore,” she says.But who will speak for the people who are no longer people at all?
Tom Levinson’s July 3rd, 2025 article in Haaretz, “We’re Not the Same People Anymore”, is one of the rare pieces of Israeli journalism that dares to look into the abyss. It features testimonies from active and recently discharged IDF soldiers, raw and aching with a disturbing truth: the war has scarred them forever.
These young soldiers, many barely out of adolescence, speak of horrifying scenes: the charred remains of buildings, the collapse of entire neighborhoods, the screams of children—enemy and comrade alike. They speak of moral injury, of killing and witnessing killing, of ghostlike numbness and the guilt of survival. Some cry openly. Some stare blankly, emotionally fractured.
This is a devastating admission.
A confession.
A reckoning.
But let us be honest: these soldiers are wounded by what they chose to do.
Gaza is shattered by what was done to it.
While the Israeli public trembles under the weight of its children’s nightmares, 2.3 million Gazans live inside the nightmare itself.
And unlike soldiers, they cannot go home.
There is no civilian life to return to.
There is no therapy. No journalist waiting with a soft lens. No microphone for their sobs.
The soldier says she “is not the same person anymore.”
But Gaza is not the same land anymore.
It is a graveyard wrapped in siege.
A place where the tap runs dry, the baby formula never comes, and the drone never leaves the sky.
Let us speak, then, of Gaza’s truth—the one no Western outlet wants to hear:
- 💧 Water: 97% is unfit to drink. Israeli bombing destroyed desalination plants. Children drink sewage.
- 🍞 Food: Aid trucks are bombed. Starvation is systematic. WFP warns of “catastrophic hunger.”
- 🏥 Healthcare: Collapsed. No fuel. No oxygen. No antibiotics. All major hospitals bombed or besieged.
- 🏚️ Shelter: Over 70% of homes destroyed. People live in tents, if they're lucky.
- 💀 Death toll: Over 62,000 killed, nearly half of them children. Many buried under rubble, never counted.
So yes, Israeli soldiers speak of PTSD, moral crisis, and unbearable guilt.
But Gaza speaks in silence.
Because Gaza has no voice left.
And still the question must be asked:
How did we come to live in a world where the trauma of the soldier is more important than the genocide of the occupied?
Why is a soldier’s tear a headline, but the last gasp of a dying child in Rafah is statistics?
Why is it that when an Israeli soldier says, “I cannot sleep”, the world says, “She’s brave,”
but when a Gazan mother says, “My baby died waiting for dialysis,” the world says nothing at all?
Let us be clear.
This is not to mock the pain of the soldier.
It is to center the obliterated humanity of the people they invaded.
If these young Israelis are “no longer the same,”
then what, in God's name, do you call a people who have lost everything?
- The boy who watched his siblings burn in a white phosphorus strike.
- The amputee girl who dances in a dust storm outside a bombed clinic.
- The grandmother who died clutching her lamb, not in metaphor, but in grief.
Tom Levinson’s article belongs in history’s archive. But so too do Gaza’s screams—
not preserved in ink, but in blood, in ash, in soil salted with tears.
Because someday, when the world awakes from its moral coma,
it will not just ask what the soldiers became…
It will ask:
Who did they destroy to become this?
🕯️ Gaza does not weep in front of cameras.
🕯️ Gaza is the camera—the world watches it die.
🕊️ And when all of this is over, Gaza will not forgive.
It will remember.
Sources:
- Tom Levinson, “We're Not the Same People Anymore”, Haaretz, July 3, 2025
- Al-Shifa Director: ICU Patients Will Die Within Hours, Haaretz, July 8, 2025
- UN OCHA Reports on Gaza (2023–2025)
- WHO Emergency Situation Updates, 2025
- UNRWA, WCK, Save the Children, Médecins Sans Frontières (2025 field briefings)
🔗 www.ainnbeen.blogspot.com
✍️ By Malik Mukhtar
📢 #GazaGenocide #WarCrimes #EndTheSiege #GazaVoices #CeasefireNow #SilenceIsComplicity #ZionismIsTheCrisis
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