Breaking News

Every day, every hour, indeed every moment, breaking news emerges, news with sharp teeth that gnaw at us, wound us, and grind us in its noisy texts.
I browse daily newspapers and media websites to find that we, the inhabitants of the occupied territories from Rafah to Jenin, have turned into breaking news: raids and mass arrests, field executions, continuous settler attacks on villages and farmers, looting of property, bombing and raids, demolition of homes and land leveling, construction of settlement units, closure of checkpoints and roads, installation of iron gates, an infant freezing to death in Gaza, prisoners dying from torture, hunger, and rape in stone-walled prisons, incursions into religious sites, leveling of refugee camps, demolition of UNRWA headquarters, accumulated humiliation and suspension of food aid in Gaza, escalating officially and ideologically supported Jewish terrorism, scattered short headlines that seem small and isolated, but when combined, they do not constitute news, but a complete war map.
This is not a war in the traditional sense, no official declaration, no zero hour, no siren, no military statement, not a decisive battle broadcast on screens; it is a different kind of war: a war of daily attrition, slowly exhausting and destroying society, making life costly, genocide by installments, so that oppression and repression transform from an exceptional event into a regular rhythm, from a shock to a habit, and from a crime to a piece of news.
Breaking news, a comprehensive war fragmented into news, and dismembered so that it is not seen, for the world only sees war when it is noisy and loud; it is an occupation that practices continuous structural violence against the Palestinian people geographically, psychologically, physically, and culturally, gradual annihilation, as if it tells us: you will die but not all at once, you will become extinct news after news, image after image, until you become able to live within death without screaming.
We live in the era of breaking news; the newspaper is no longer a window to the world, it has become an open coffin; every piece of breaking news is a daily exercise in death, killing here, bombing there, a family wiped out of existence, tents submerged in water, no medicine, no fuel, no food; headlines change and spread in all directions, but the tone is one and the ink is black, an unnamed obituary, bodies disappeared under the rubble, a funeral without mourners and a resurrection that never comes.
We read and then read, not to understand, but to get used to it, for habituation is the most dangerous form of defeat, helplessness, silence, paralysis; shock loses its ability to scream, death turns into routine, disaster into a number, and man into news, as if we live in laboratories for shaping peoples that colonial states practiced in Algeria, Vietnam, and South Africa previously, and in American protectorates, where you are not asked to deny injustice but to see it every day without your vision turning into political power; you are allowed verbal anger, digital sadness, canned condemnation, but you are forbidden to transcend language to meaning and action, or to awaken memory.
Breaking news, here at home and in the brain, in the street and at school, in writing and thinking, news chases us and we are its material, we have become part of the machine, we have become communities of breaking news, analysts, waiting commentators; it is administrative killing, to have your life managed in a spiral of toothed news, in a way that makes death a logical outcome, not a crime, and the occupation does not want you only dead, nor only alive, it wants you suspended, waiting for reconstruction in Gaza, waiting for your salary at the end of the month, waiting to pass this checkpoint or that, waiting for a political solution, waiting for the international community, waiting for God, while time works against you.
Breaking news fragments crime into small details, turning genocide into numbers, the newspaper into an archive of ruin, and man into a cold, molten, unconscious mass without will, for people are not physically absent, they are in their homes, on their phones, but on the level of history they are disabled and frozen; it is postponed living, to be allowed to remain but not allowed to live.
Breaking news, the divorce rate in Palestine is 70 percent, and the unemployment rate is 46 percent, stripping the individual of control over their destiny, and here the occupation practices a system of managing frustration, silent social genocide, and transforming Palestinian society into a permanent state of emergency.
Breaking news, leaders condemn and denounce escalating Israeli violations, politics falls into language, documenting violations instead of breaking them, waiting for intervention instead of initiating action, and here the people are re-formulated not as a political actor but as a wounded body in need of care, not liberation, the oppressed watch their oppression, a maze, no liberating authority and no resistance movement, it is a vacuum of sovereignty.
Breaking news, all leaders, organizations, media professionals, and thinkers consume news, discuss, analyze, and manage news and perception as professional witnesses, participating in managing the existential crisis, speeches without a liberating moral project, without a collective vision, statements without action, and a policy that adapts people to reality instead of changing it, the statement is no longer a means of mobilization, but has become a linguistic substitute for action and a psychological compensation for helplessness, we share the news to convince ourselves that we are still alive, we write and write, how heavy the news is as if it were bombs, the tank in front of the house, absent consciousness and absent leadership and breaking news.