Looking into the Face of the Gorgon

In August 2025, I joined a forum of Israeli mental health professionals called “Silence is a Crime.” The forum was designed to protest the Israeli mainstream media's consistent silencing of the humanitarian situation in Gaza and demand that a voice be raised against the killing and starvation. In the first demonstration organized by the forum, a letter written by a Gazan doctor named Dr. Azz a-Din was read aloud. The letter, called “A Letter from Hell,” is presented here in English translation:

I write these words not as a doctor, not as a son, nor as a man. I write as one who has descended into the depths of hell and returned—not with a prophecy—but with a silence in my throat and blood under my nails. What you are about to hear is not a message. It is a confession. A scream. A documentation of our fall. And may God forgive me—perhaps a final prayer.

We are trapped in a vortex. A great wheel of suffering that grinds us down, and this is no accident. This is the work of man. It is not fate that starves us, nor the heavens that bomb us; it is the logic of the powerful, the rituals of violence, the cold calculus of geopolitics, that have turned our streets into slaughterhouses.

Every morning, I wake up with the same thought: Has the battery died? Not mine; mine ran out long ago. But my phone's. I need it to last long enough to charge it again at the hospital. To remain connected to something, anything that suggests we are still part of the world of the living. There is no water, no breakfast, no routine. There is only a salt-stained bucket, full of seawater, in the place where a sink once stood. I wash my face not to clean it but to remember that I am still flesh and blood, that I have not yet turned to dust. I do not eat. We eat once a day when we manage. We save the leftovers for a shared meal in the middle of the day: rice, lentils, silence. I arrive at the hospital and the doctor greets me with a list of short