Frontline Pulse

I don’t carry a professional camera. Just my phone. It fits in my hand, slips into my pocket, and somehow holds the weight of a thousand shattered lives. In Gaza, that’s all I have to document what the world refuses to see.

I never set out to be a storyteller. But how can you not become one when the streets you walk are paved with broken glass and broken dreams? When the lullabies are drowned out by the hum of drones? When the children… God, the children… look at you with eyes that are far too old for their faces?

There was one boy. Youssef.

He came into the clinic with a minor wound on his arm. He didn’t cry. He just sat there, holding a crumpled drawing in his hand. A house with a red door. A tree. A sun. I asked him about it, and he told me he wanted to be an artist. His voice was soft, but his eyes were louder than any scream I’ve ever heard.

I asked if I could take his picture. He nodded. And then he smiled.

It was the kind of smile that breaks you. A smile that says, I’m still here, even if everything else is gone. I took the photo. And then I went back to work.

That night, I sat on the floor of the guest house, the walls still trembling from distant shelling, scrolling through the images on my phone. Youssef’s smile. A girl clutching a teddy bear with one eye. A mother rocking an empty blanket. A nurse crying in the hallway because she lost someone she loved. I looked at them all and whispered, I’m sorry.

I say it every time.

I’m sorry if my photo captured your pain. I’m sorry if it exposed your grief. I’m sorry if it became just another image in a world that scrolls past suffering like it’s scenery.

I didn’t take these pictures to go viral. I took them because I couldn’t bear the thought of your stories disappearing into silence. I took them because I needed to remember. Because I needed the world to see what I saw.

But still, I apologize.

To every child I photographed while stitching wounds I couldn’t fully heal. To every mother whose eyes met mine as I told her there was nothing more we could do. To every soul whose suffering I captured with a device that cannot feel.

I’m sorry.

The world owes you more than my apology. It owes you safety. It owes you dignity. It owes you a future.

Youssef is not a headline. He is a boy who wanted to draw sunflowers. His sister Lina used to braid his hair and sing to him when the bombs got too loud. She’s gone now. Buried beneath the same rubble he drew his dreams on.

Sometimes people tell me my photos are powerful. That they moved them. That they cried.

And I want to ask: Then what? Did you remember their names? Did you speak their stories? Did you demand the world to stop this?

Because I don’t want your pity. I want your outrage. I want your action.

I carry these images not because I want to, but because I must. Because if I don’t, their stories will vanish. And silence is the cruelest grave.

So I kept taking these pictures. I keep telling their stories. I keep saying their names.

Even if all I have is a phone in my hand, and a heart that breaks a little more with every click.