In Hiroshima, I Witnessed Gaza’s Ongoing Reality

“To honour Hiroshima without acting for Gaza is to betray both.” In Japan for the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Palestinian genocide survivor Mariam Khateeb demands action.

On the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing, the residents of Hiroshima honour the victims by casting flowers and lanterns into the river.

The city is quiet, almost deceptively so, its streets lined with cherry blossoms and memorials that whisper of another time. At the ceremony, I stood among survivors—hibakusha—whose fragile frames carry the invisible scars of radiation, and among descendants who inherited not only loss but the duty of remembrance.

Inside the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, I walked past the relics of incinerated lives: a child’s tricycle twisted by heat, a pocket watch frozen at 8:15, a school uniform stained with blood. Each artefact screamed silently of a world turned to ash in a single morning.

But I did not stand there as a detached visitor. I stood there as a Palestinian from Gaza, a survivor of another kind of annihilation. My own city, thousands of miles away, was at that very moment burning under relentless bombardment. In the polished halls of Hiroshima’s memory, I carried my own ghosts—the rubble, the hunger, the endless funerals. The echoes between Hiroshima’s past and Gaza’s present were inescapable.

Hiroshima as humanity’s warning

Hiroshima is not merely a Japanese tragedy; it is humanity’s most terrifying mirror. In August 1945, the world witnessed the dawn of total war—the knowledge that a single weapon could erase a city and alter the human genome for generations. Hiroshima is taught as a historical rupture, a warning that “never again” must guide the world.

And yet, standing there, I realised that Hiroshima has not ended. Its lessons remain betrayed. The promise of “never again” has been replaced by “again and again,” enacted in different geographies, through different technologies, but always with the same target: civilian life.

In Gaza, the destruction is not instantaneous like the atomic bomb, but it is no less total. The weapons fall day after day, phosphorous lighting up the night sky, precision-guided bombs collapsing apartment blocks, starvation deployed as a weapon of war. The devastation is slower, stretched across weeks and months, but the result is hauntingly familiar: families erased, neighbourhoods incinerated, a people pushed toward disappearance.

Where Hiroshima’s devastation is remembered in the past tense, Gaza lives it in the present continuous. We do not yet have the luxury of anniversaries or memorial museums. Our ruins are still smouldering. Our dead are still being pulled from beneath the rubble. Our children are still asking why the world does not see them.

In Japan, remembrance is ritualised. Every August, the bells toll, the speeches are given, and the world pauses—if only briefly—to honour the victims of nuclear war. Hiroshima’s past has been transformed into a universal symbol, a cautionary tale etched into the conscience of humanity.

But in Gaza, time itself is fractured. We live in what feels like an eternal present, one where destruction does not belong to memory but to the now. For us, there is no ceremony, no closure, no global silence of mourning. We are suspended in an endless emergency, condemned to relive catastrophe as if history refuses to move forward.

This temporal paradox struck me most powerfully as I stood before Hiroshima’s cenotaph, where the names of the dead are carefully inscribed. In Gaza, names vanish before they are even recorded. Families are obliterated in such numbers that sometimes no one is left alive to speak their names. Memory is devoured even before it can be preserved.

Bodies as archives of violence

In Hiroshima, survivors speak of radiation that continues to mutate inside their cells, shaping their descendants’ bodies. The war lives on beneath their skin.

In Gaza, our bodies, too, are archives of violence. We carry malnutrition in our bones, trauma in our nervous systems, and grief in our very breath. Women give birth in tents under bombardment, stitching together life amid the machinery of death. Children wake screaming from nightmares that are not dreams but memories. Our bodies are not abstract symbols—they are living testaments to genocide.

As a young Palestinian woman, I know that survival is not neutral. To exist, to speak, to write, is to resist erasure. In Hiroshima, I realised that the body itself is a museum of history, a vessel where both suffering and defiance are inscribed.

The anniversary of Hiroshima was filled with words of peace, solemn pledges that such horror must never be repeated. And yet, as Gaza burns, the world looks away. The same international system that mourns Hiroshima funds the bombs falling on Palestinian children. The same leaders who honour the victims of 1945 justify the slaughter of 2025.

What, then, does global solidarity mean? Is it a ritual of memory divorced from action? Or is it a moral responsibility to intervene when history repeats itself in real time?

To honour Hiroshima without acting for Gaza is to betray both.

We demand action now

Despite everything, Hiroshima taught me that memory itself is a form of resistance. The hibakusha refused silence. Their testimonies became the conscience of the world, ensuring that Hiroshima would not be forgotten.

In Gaza, we are learning to do the same. We write, we film, we sing, we bury names into poems so they cannot be erased. Even as bombs fall, we insist on archiving our existence. Our survival is not passive—it is an active refusal to be annihilated in silence.

Eighty years separate Hiroshima and Gaza, yet they are bound by fire. Hiroshima was supposed to be humanity’s final warning. Instead, it has become Gaza’s present reality.

To stand in Hiroshima is to realise that history is not behind us—it is repeating, with new victims, new ruins, new silences. To remember Hiroshima truly is to act for Gaza now. Anything less is a hollow ceremony.

Hibakusha in Japan call themselves “the bomb’s witnesses.” In Gaza, we too are witnesses—of a slow-motion atomic bomb falling not in a single flash, but day after day.

The question is not whether humanity will remember us eighty years from now. The question is whether humanity will act while we are still alive.