October 7, 2025

two years: a dispatch from the palestinian youth movement

To have not been transformed by the last two years is to not be human. A prison break actualizing the right of return for the grandchildren of the Nakba, tearing down the fences that had so violently caged them for 16 years, and reuniting with the land they had been exiled from for decades.

Two years on, we are still confronted by the dividing line between the world before and the world after Tawafan Al-Aqsa. We are still trying to make sense of where we are through where we were.

Yet two years later, the horrors have not ceased to emerge, the images and the screams still defying all language, all categories. The Israeli directive in Gaza was, and remains to destroy every neighborhood, every institution and pillar of life, put a bullet or a bomb in every person who could ever help to rebuild when the war ends. Gaza can never be Gaza again.

We know today, from the highest levels of the occupation’s military, its intelligence, and its politicians, that this is the end goal of the state of Israel.

Today the estimates stand at over 400,000 martyrs killed by Israel. We have seen the destruction of every university in Gaza, the bombing of every hospital in the Strip, schools turned into shelters, tens of kilometers of beaches turned into tent cities, and tens of thousands of our people disappeared and tortured in Zionist prisons. The enormity of the pain and loss is most viscerally felt by our people, not through figures and statistics, but in each precious life lost, each family home destroyed, each orange tree uprooted.

We recall Refaat Al-Areer’s love of the strawberry fields of Beit Lahia, how his sharp analysis cut through obfuscations of the truth. We recall how the Abu-Emara family was targeted and killed for feeding their neighbors during the first siege on the Al-Remal neighborhood in Gaza City. We are still haunted by the Al-Ahli Hospital massacre, the press conference that should have stopped the world, and the eyes of Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta as he recounted the horrors he witnessed.

We eternalize the voice of Anas Al-Sharif, taking off his helmet and vest in relief, as he announced the brief ceasefire in January of this year, and the images of him being carried on the shoulders of his people in celebration up until the moment that he was carried on their shoulders as a martyr.

“I urge you not to let chains silence you, nor borders restrain you. Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland.”

The moral arc of the universe does not bend towards justice out of its own volition—it only bends so far as the forces making it so.

Liberation is a path forged through fire, a struggle of the masses against the forces conspiring to maintain an unspeakably violent status quo. The task ahead remains tremendous, for every second that the bombs continue falling is a second too late.

Over two years, millions of people across the world have reoriented their lives to halt the gears of this genocide, becoming agitated, getting organized, and taking action.The task ahead for our movement remains: to fight for a global arms embargo, sanctions on Israel, and an end to the genocide and occupation of Palestine.

We must isolate Zionism at every turn, and ensure that those who have enabled the genocide in Gaza are held responsible for their crimes. From Tangier to Oakland, Bogota to Sanaa, a different world is being built, with Gaza as the compass.

Will we rise up to claim it?