My Letter To Australian MP Mark Dreyfus About Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone

Dear Mr Dreyfus,

Today I saw the skeleton of a young man in Gaza picked clean by dogs, his arms and head intact but the rest of his body was bone and gristle. The colour of the bones was still a bright fresh red. He had been shot only days ago but the cats and dogs had got to him already and gnawed his bones clean. I have never seen anything like it.

Every single day brings fresh horrors to my screen. Each time I think I can no longer be shocked, I am proven wrong. The image of that man made me gasp. It literally took my breath away. I then had to sit with my hands over my eyes while I waited for my heart and breath to come back to normal.

When I close my eyes at night, all I can see is skeletal babies, their little mouths gaping open like baby birds waiting for a worm. I have started to dream about it. Each night I carry a child, a new child, a different baby, trying to find food for them. I wake up with a shadow of an ache in my arms because in my dreams their bones are as brittle as egg shells and I have to be so tender and careful.

This. Must. Stop. All the waffle of who-did-what-and-when burns to dust when babies are starving. No amount of words can make that right. No amount of words can extinguish the images from my eyes, the ache in my heart, and the alarm going off in my head for those babies.

Please do what you can! I beg of you. Please make it stop. It’s all I can think about and I am not alone. Every day the numbers of people like me are growing. Every day more eyes snap awake.