Tom Common

My friends, I want to tell you something…Please, hear me not with your ears — but with your heart for a minute. Before me, there are two roads: A road to death — wide, dark, with countless faces of loss and pain. And a road to life — so narrow, barely a sliver of light, its chances no more than 0.01%. 📢📢 The road to death comes in many forms here. I might die from an airstrike, or a stray bullet, or at the hands of lawless gangs operating under the occupation’s protection — this is the direct killing. Then there’s the silent, indirect kind of death. Death by hunger. For two months, we’ve eaten nothing but lentils. Days often pass without a single meal. Or death by heartbreak… "the suffocating helplessness of watching your children starve and not being able to feed them. And there are countless other faces of death… I might be arrested and executed like my friend Mohammed. I might fall sick — my body is fragile now, and my immunity shattered. A simple wound on my hand hasn’t healed for days. It festers, and my body can no longer resist. A friend of mine was lightly wounded in his leg… but he died too. There are no hospitals. No real medical care. Just hollow buildings and empty promises. 📢 And yet — the road to life still exists. Narrow is barely visible, but it’s there. My only way to live is to die with my voice heard. To have my voice reach beyond these walls, beyond these borders — to find a word of solidarity, a prayer, a message of hope. To feel that goodness still exists in this world. That somewhere, hearts still beat with mercy. We’ve been burning for 600 days… and we’re still breathing. We’ll endure, until the very last breath, with that fragile, flickering spark of hope… 0.01%.