The Nameless… Yet Everything to Someone

In Gaza, death is not the end.

It’s the beginning of another kind of agony — the search for those who are no longer whole.

Some are killed without a trace, without a name, without a final goodbye.

They are buried under the label “Unknown,” as if they were never sons, brothers, neighbors, or dreams walking the earth.

Imagine your brother among the bodies.

You walk between them, searching for something familiar.

A face? Gone.

A hand? Maybe severed.

A shirt? Torn, but it looks like his.

You call your father, voice trembling:

“Dad… what shirt was my brother wearing?”

You ask again. And again.

He replies, confused: “Why?”

You say: “There’s a martyr here. No name. But his shirt… it looks like my brother’s.”

Your father answers: “No, your brother came back.”

And then the tears come.

But what kind of tears are these?

Relief? Guilt? Grief for the one lying before you?

You kneel beside the body, kiss what’s left of a forehead, whisper a prayer, apologize to the martyr for not being there… and walk away.

But that martyr was not unknown.

He was someone.

He had a name, a laugh, a home, a mother waiting, maybe a brother searching elsewhere.

He had a voice — maybe he was singing minutes before the strike.

He had a life, and it was stolen.

In Gaza, some mothers don’t know where to direct their grief.

Some fathers don’t know whether to mourn or keep searching.

Some siblings don’t know whether to cry, wait, or apologize for not being there.

And what if it were you?

What if your body lay among the nameless, and no one could tell it was you?

What if your family searched for days, hoping for a sign, a scar, a shirt — anything to say: “This was ours”?

What if your name was never spoken again, and your story ended in silence?

“Unknown”?

No. They are known in the hearts that break every day.

They are the sons of sleepless homes.

The dreams that never got to grow.

The names that were never spoken in a final farewell.

And in each of them, we might see ourselves.

A brother. A son. A friend.

And maybe, for a moment, we realize how close we are to being erased, forgotten, buried beneath the word: “Unknown.”

But we remember them.

We mourn them.

We write — so they are never lost again.

_We speak their names — so the world never dares to forget._