The camera lens records the destruction, and for a moment I feel like I’m watching a black-and-white film. The image is gray and featureless. My mind tells me there’s something wrong with the camera—its colors have faded—or perhaps my mind, stunned by shock, can no longer tell colors apart. I study the screen, trying to spot more scenes and examine their tones. Suddenly, a red appears among the ash. I lift my head… it’s blood on a pink dress worn by a little girl, her golden hair crowned with soot. I scream: Save her!

That scene was not just a breaking news item; it was part of my daily work for two years in Gaza.

Now I am in Sydney. Ten months have passed since I left, and I follow the same war from another screen. The headlines read: “Shelling in the north” or “Progress in negotiations.” I read and feel exhausted; details I used to see clearly on the ground are now distant and blurred. The details that were my tools as a journalist are gone, replaced by cold numbers and headlines that don’t tell the story, as if the truth never reached us whole. On the ground there are realities the world doesn’t see, and stories that get lost in the gap between tragic reality and the dead chill of a screen.

Here in Sydney I discovered that distance is not measured in kilometers. Fourteen thousand kilometers may lie between the cities, but the real distance is the one between those who watch the war and those who live inside the destruction. There, where there is no electricity, a child can lose their life at any moment. The search for a sip of water, enduring the summer heat and the bitter winter cold under endless displacement tents—that is the whole struggle to survive.

Politics buzzes with continuous negotiations: a statement from one side, a reply from another, a new map handed to the media, as if people’s lives were just a game of points and clauses, their fate and suffering ignored. In the field we saw those maps drawn with ink at conferences, while people on the ground drew their real maps: where water is available today, which street is safe to cross, which bakery is still operating.

The world measures war by politics, while the people of Gaza measure it by survival. An agreement may succeed today and fail tomorrow, but the queues of suffering will remain, the ruined house will remain, and the red stain on the pink dress will remain etched in the memory of those who saw it. We hope for a real ceasefire, for Gaza to be rebuilt, and for its people to return to normal life like any other city in the world.

The best way to confront this reality and achieve justice is simply to stay alive. Survival in Gaza is not accidental: waking each morning to find your family there, to find a sip of water, and not to become just a number in the news—this itself is the real act of resistance, and the only justice available now.

From Sydney, despite my vigilant and continuous following of every report and development, I know for certain that the most important truth is not in the headlines but in an unchanging reality: don’t wait to understand every clause of politics—understand only this: survival there is everything politics claims to be.