Last night, Mary Abu Daoud was killed. She worked at a shelter run by the Sisters of Mercy, caring for children in Gaza who are born with severe congenital disabilities that prevent them from developing normally and often mean they die at a very young age. These are children whose families, because of poverty and the enormous demands of their care, are sometimes forced to place them in the shelter.
In other words, Mary spent her life in a place devoted to holding on to life, protecting it and caring for those most vulnerable.
And in the end, she was killed by an army that has come to treat every Palestinian as if their life is disposable, while targeting a wanted commander from a movement whose own rhetoric has long proclaimed that “death is our highest aspiration.” Yet that commander chose to hide in an apartment inside a residential building full of displaced families who had come there looking for safety and had no idea he was among them.
This is the full picture of what happened yesterday.
And this is the story that needs to be told in full.
Civilians in Gaza are trapped between forces and decisions they do not control. They do not choose who hides beside them. They do not choose when or where Israel strikes. They do not choose the wars, the calculations, or the people making them.
Yet again and again, they are the ones who die for all of it.