"When a toxic person can no longer control you, they will try to control how others see you. This misinformation will feel unfair, but stay above it, trusting that other people will eventually see the truth - just like you did."
- Unknown
Kids love watching planes fly by but in Gaza it's a different story. Our children are not simply enjoying the sight of aircrafts like other babies around the world. They are just happy because if the planes are not dropping bombs on them, it means there is a chance they are delivering even the slightest amount of food they need so much. As you can see here, Omar and Salah are waving dedperately for aid planes as they are heading to aid-drop food far and deep into sea. Salah is even telling the plane to come help him. The possibility of those food parcels reaching them is little to none, but still seeing planes drop aid instead of bombs makes them somewhat hopeful.
After being dispalced again from Rafah to khan Yunis, it has become nearly impossible for my family to provide water, food and other basic necessities for their children and newborns. It is even harder for them to access humanitarian aid now that the occupation has sealed the Rafah crossing with Egypt while Israeli settlers and soldiers continue to block aid trucks at Israel's Kerem Shalom border crossing. International organizations say it has become almost impossible to deliver aid in Gaza because of the presence if the Israeli military. Despite international appeals to reopen the borders and allow humanitarian aid in, Israel keeps depriving my family and countless others of desperately needed food, water and medicine while it constantly subjects them to the torture of displacement at the same time. Airstrikes and snipershots are not the only threat to my family right now. Starvation and disease are effectively used by the occupation to further deepen our suffering and threaten the very survival of our children and families.
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Also on topic of Consent: whenever somebody says "Kids should have bodily autonomy!" some guy always is like "You are too unrealistic. What will you do when a kid is seeing the doctor and doesn't want to get a shot? Would you just let them refuse the shot?"
Yeah I probably would. You're straight up asking the wrong person if you want the nice normal answer here. Doctors and nurses forcibly doing (relatively routine) things to my body against my protests when I was a small kid fucked me up so bad that as an adult anything medical related is a huge trigger for me, I've had persistent intrusive thoughts and recurring nightmares about medical procedures, and I can't have even the most basic tests and health checks done on top of it.
I hate talking about it because I can't get comfortable calling it "trauma" and I don't have any other words that are useful, but it's made my life so much harder and really scary since if I start having a weird symptom, there's nothing I can move myself to do about it.
I figured out a loophole where going to a pharmacy instead of a doctor's office for vaccines reduces some of the stress, but I was still in stress and misery for days before I went to get my tetanus shot. The repulsion is so intense it feels like I literally don't have control over myself, it feels like I can't make appointments or plans about such things out of my own free will, and so every year I have guilt guilt guilt guilt guilt about how I should get the flu shot, and it does nothing but ineffectually hurt me.
Vaccines save lives and all that, but when it comes right down to it, I don't think it's actually a net benefit to public health to give any percentage of kids lifelong psychological scars so deep and painful they're almost completely barred from accessing health care as adults.