'But the heart remains frozen...'

I fail to feel any empathy at a reel showing Jews in Tel Aviv running in panic as a missile hits a multi-storeyed building behind  them. I hear screams, sense their terror, but the heart remains frozen.

By Meher Pestonji in Mumbai

I'm afraid I'm losing sensitivity, an essential trait for a writer and poet.

I fail to feel any empathy at a reel showing Jews in Tel Aviv running in panic as a missile hits a multi-storeyed building behind  them. I hear screams, sense their terror, but the heart remains frozen.

My thought is that this is their first taste of the relentless terror they have been inflicting on Palestinians for two years and longer.

Hope that bitter taste injects traces of humanity in them.

Another reel depicts the rush at Tel Aviv airport. People desperate to leave what they called their 'homeland'.

Now they have deliberately targeted and murdered more than 185 school girls in Iran. Pray, what was their crime?

Palestinians stayed and fought for their homeland. Ukrainians stayed and fought for their homeland.

That's what you do when you belong to the land as much as the land belongs to you. Just because armed and brutish Israeli settlers throw out original Palestinian owners forcibly, capture and build houses they can't claim the land as their own.

Gaza

The lasting image is of a terrified dog trembling in a cleft between a wall and rubble. Innocent animal trapped in a mindless conflict created by ruthless men in Washington DC and Tel Aviv.

I am no great champion of animal rights, but that dog touched my heart.

Thankfully, sensitivity isn't dead yet.

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Meher Pestonji is a journalist, author and poet based in Mumbai.

All photos courtesy Instagram posted on March 4, 2026.