Photo/Illutration Mohammed Mansour, an Asahi Shimbun correspondent in Gaza (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

Every story 29-year-old Mohammed Mansour filed from Gaza contained something emotionally striking about how the people caught in this war are just like anyone else, including me.

His words, uttered under extreme circumstances from a city nobody could escape, told the harrowing reality of that land with gut-wrenching intensity.

“Was my being born in a place ruled by Hamas a crime I now have to pay for?”

“I hid myself before I bawled my eyes out. I just could not show myself like this to my family.”

“Memories of the horrors of chronic nightly air raids have been permanently imprinted onto the fabric of relief tents.”

“If being robbed of something hurts as badly as this, I wish I’d never had anything to begin with.”

“And yet, we must keep living.”

“Our ‘routine life’ has resumed,” he concluded his report right after the cease-fire agreement was shattered.

I read that in The Asahi Shimbun building a little after 9 p.m. on March 24, and then went home.

The following morning, I read in the paper of Mansour’s death in an Israeli attack.

I was speechless.

Priceless life is ended in a flash and that’s war. I’d written that so many times before, but somehow, I always assumed that Mansour would be safe—I wanted to believe it because he was my colleague.

What a sadly fragile wish that was.

It will soon be 18 months since the war began. More than 50,000 lives have been sacrificed.

My tears for Mansour don’t even register when compared to the oceans of tears that must have been shed in Gaza.

“I can’t trust the world anymore,” Mansour wrote in a report he filed last autumn. But he continued, “Still, all I can do is to keep writing and taking pictures.”

His last wishes are now etched in my heart.

—The Asahi Shimbun, March 26

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.

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