My mother was in Hayy al-Sellom—also known as Hayy al-Karama—on Black Wednesday, when Israel targeted a building just one hundred meters away from the one where my family lives. My mother was there with some of my brothers, sisters, and grandchildren, reassured by the belief that a poor neighborhood like Hayy al-Sellom / Hayy al-Karama would never be targeted. But their assumption collapsed. The roar of the missiles was greater than anything one could imagine or explain.

Dust stormed through the neighborhood, smoke seeped into the house, and voices rose alongside the screams of women and grandchildren. My brother and brother-in-law rushed to evacuate them from the building as the children cried intensely. My brother’s wife froze in place; her jaw twisted from shock.

My mother is in her eighties, ill, barely able to move after several surgeries. She claims she is strong—but who can truly withstand the sound of a missile? We are human beings. No matter how much she insists otherwise, her suffering reveals itself in her voice, in the trembling of her hands, in the lines of her wrinkled face, and in the deterioration of her health after that black day.

When my mother reached the nearby area of Choueifat, my brother-in-law pulled the car over. A pause. They smoked cigarettes while their souls burned inside them. Then he turned on the radio to distract the children and shield them from the catastrophic atmosphere. A song burst through the speakers:

“I am in one land, and you are in another…”

My mother’s eyes flooded with tears of love, and she repeated the lyrics while striking her chest:“I am in one place, my children… where are you? May God protect you for the sake of  Hussein and Our Lady Fatima.”

They are safe now. She began counting the family members: her children and grandchildren, her daughters and sons. My mother has ten children—yes, they are still children to her. She began thinking of each one: the first is in the army, the second in the Internal Security Forces, the third “has disappeared,” the fourth escaped to Khaldeh on a motorcycle, the fifth is in Aramoun, the sixth in Zahle…

The seventh! Where is the seventh? Why is his mobile phone switched off?

Her youngest girl is with her—I mean her daughter, her youngest daughter. As for her middle daughter, she is in Baalbek, in her husband’s village. Her eldest daughter is in the family’s village, their birthplace. Now she began counting the older grandchildren.

Her thoughts expanded in that moment. She tried to grasp every thread of the family at once, to gather all the branches of the tree together in a single instant, to make sure no branch had broken off and fallen beneath the soil. She called every member of the family and did not calm down until everyone answered. She began tracing the map of them all: from Choueifat, where she was, through Khaldeh, to Aramoun, then Zahle, then Baalbek, then the village, then the military barracks, then the police station, then her sons-in-law and the places where her daughters were staying.

Her phone in her hand, she told my younger sister: “Call your eldest brother, then the second, then the third, then the fourth…” until the entire list was exhausted.

I once watched footage of a drone diving toward a fighter in southern Lebanon. I saw in it nothing but a human being raising his hands to his face, as though trying not to see death before his eyes in his final seconds. A single image—enough to remain forever. Enough to inhabit a mother’s memory and pursue her every time she closes her eyes.

I became afraid—terrified—and prayed: “Dear God, please never let my mother taste the bitterness of seeing a video like this of one of her children.”

How can a single scene document a son’s death and remain lodged in memory like an unremovable thorn, destroying an entire family and killing mothers once, then twice, then countless times over?

Death is no longer a passing moment. It has become infinitely repeatable. Replayed with the press of a button, shown again and again, reviving the same tremor, the same sound, the same helplessness. What kind of justice leaves a mother to witness her son’s death not once, but every time she returns to that image? And what kind of cruelty turns loss itself into something endlessly repeatable—as though death were not satisfied with happening a single time, and insists instead on replaying itself forever?

Faced with all this, the publication of such footage can no longer be treated as a mere detail. It becomes another act of violence, an extension of the killing itself. As though the son’s death were not enough, his death is then circulated, repeated, and forcibly delivered into his mother’s eyes. From this perspective, the call to criminalize the publication of such videos becomes both a political and an ethical demand—an attempt to protect whatever humanity still remains in a mother’s heart, and her simple right “to lose her son only once.”