They count the dead like numbers on a screen, but they don’t show the bread left burning in the ovens when the sirens come. No one speaks of the women who wake before dawn to feed children on empty cupboards because the market is rubble and the trucks haven’t come. In my village in Palestine, before they called it nothing, we kept each other alive with names, with recipes, with stories that didn’t need paper to survive. Now those stories are buried under concrete and cable news. The real cost isn’t in the headline — it’s in the silence after a grandmother calls a name and no one answers. I write those names in my shop ledger, under the sugar and flour. Just in case.
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