In perhaps the first trigger warning on LBN, don't read it if you are not ready to be depressed.

The author, Ahmed Alnaouq, a journalist from Gaza and co-founder of We Are Not Numbers, used the phrase "Just like that" as a motif throughout the piece, to accompany various tales of sudden death meted out by the apartheid state to his friends and family. This final section caught me when I was chopping onions..

In 2023, Gaza entered its seventeenth year under Israeli blockade. There was no hope of relief. Then Hamas launched an attack that reportedly killed 1,200 Israelis, and Israel retaliated with its most devastating assault on Gaza yet.

I had settled in London after studying in the UK on a scholarship, but was on holiday in Turkey when the bombing started. Unlike in 2008, 2012, and 2014, I was away from my family during a war. I worried about them constantly.

Most of my relatives gathered at my father’s place in Deir al-Balah. It was in a residential neighborhood, with no military installations or warehouses nearby. If anywhere was safe, we thought, it’s there. I called them every day, asking how they were. “We’re fine, we’re OK.” They were running out of food and water, though. “The situation is very difficult,” they admitted—“but we’re together. Together, we’ll be OK.”

They were asleep when, on October 22, at five in the morning, some Israeli pilot dropped a bomb on our house. Just like that. My family wiped out.

My father, Nasri Alnaouq, aged seventy-five

My sister Walaa, thirty-six, and her children: Raghd, thirteen; Eslam, twelve; Sara, nine; and Abdullah, six.

My sister Alaa, thirty-five, and her children: Eslam, thirteen; Dima, twelve; Tala, eight; Noor, four; and Nasmah, two.

My sister Aya, thirty-three, and her children: Malak, twelve; Mohammed, nine; and Tamim, six.

My oldest brother, Muhammad, thirty-five, and his children: Bakr, eleven, and Basema, nine.

And Mahmoud, twenty-five, a human rights activist who had just been admitted to a master’s program in Australia. My little brother.

Why was my family eliminated? There was no reason. Were militants there? No. Were rockets there? No.

They turned my home into ash and vaporized the life from those people because they were Palestinian. Because the occupation decreed that a decent life is not for us, and if we demand it, then life is not for us.

Many of my relatives were left for days under the rubble. One family member went to my home to recover the pieces. He put these remains that were once my nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters in a trash bag and gave it to my sister. Just like that.

For me, and my surviving family, this is an epic tragedy. It is also an epic tragedy for the world. Because what the world let happen to Gaza, in 2023 and before 2023, is a stain that can never be removed

This is indefensible.