Viktor Frankl wrote in the classic Man's Search for Meaning that the worst time in the concentration camp was not when they arrived, not when they were chosen, not even when they were beaten at random. It was the moment a prisoner stopped imagining a future. Not despair exactly but something quieter. A man who could no longer see himself forward in time, who could no longer picture himself in the after, began to die in ways the body registered before the mind admitted. Frankl called it in his book 'the loss of meaning'. By this, he did not mean the emotional loss of hope, but the loss of a story in which his pain would be seen, acknowledged, and put into words in the history of humankind. It's the witnessing part that the world has been systematically missing in Gaza.

This is not a piece on who started what, or about proportionality in the legal sense, or about the competing territorial claims that predate most of the people that are dying........

© The Express Tribune