Hind Rajab was a 6-year-old Palestinian girl from Gaza. On Jan. 29, 2024, she was with her family in a car trying to flee Gaza City. An Israeli tank shot at the car, leaving only Hind and her cousin alive.
Hind’s 15-year-old cousin, Layan Hamadeh, called the Red Crescent and pleaded for someone to rescue them. But then Layan was shot and killed, and the call dropped. Responders called back and spoke with Hind, who begged to be rescued for 3 hours. Again, after sounds of gunfire or an explosion, the call was dropped. On Feb. 10, 2024, after the Israeli military withdrew from the area, Hind and her six family members were found dead. The two paramedics who attempted to rescue Hind were also found dead. The recording of Hind’s call to the Red Crescent spread around the world.
I was recently reminded of Hind while on a trip to the American South with the Telos Group, a nonprofit dedicated to equipping people to advocate for peace and reconciliation amid conflict. The purpose of the delegation was to help Palestinians learn about the histories and current realities of the Black and Indigenous struggle for justice in the United States.
New Orleans was our first stop. At Studio Be, a mural of a Black girl with luminous curls and hands raised made my eyes swell with tears. Her beautiful, defiant eyes stopped me in my tracks. Here was a child who refused to be forgotten and counted as disposable. Here was an image of God, worthy of dignity and honor. In the face of the Black girl in this mural, I saw Hind.
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I would later understand that this moment in front of the mural was only one of the many connections I would make between the Palestinian struggle for justice and the Black struggle for justice.
As I reflected on these connections throughout the trip, I kept returning to the biblical character Rizpah. Rizpah’s story is found in 2 Samuel 21. It is one of mourning, persistence, and healing. When Rizpah’s sons and five other young men are unjustly executed and left exposed, Rizpah keeps vigil beside their unburied bodies for months. Scripture records her chasing away birds by day and wild animals by night. Her bold witness moved the king to retrieve and bury the bodies — an act that ultimately allowed the land to begin healing.
Rizpah’s story has guided my reflections on Palestine, the American South, and on what it means to bear witness to injustice as faithful followers of Christ.
Against Erasure
The way the bodies of Rizpah’s sons and the others were left exposed was meant to strip them of dignity and humanity. But she insisted that they were grievable. In Arabic, we say “اكرام الميّت دفنه,” which can be translated in English to mean “to honor the dead is to bury them.” Rizpah fought for the honor and humanity of these young men, refusing to let them become nameless, faceless victims of political violence.
In Montgomery, Ala., our delegation visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. At this memorial, there are more than 800 steel monuments, each symbolizing a county in the United States where an incident of lynching occurred. The steel slabs are inscribed with named and unnamed victims. The site testifies to a history that some prefer to bury and erase. Walking around the memorial, I tried to honor the memory of each victim, to recognize their God-given humanity.
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In Montgomery, I found myself grieving the bodies buried under the rubble in Gaza. Just as there were Black Americans whose bodies had been brutalized and whose names had been erased from the historical record, there were also sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, cousins, uncles, and grandparents in Gaza who were being killed, and I would never know their names. Their families would never be able to offer them a proper burial.
Since the war began in Gaza, some have been buried in mass graves while others have not been buried at all. As the dentistry student, poet, and writer Mariam Mohammed Al Khateeb observed in June 2024, “Nowadays, we Gazans are lucky if we even get to have a funeral, to bury an intact body, or to have our family and friends there to say goodbye and cry over us.” Mass graves, Israeli soldiers preventing the burial of the dead — these conditions facilitate the erasure of the humanity of Gazans and Palestinians living in the occupied territories.
As followers of Christ, we are called to resist erasure. We are called to affirm the sacred worth of each life, even when the world tells us to forget them. Rizpah’s vigil teaches us to reject narratives that dehumanize, and to insist on the God-given dignity of every human.
Against Apathy
Rizpah held her vigil for months, from the beginning of the harvest until the rain came. I imagine many people passed her by during this time, moving on with their lives and thinking the killing of the young men was unfortunate but inevitable.
But Rizpah did not relent, and she kept her vigil on the hill, reminding the community of the injustice that had been committed and the need for repentance. Rizpah’s name means “hot coal,” and that is what she became for her community: a burning presence seeking to revive the conscience of her community.
Rizpah’s story reminds me of the story of Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955. She insisted the world see what had been done to her 14-year-old son. She held an open-casket funeral and invited the press, forcing Americans to confront the brutality of racism. She did what Rizpah did: She forced people to confront their apathy toward violence. A mother’s witness transformed a grave injustice into a national reckoning.
Today, many are apathetic toward our suffering as Palestinians. I have encountered many people who just assume that our region is bound to always be at war: “It’s just a troublesome neighborhood,” “There’s always violence going on in the Middle East,” I have heard people say.
Others hide their apathy with spiritual language, proclaiming that “There won’t be true peace until Jesus comes,” which they believe absolves them from the biblical mandate to be peacemakers (Matthew 5:9).
Rizpah’s actions invite us to move away from apathy and toward solidarity. Only two of the seven young men were Rizpah’s children, and yet she stood by all the bodies, protesting the injustice done to each one of them.
South African theologian Allan Boesak explains in “The Dignity of Resistance in Solidarity” that Rizpah’s story charges us to say that “As long as there is one single child on the cross of pain, and indignity, of suffering and futurelessness, I will stand up and I will fight for that child.”
As Palestinian Christians, we reject the temptation to only care for our kin. We insist that every human being impacted by violence, Israeli or Palestinian, Black or white, is made in the image of God, worthy of dignity and freedom. Every child on the cross is our child. Everyone who lives between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea deserves to live a safe life and to have the opportunity to prosper and flourish. This is our message as peacemakers, as children of God.
But critical to note is that peace and healing cannot come without confronting the wrong that has been done. Rizpah and Till-Mobley bore witness not to undo the past, but to shape the future. We, too, are called to that kind of faithful presence, to be coals that refuse to grow cold.
Against Hopelessness
By all social measures, Rizpah was among the weakest in society: a woman, a concubine, a grieving mother with no living male sons. Even in the text, her words are not recorded. Yet she insisted on her agency and persisted in her witness. And as a result of her witness, the king had to act, ultimately bringing about the healing of the land.
In the American South, I saw that same persistence. In Selma, we listened to activist Callie Greer, affectionately known as Mama Callie, share how she lost her son to gun violence and her daughter to cancer. She told us how God’s grace met her in her pain. Like Rizpah, she chose to stand in the wounds of her story and turn grief into action. Unrelentingly, she continues to work for change in her community.
In Palestine, after years of systemic injustice and dispossession, we too often feel hopeless. Honestly, from most people’s perspectives, when it comes to Palestine, there is not much of a reason to hope for a better future. It seems things are only getting worse with an increase in displacement, demolished homes, flimsy tents housing tens of thousands of people, and destroyed schools and hospitals. I felt the bleakness of our situation acutely as just a day after I returned home to Nazareth, the fragile ceasefire in Gaza collapsed, and the mass murder and destruction continued unabated and unchallenged.
Yet as Palestinian Christians, we learn from our siblings around the globe, and we continue to hold on to hope. Not as a naïve idea or a delusion, but as an expression of faith in the God we love and follow. A hope that is rooted in a God who is just and merciful, who is close to the brokenhearted; a God who is the advocate of the poor, the defender of widows and orphans. Our hope is in a God who rose from the grave and defeated death.
We can express that hope by joining God in building God’s kingdom. By living in the way that Jesus taught us: to hunger and thirst for righteousness, to strive for peace, to love our enemy until they see our equal humanity.
Rizpah’s vigil is an invitation for us today to stand firm against erasure, apathy, and hopelessness. We are called to stand where bodies lie exposed, where names are forgotten or never known, where hope feels absurd. And in those places — from Gaza to Montgomery — we must insist on justice, love, and healing.
Lamma Mansour has a Ph.D. in social policy and is a writer and researcher from Nazareth. Her work focuses on justice, faith, and young people across Israel-Palestine.
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