When you ask me how I am, I will answer with a lie because the truth is too painful to convey.

The truth is, I’m not okay. No one I know is. But we continue to turn up for life whilst functioning on an exhausting mix of futility, rage and hope that somehow, someway, things will get better.

Six hundred and fifty two-odd days ago, we thought things could not get worse, and yet they have steadily defied expectations of horror on an almost weekly basis.

As I navigate daily life, even routine tasks become interspersed with guilt.

Walking past a local school where primary school kids gleefully chatter and chase a football, I remember that children in Gaza haven’t attended school for 652 days. Schools have been blown up. That’s 652 days of no classes, lunchtimes, recess, excursions, PE, library, learning. What will that do to the developmental arc of a child?

No-one is okay.

My niece calls to tell me she had a great day teaching her Grade three class today. Then I remember the IDF has killed the equivalent of her entire class every day for 21 months. That’s approximately 18,284 primary school-aged children massacred. For context, I imagine a different grade three class in Australia being carpet bombed every day for 652 days.

No-one is okay.

I see my neighbour joyfully wheeling her newborn in a pram on her way home from the GP. Then I remember the health system in Gaza has been decimated. And the images of decomposed premature babies in incubators who nurses were forced to abandon when the IDF gave them minutes to evacuate.

No-one is okay.

I carry my neighbour’s baby and notice how much he has grown. Then I recall the parent who raced home after leaving to buy food for his family. He returned to find them in pieces, literally dismembered and strewn across rubble following a bombing of their shelter. A rescue worker collected an amount of flesh weighing approximately what one of his children weighed. He passed it to the father telling him to bury it.

No-one is okay.

At the grocery store, I lament the price increase of bread and eggs. Then I remember the child eating sand. The mothers boiling grass. And the adults who risk their lives scrambling at GHF food collection points which have become death traps run by the IDF and US contractors who shoot unarmed civilians carrying empty pots. The choices it seems are to die of starvation, or die trying to prevent it.

No-one is okay.

In the evening my child complains about an ankle injury so I fasten a brace for them. Then I remember the interview with an American physician recalling his deployment in Gaza. He spoke about the patterned manner in which children with gunshot wounds would arrive at the Nasser hospital – one day cases of multiple head shot injuries, one day multiple abdominal wound cases, one day mass cases of children shot in their genitals. He called it target practice; a sport.

No-one in is okay.

I speak to a friend’s toddler and marvel at her adorable babbling and childlike imagination. Then I remember a trauma counsellor in Gaza share how children say they want to die because “at least heaven has food” and ask if “the pilots who bomb children have children of their own?”

No-one is okay.

Gaza is now the site of the highest number of child amputees in the world;

The most journalists killed in a conflict in the 21st Century;

The most aid workers killed in UN history;

A total of 1400 healthcare workers killed since October 2023;

More than 50,000 children murdered.

No more universities exist in Gaza. Israel has obliterated the education system and half of all religious sites have been destroyed. There are entire bloodlines of Christian families who have been eliminated. Erased.

And now widespread, IDF -engineered starvation has taken hold as the genocide escalates.

Houda Abu Al-Naja is 12 years old and weighs 20kg. And Baby Judi is six months old and weighs barely 2kg. The impact of starvation is so catastrophic that even if aid were to miraculously arrive, damage sustained to children’s lives is deemed irreversible, stunting bodies and minds for life. Imagine being an adult with the power to feed a child and instead choosing to let them starve.

How is this self-defence?

It would seem that Palestinians are the wrong race to warrant constructive Western nation intervention.

If only they could have been more Ukrainian. And less Arab. Or less Muslim.

This is where we’re at.

And this is why no-one is okay.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.