At exactly eleven in the morning, they burst through the clinic door, four men whose hands were trembling, whose faces were pale with that particular terror known only to those who have just carried death in their arms. Their clothes were soaked in blood, and in their arms lay a boy, fifteen years old, his head limp, his breath shallow, his life fleeing him with every convulsion of his chest.
Just minutes before, he had been standing at the entrance of his tent,
a child among the ruins of childhood,
beside this very clinic where I sit now, writing with hands still sticky with his blood.
More than half a mile away from the so-called “yellow line,” where armored machines squat like iron beasts watching for movements they no longer distinguish, man or child, danger or breath.
And then, a shot. Not aimed. Not justified. Not needed. A single pointless eruption of metal from a soldier’s weapon, as casual as flicking ash from a cigarette.
The bullet entered the boy’s back.
Tore through muscle, ribs, and soft lung tissue. Burrowed into the lower lobe of his right lung and nested there like a cold, uninvited parasite.
Inside him bloomed a dark crimson flower: a hemothorax, a drowning from within.
He arrived to me suffocating, gasping like a fish thrown onto sand, his breaths desperate, uneven, and filled with the rattle of blood. Each cough spat out fragments of his own life.
His right chest was silent, no air entered. Only the thick, suffocating weight of blood collecting around the torn lung, crushing it, crushing him.
“Doctor,” someone whispered, “save him.”
As if salvation were something I could command.
Still, we tried. Oh, how we tried.
With the pitiful remains of what once was a medical system, a few oxygen masks, trembling hands, gauze that runs out too quickly, medicines that arrive too late, we worked.
We secured what we could of his airway. Cleared blood from his mouth.
Gave oxygen through a mask that hissed like a dying animal. Pressed on wounds. Stopped the bleeding we could reach. Stabilized his pressure with what little fluid we had.
And then, with the urgency of men fighting the tide itself, we sent him in the ambulance to the nearest hospital, the kind of place where, under normal conditions, a child like him could be saved.
But nothing here is normal. Not anymore. Perhaps not ever.
And I swear on whatever remains of my soul: this did not happen at a frontline. Not during battle.
Not in crossfire.
No, this happened during what the world, in its infinite appetite for illusion, calls a “ceasefire.”
A ceasefire in which a child can be shot in broad daylight for standing at the doorway of his shelter.
A ceasefire where safety is not a promise, only a rumor.
A ceasefire where life and death depend not on rules or agreements but on the idle whim of a man holding a rifle.
And yet, the boy, that poor boy, looked at me before we sent him away. He tried to speak, but blood filled his throat. His eyes said everything.
“Why?” The eternal question.
The question that has no answer, because the world that should answer it long ago sold its conscience for comfort.
I do not know if he survived the journey. But I know this:
A civilization that permits this, that accepts this, that grows accustomed to this, is a civilization already standing at the edge of the abyss.
You can visit Dr. Ezzideen at:
https://x.com/ezzingaza