We begin with the number zero. It is, first, the number of safe places left in Gaza according to Médicins Sans Frontières. It makes little difference what colors or labels the Israeli military marks on digital maps. The reality is simpler: Death awaits us everywhere. There is no immunity for hospitals overflowing with the wounded, in United Nations schools sheltering the displaced, in mosques, and beneath canvas tents.

Then to those thousands of statistical inputs rapidly approaching zero. Reports from the World Health Organization and UNICEF record the declining weight of Gaza’s children and the spread of acute malnutrition and dehydration brought about by starvation policies. In the corners of makeshift clinics, I have watched doctor after doctor stand helplessly as the numbers on the scale drop every week, as if counting down to the end of a life. I have watched a mother run her hand across her child’s protruding ribs as she gathers him into her arms.

Finally, to those families whose entire bloodline will now sit permanently at null. The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor has documented hundreds of cases in which three or even four generations of the same family were buried beneath the rubble of a single home. Entire extended families wiped from the civil registry. Grandfather and father, uncle and newborn, collectively killed in seconds. An archive, living and otherwise, reduced to ash. A collective loss marked not in the accumulated history of generations, but as distinct counts in a death toll.

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Surviving in Gaza today means not only escaping the bombardment, but also fighting a fierce battle of preservation to protect our names, our thoughts, and our small human stories from being swallowed by cold statistics, stripped of all meaning.

I am among those 1.9 million people who have been displaced from their own homes to another’s, from that home to a tent, from that tent to a camp, and so on. Displacement is a cruel calculation that arrives without warning. It demands you compress your entire life and dismantle your identity until all that remains can fit inside a single backpack.

Every displacement is a violent uprooting from a diligently built life, and mine is no exception. Before the war, I was a UI/UX designer studying human behavior, using technology to make people’s lives easier, designing digital interfaces and workspaces that felt comfortable and functional. My mind was occupied by the movement of a cursor across a screen, by color and typography. But in a matter of minutes, all those years of hard work and sleepless nights were reduced to an escape plan into the unknown. I had to bid my life farewell and leave behind the keys to a home that would become nothing but ash.

You step out and join the tally, holding your identification papers in a small plastic bag, becoming another statistic among a million displaced people running through the streets, searching for essentials to survive.

Another statistic dominates the news cycle: the number of aid trucks permitted to enter the Gaza Strip. Politicians coldly debate whether 50 or 100 trucks are allowed on any given day. This discourse skews the reality in the global consciousness, framing the crisis as a natural famine that could be remedied by charity and donations. It portrays our entire society as nothing but hungry mouths waiting for bread, while obscuring the systematic humiliation that reduces us to this dependance. It does not describe how the ambitions and dreams of young people evaporate when they are suddenly forced to spend every waking hour searching for basic sustenance to support their families and loved ones.

To live beneath the daily weight of genocide is to exhaust yourself trying to perform the most elementary acts of life. There is no international metric that can quantify such labor, nor a camera that can capture these mundanities. When essentials such as water and fuel disappear, every minute turns into a battle for survival in its own right.

The electrical grid has long since collapsed, and total darkness has enveloped the Strip. To send a brief message reassuring your family that you’re still alive — or to write just a few lines documenting the atrocities unfolding around you — requires undertaking a dangerous and complicated journey. Your digital existence depends entirely on old worn-out car batteries or small solar panels shattered by shrapnel. You walk through ruined streets, over piles of rubble, beneath the hum of surveillance drones in search of some raised surface or unobstructed stretch of pavement where you may catch even the faintest signal. And then you wait for hours; you watch desperately as the loading bar creep across the screen, aware that even a single artillery shell could interrupt your signal or that the battery could fail suddenly, returning you again to that cycle of darkness, oblivion, and the world’s indifference.

I remember one day when I spent more than two hours walking through ruined streets in search of an internet signal strong enough to send a brief message to a relative. It contained only two words: “We’re safe.” My phone battery was running low, and the connection disappeared every few minutes. Anywhere else on earth, such a message would’ve taken seconds to send. But here, it brings about an anxiety that is immeasurable.

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We live a life here that has been suspended, a life in constant anticipation of the promise of reconstruction. But true rebuilding is not, at least in any language worthy of human dignity, the allotment of thousands of tons of cement and steel. As necessary as that may be to restore shelter for my family and our neighbors, reconstruction actually begins with returning to us the capacity for production. It begins with the complete and unconditional end of the blockade that has crushed my society for twenty years. Rebuilding means opening the borders so we may breathe again. It means restoring our destroyed universities and cultural institutions so that they may flourish — without the need for permission. It means a life without the humiliating restrictions imposed at every crossing: a life where we may travel, study abroad, and trade freely with the world as others do.

But before any of that may become possible, the self-evident solution to Gaza’s crises requires an immediate and complete end to both the daily incursions that tear through our neighborhoods, and the ever-expanding systematic policy of constricting the geographical space where more than two million people are already crowded together. It is not possible for us to plan for tomorrow while the earth beneath our feet shrinks today.

A ceasefire that merely silences the roar of artillery and aircraft is not peace, nor is it stability. Any agreement that sustains the blockade of land, air, and sea amounts only to an unspoken international consensus that we should die slowly and quietly, away from the cameras, so that our deaths may no longer disturb the world.

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What is the unemployment rate this morning? Will it be 50 or 100 aid trucks permitted to enter the Gaza Strip today? Or will it be zero again? How many calories does an individual need to survive under siege without quite dying? For decades, the international community has constructed a framework whose function is to keep Palestinians in Gaza suspended in a state of permanent dying, a subsistence perpetually renewed through the fine-tuned calculations of minimum aid. All the while, the inherent structures of blockade and occupation remain untouched and largely outside the scope of accountability.

With every new round of bombardment, people around the world turn to their screens to watch our deaths become the toll, waiting for the figure to reach a certain threshold that warrants the announcement of a “temporary ceasefire” — only for everything to return to square one, awaiting the next round, back to null.

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I write to you amid rubble and ash in the hope that I may wrest my voice away from the grip of statistical abstraction. Our loved ones cannot be left to a legacy of scaled models. We ask you only for ordinary things: to be looked at in the eyes, to live a life undeferred.

This piece appears in the twenty-second issue of The New York War Crimes.