108 Attacks in July, 270 Colleagues Lost — and Still the Work Goes On

One hundred and eight attacks in a single month. Two hundred and seventy colleagues killed since October 2023. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate counted both figures, and the counting itself reveals something: the toll is measurable, but the decision to pick up a notebook the next morning is not.

That is the contrast the numbers cannot hold. We can tally attacks and name the dead, but no count accounts for the journalist who watches a colleague fall and still files a story. David's charge to Solomon was not a rally for a single moment of bravery — it was instruction for a long, difficult project. The courage David describes is not the absence of fear but the decision to keep going when fear is fully justified and the cost is already known. He spoke those words about building the Temple — not as a promise of safety. The 270 who died in Gaza were not less faithful than the ones still filing stories, and survival is not proof of God's favor. What God offers is His presence — a word about endurance, not a shield.

Few of us will face that kind of choice. But each of us knows the smaller version — the conversation we avoid because it might cost a relationship, the truth we soften because honesty feels too expensive, the responsibility we consider setting down because it has grown heavy. The question is not whether our stakes compare to those of journalists still reporting in Gaza. It is whether we let measurable risk silence the work we are called to do — or whether we pick up the notebook anyway.