Hiiraan Online

Wednesday 17 September, 2025
By Mohamed Mahmud Alaalle

Last night, I saw Gaza bleeding in 4K. A father clutching the shredded remains of his daughter. A pink sleeve still clung to her arm. Her face was gone, erased by dust and fire. I stared too long, long enough to feel sick. And then I did the sin of our time. I scrolled.

That’s what we’ve become. Consumers of slaughter. We scroll past genocide like it’s just another clip between a football score and an Instagram kitten video. Gaza burns, children starve, and presidents adjust their ties for photographs. We remember diplomats who sip water in glass towers at the United Nations, but we don’t remember the little girl who shredded like minced meat in Gaza.

Somalis Should Know Better

We of all people should know better. In 2011, famine killed more than 250,000 in Somalia. The images still haunts us. Skeletal children with eyes too big for their faces, mothers too weak to cry over shallow graves. The world had turned its back, until one man stepped in.

Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He flew into Mogadishu when others wouldn’t. He held starving children in his arms with flies on his face, when our own leaders avoided carrying these “dirty” children. He showed the world that Somalia mattered. Suddenly the cameras came. The aid planes followed. Celebrities ran campaigns for Somalia. Ordinary people gave what they could. That visit shifted history. It turned despair into a global rallying cry.

And it worked. Because someone with courage refused to let the world look away.

Why can’t we do the same for Gaza?

History Is Screaming

We’ve seen this before. Rwanda, 1994. A million Tutsis slaughtered in just one hundred days while the “international community” drafted reports. After the genocide, the world wept and promised, “never again.”

Go further back. Hitler’s Holocaust. Six million Jews exterminated in camps and gas chambers while neighbors stayed silent, while leaders calculated interests. The world swore, “never again.” But the never again is only in movies like the ‘The Boy in The Striped Pajamas.’ Our tears are only when watching Netflix, not in our real world.

And yet here is the bitter truth: the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who survived the Holocaust are now perpetuating a genocide in Gaza. The oppressed have become the oppressors. The memory of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Dachau has been twisted into justification for starving children in Rafah and bombing hospitals in Khan Younis.

Today, in Gaza, it is happening again. Farmers are shot in their fields. Fishermen are barred from their sea. Hospitals are reduced to morgues. Children starve to death under siege. Entire neighborhoods are turned into rubble.

“Never again” has turned into “again and again.” And this time, the world doesn’t even have the excuse of ignorance. The evidence streams into our palms in real time.

Leaders Without Pulse

The United Nations Security Council knows. They’ve seen the same footage we have. They watch fathers carry children in plastic bags. They see newborns suffocating in incubators without power. They hear the cries of women digging out family members who are buried alive in rubble with their bare hands.

And yet, the Council issues statements filled with euphemisms: “de-escalation,” “pause,” “mutual restraint.” Polite words as bodies pile up. Empty words as children go hungry.

Somalia’s delegation will sit in New York this September. To them, I say this: don’t whisper when you should be shouting. Don’t scroll while Gaza starves. We are a nation that has buried its own children in war and famine, a nation that knows what silence costs. If Somalia cannot stand for Gaza, then what is the meaning of our flag in New York?

The script is already written. In 2011, Türkiye wrote the first chapter of compassion. Erdoğan became the face of saving Somali lives. He can still become the face of saving Gazan lives.

And Somalia has a role too. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud should not wait in the shadows. He should join hands with Erdoğan and other world leaders. Together, they can form the moral alliance Gaza desperately needs. Together, they can demand and not beg. Demand that the siege ends, that food and medicine enter Gaza, that bombs stop falling on children.

Imagine the image: World leaders including Presidents Erdoğan and Hassan Sheikh, standing side by side at the UN General Assembly, their voices breaking through the hypocrisy, their words turning silence into action. That alliance could spark a wave, just as it did in Somalia in 2011.

The question is not whether they can. The question is whether they will.

The Shame of Our Comfort

Meanwhile, the rest of us rage at bad Wi-Fi, sulk over flight delays, complain when a loaf of Ekmek cost a lira more in Ankara. And in the same hour, we can watch a Gazan father cradle his daughter’s remains, wrapped in cloth, her face gone.

If one hospital in Paris was bombed, if one city in Washington went dark without power for a week, armies would move. But when Gaza’s hospitals are flattened, when its cities are starved, the world calls it “complicated.” Human rights are only loud when the skin is light; for black and brown skins, they’re whispers no one hears.

That is not complexity. That is cowardice.

Gaza: The Only Honest Place

Perhaps that’s why Gaza feels like the only honest place left on earth. Its rubble is truth. Its hunger is testimony. Its funerals mock international laws. Its children shame every parliament that bankrolls their killers.

Gaza is the mirror we refuse to look into, because it shows our cowardice, our hypocrisy, our complicity.

A Lesson to the World

Here is the lesson: pity is useless. Pity changes nothing. Gaza does not need your pity. Gaza needs your courage. Gaza needs leaders willing to pay the price of conscience.

And here is the question that should sit like a stone in everyones throat, especially for those who will walk into the UN General Assembly hall this September:

If you can watch Gaza bleed in 4K and not feel the lump rise, if you can see fathers carrying fragments of their children while diplomats sip water in glass towers and still scroll past, then you are complicit.

The world does not need more statements. It needs action. Stop the killing. End the siege. Let Gaza live. To the leaders attending UNGA this September: history will not remember your speeches. It will remember the graves your silence helped fill.

Somalia has a chance to stand where it once stood, shoulder to shoulder with Türkiye and other world leaders, reminding the world that silence is death. Action is life.

But this is not just about presidents and prime ministers. It is about us too. Because if you can make your leader take action, then that is your contribution. Your protests, your pressure, your refusal to let Gaza slip into the background, this is how you stand on the right side of history.

The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors now perpetuate horror in Gaza. The ghosts of Rwanda cry out. The bones of Somali war and famine victims bear witness. The lesson is clear: silence always ends in graves.

Gaza is not just bleeding. Gaza is exposing us. And the shame is not only that it’s happening, it’s that the world is watching, and still doing nothing.