Jamal’s nine-year-old body was paralyzed. He experienced constant, uncontrollable, violent convulsions. He couldn’t sleep through them. Neither can his mother. To control spasms, a drug called baclofen is needed. It relaxes muscles and stops shaking. Stopping baclofen suddenly may have serious health consequences.

Jamal’s mother, my cousin Shama, wrote to me a week ago from the family tent in the Mawasi displaced persons camp in Gaza. This is the seventh day her son has not taken any medicine. Jamal screamed in agony as violent nerve spasms in his limbs occurred.

Baclofen is not available anywhere in Gaza: not in hospitals, clinics, Ministry of Health warehouses, or even the Red Cross. Shaima has searched them all. It is one of many drugs blocked in Israel, along with painkillers and antibiotics.

Jamal now endures dozens of convulsions every day. There are no alternative medicines or substitutes. There was no relief, just pain.

If people like former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were willing to do whatever they wanted, Jamal’s story wouldn’t be told.

Speaking “We need to make sure we tell the story correctly so that when history writes about this, they don’t write about the victims of Gaza,” he said last month at the US-based, Israel-focused Miyam Institute. As soon as these words came out, the audience burst into applause.

Pompeo went on to say that every war causes civilian casualties, but the real victims of this war are the Israeli people. He worries that October 7 and the war in Gaza will be remembered “wrongly”.

Pompeo seemed to want to argue that the people of Gaza were just “collateral damage” in Israel’s war. They will remain nameless, faceless, forgotten. He wants their stories erased from the pages of human history.

His comments reflect the next phase of Israel’s genocide. Israel and its Christian Zionist allies like Pompeo, dissatisfied with the progress they have made in wiping out Gaza’s people, mosques, schools and universities, cultural institutions, economy and land, are now beginning to erase memories and martyrdom.

The movement is evident both inside and outside Gaza. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) – the agency that has long upheld the status of Palestinian refugees and guaranteed their right of return under international law – is being systematically undermined and dismantled. TikTok, one of the few social media platforms that allowed Palestinian voices more freedom of expression, has been banned. Limit pro-Palestinian accountsAfter being taken over by an Israel-friendly conglomerate.

In the United States, Britain and elsewhere, local laws have been weaponized against pro-Palestinian youth, with dozens detained for using their supposedly protected rights to free speech. the law is equal Passed Developing school teaching content about Israel and Palestine at the state level in the United States.

But what Pompeo—and those like him who misread biblical verses to justify support for Israel and its genocide—fail to understand is that Palestinians have faced erasure before and have overcome it. We will do it again.

When thinking about memory and testimony, the word “martyr” comes to mind. The word “martyr” comes from the Greek word “martus,” meaning “witness,” and occupies an important place in the Bible. Likewise, the Arabic word “shaheed” comes from the root of the word “witness” or “witness.” As the word evolved, it also took on the connotation of violent suffering for one’s beliefs, and even a sense of heroic steadfastness due to the scale of the sacrifice.

I can’t think of a better word to describe Jamal and those around him than “Shahid”: they are living martyrs. Jamal’s tiny body experienced tremendous pain; it was ravaged by the violence of war, and he – like his mother – kept going because of a strong desire to survive.

Jamal and Shama’s tent was surrounded by thousands of other tents. Every one of them was stung by Jamal’s screams, day or night. Tens of thousands of people were in tents, cold and often wet from recent flooding, requiring urgent and critical medical evacuation to hospitals.

The pain and suffering are immense, yet people like Pompeo continue to defend the ongoing process of annihilating the Palestinian people with historical roots.

The Palestinian people are also poets at heart. What Pompeo, who belittles language, memory and history, will never understand is that the poet is a witness.

As the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote in one of his poems:

those who pass between fleeting words

Let’s go with your name

Get rid of our time and let’s go

Steal what you want from the blue sea and the sands of memory

What photos should be taken to facilitate understanding?

You will never:

How a stone in our land becomes the ceiling of our sky.

The Palestinian people will remember the memory of Beit Dras, Deir Yassin, Jenin, Mohammed al-Dura, Anas Sharif and the pain at the root of every olive tree that was torn from the soil. The solidarity of the Palestinian people and millions of people around the world witnessed Israel’s destroy Gaza. To defy Pompeo and honor the living martyr Gamal, each of us will pick up the stones of Gaza and build a new sky.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.