The lights are going out on Gaza today, all electricity and fuel cut off by their occupier, and with this siege goes also our access to first-hand accounts of people’s experience there as conditions get almost unimaginably worse, not just for Hamas, but for everyone in Gaza, nearly half of them under eighteen years old, thousands injured, tens of thousands displaced from their homes.

I was in Cairo in the 2011 uprising when the government shut off cell and internet service for several days. I was young and blithely unconcerned, distracting myself by keeping a journal to post later to my blog, but there was a sense of concern in the back of my mind, a subtle pressure, a knowledge that I couldn’t tell my family what was happening, couldn’t let them know that I was unharmed and making my way to safer ground. I knew later something of the panic my classmates’ parents were unloading on the program staff Stateside.

I was in only a tiny fraction of the danger that Gazans are in this week. There was gunfire down the street on Tahrir Square, but I knew that if I stayed in my apartment after 4pm, no harm would come to me. I didn’t have phone or Internet service, and sometimes a shift in the wind brought tear gas wafting across my balcony, but there were no bombs nor white phosphorus falling around me, no threat that my building and all my belongings in it might not still be there tomorrow.

We’ve heard very few stories of what life is like in Gaza. While the media tells tale after tale of the woe of Israeli families tragically ripped apart by the events of the weekend, they tell few tales of the millions of Palestinians trapped inside the world’s largest prison, the Gaza Strip.

That’s not coincidental. Israel has had a policy of restricting journalistic access to Gaza for a long time, as NPR keeps reminding its audience, and now that Gaza has lost most of its electricity, as NPR mentioned this morning, their producer inside Gaza is losing her already limited ability to report out as her battery supplies dry up. She is among thousands of families who will lose their ability to contact loved ones outside Gaza.

As the lights go out in Gaza, Palestinians will lose even the few and paltry opportunities they have to tell their stories, to plead for your compassion. As cell phones slowly fade to bricks of glass and rare earth metals, the people of Gaza will fade even farther from our awareness, lost in the darkness of Israel’s illegal, immoral, compassionless siege.

I have only the smallest inkling of what it’s like to lose contact with the outside world, far less understanding of how it feels to know you might not live to tomorrow but are unable to call your beloveds outside the wall to tell them what they mean to you, nor to text them in the morning to let them know that you are still alive. I can only imagine what it must feel like to know that the eyes of the world are on your annihilator, but they cannot see you in the dark of a prison you never chose and do not deserve. And I cannot imagine at all what it must be to resign yourself to die in that darkness, your last words never reaching the people you love.

As the lights go out in Gaza, who will speak for the Gazans? Who will even hear their stories?