If I must die, you must live to tell my story
Refaat Alareer (1979-2023)
In tijden van verwoesting en uitwissing wordt de rol van de getuigen extra belangrijk. We worden afhankelijk van getuigenissen van kunstenaars over het leven in Gaza, zoals het was, zoals het is en zoals het misschien wel nooit meer wordt. Door die getuigenissen te leren kennen, ze te waarderen, erover te praten en ze te delen, houden we de herinneringen levend.

Klik de namen:
Kunstwerk van Malik Qraiqea: “Gazans on the March”
Inleiding
Deze maanden horen we van een ongekende massaslachting en etnische zuivering van de bevolking in Gaza. Dit buitensporige geweld is niet alleen gericht op burgers en hun leefomgeving maar ook op alles en iedereen die de cultuur en het erfgoed van het Palestijnse volk behoeden en vorm geven. In de afgelopen maanden zijn musea, archieven, culturele centra, bibliotheken, boekhandels en historisch erfgoed verwoest en onbruikbaar gemaakt. Een levendige cultuur met een lange historie en een eigen identiteit dreigt te worden uitgewist. In een rapport van het Palestijnse Ministerie van Cultuur van begin december wordt gesproken over de beschadiging en verwoesting van 21 culturele centra, 9 bibliotheken en uitgeverijen en 20 historische sites waaronder de Byzantijnse kerk van Sint Porphyrius uit de 4e eeuw, de Grote Omari moskee in Gaza-Stad, met een minaret uit de 7e eeuw, en de haven van Anthedon die vermeld staat op de werelderfgoedlijst. Veel gearchiveerde documenten en objecten zijn voorgoed verloren gegaan.
Bovendien zijn veel kunstenaars vermoord zoals schrijvers, dichters, kalligrafen, fotografen, schilders, theatermakers, musici, zangers en dansers. Of zij zijn door ontberingen en gebrek aan hulpmiddelen niet meer in staat om te werken.





Getuigen van Gaza
Bij grootschalige verwoesting en uitwissing is de rol van getuigen extra belangrijk. We worden afhankelijk van getuigenissen van kunstenaars over het leven in Gaza, zoals het was, zoals het is en zoals het misschien nooit meer wordt. We hebben getuigen nodig die een beeld schetsen van het dagelijks leven op straten, pleinen en markten. Die vertellen hoe het landschap er uitzag, welke bomen er stonden, waar de stad was en waar het platteland. Die een inkijkje geven in de gemoedstoestand van mensen, in hun dromen en vragen, hun plannen en teleurstellingen. Die vertellen over maaltijden, feesten, muziek, zang en dans en die uitleggen hoe Palestijnen zich verhouden tot religie, familie, politiek en cultuur. Die verhalen vertellen waardoor we het leven in Gaza van binnenuit begrijpen en kunnen meeleven met de grote en kleine gebeurtenissen, de dilemma’s, conflicten en tegenstellingen en de worsteling van elke Gazaan om te leven in onmenselijke omstandigheden.
Refaat Alareer (1979-2023), schrijver en docent
Een getuige die niet onvermeld mag blijven is Refaat Alareer (1979-2023). Alareer werd op 6 december vermoord door een Israelisch bombardement. Hij stierf samen met verschillende van zijn familieleden waaronder vier kinderen. Aangezien Alareer zijn verhalen, gedichten en artikelen in het Engels schreef en publiceerde op social media, werd zijn werk wereldwijd veel gelezen. Heel bekend werd zijn column uit 2021: My child asks, ‘Can Israel destroy our building when the power is out?’
Ook sprak hij in 2015 op een TEDx over het belang van storytelling.
Behalve schrijver en dichter, was hij ook geëngageerd docent Engelse literatuur en creative writing aan de Islamitische Universiteit van Gaza. Daar besprak hij met zijn studenten het werk van Shakespeare, moderne poëzie en literatuur. Tegelijk stimuleerde hij hen om over hun eigen levens te schrijven in het Engels. Dit leidde tot de bundel Gaza Writes Back. Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2014). In deze bundel getuigen jonge schrijvers van eigen ervaringen of van gebeurtenissen die ze om zich heen hebben gezien. Hun verhalen zijn schrijnend, onthullend en getuigen vaak van een bittere humor. De bundel is nog als e-book verkrijgbaar.
*Twee verhalen zijn beschikbaar in Nederlandse vertaling op VerhalenPost: verhalenpost.org


Dit gedicht plaatste hij in november 2023 op X, een hartverscheurend testament:
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up
above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
Als eerbetoon aan deze schrijver maakte Podium voor Palestina in december 2024 een video van een brief aan Refaat Alareer, geschreven door Haya Abu Shammala, oud-student en collega van dr Refaat Alareer. Dit is de link naar de video.

Ook verscheen de bloemlezing If I must die. Poetry & Prose, samengesteld door een andere oud-student en vriend Yousef M. Aljamal met een voorwoord van Susan Abulhawa.
Een citaat uit deze fraai vormgegeven bundel:
I’m an academic. Probably the toughest thing I have at home is an Expo Marker. But if the Israelis invade, if the paratroopers charge at us, going from door to door, to massacre us, I am going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I do.
Yousef M. Aljamal – schrijver, activist, onderzoeker

Eén van de schrijvers uit de bundel Gaza writes back, Yousef Aljamal (zijn verhaal Omar X is te vinden op VerhalenPost) schreef een ontroerend eerbetoon aan Refaat Alareer, vol persoonlijke herinneringen aan de man die hem inspireerde en coachte op weg naar zijn schrijverschap.
A Student’s Tribute to Refaat Alareer, Gaza’s Beloved Storyteller
18 December, 2023
It is hard to write about Refaat Alareer, the person who instilled in me and so many other young people in Gaza a love of the written word. Now that I find myself writing this farewell article for him, I am lost for words. Oddly, I don’t feel he’s gone. It’s hard to believe that he’s just a memory now, hard to accept that he’ll never again show up in his classroom, share his wit and the humor for which he was famous. Among those of us who came to know him over the years, Refaat is immortal — he’s an idea, and ideas don’t die. Refaat is a word and a story, Refaat is a pen and a pun. Refaat is our poet, storyteller and mentor.
Born in 1979, the son of Al Shujaiya neighborhood in Gaza city — he loved to introduce himself in this way — Refaat has been an inspiration to a whole generation of Palestinians who came of age under siege in Gaza, youth he guided and supported to become storytellers.
Refaat was so energetic and giving with his time that now and then it seemed he could be present in two separate places at the same time. He was universal in his teaching, introducing us to Malcolm X, John Donne, Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe alongside the works of Palestinian authors such as Edward Said, Susan Abulhawa, Ibrahim Nasrallah and Mourid Bargouthi, among others.
Refaat told us that it was his grandmother, Kamla, who planted in him the love of storytelling. His grandfather would bribe him with gifts to stay with him, but Refaat always chose the stories of his grandmother.
In a TEDx talk he gave in 2015, Refaat quoted a native Canadian asking colonizers, “if this is your land, where is your story?” The story he knew about Palestine and Gaza was Refaat’s way of proving his connection to the land of his ancestors.
Early in his life, Refaat was shot and injured three times. He survived and emerged stronger. “I have never been caught in my life. I was shot three times with rubber-coated metal bullets and was beaten only when the soldiers stormed our home,” he wrote.
Refaat’s uncle, Tayseer Alareer, was killed by Israeli forces while he was working on his land in 2001 to the east of Al Shujaiya and his brother Hamada was also killed by Israel in 2014. Around the same time, Refaat’s family house was also destroyed. When Israelis destroy a home, the occupants return after a while to collect valuables like jewelry or family heirlooms and photos; Refaat dug into the heap of concrete and steel looking for writings of his students.
Refaat had a great love for literature, such that one of our classmates once joked that he keeps a copy of Hamlet under his pillow when he sleeps. Refaat laughed when he heard the joke. His humility and easy-going manner meant many of his students became his close friends. He could be tough with grades, but we still loved him as we knew that the impact of hard-earned grades would last longer.
Refaat’s connection with his students was not limited to the classroom. He would often invite us to have classes in the open air or near the beach, which is now under the occupation of Israeli forces. He would invite us for coffee and always checked on us and on our families.
Refaat edited an anthology in 2014 in which he gathered some of the best writing he could find. Inspired by The Empire Writes Back, Refaat chose Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories From Young Writers in Gaza as its title. He wanted it to be Gaza’s voice to the world. Soon after the end of the 2008-9 Israeli war on Gaza, he asked his students, including me, to write short stories as part of our school assignment, and he chose some of these stories and published them.
Through this book, Refaat wanted to debunk claims about Palestinians in Gaza through literature, because he believed that literature is universal and timeless and could be read at any time in the future as if it were written now. Gaza Writes Back was translated into Malay, Turkish, Italian, and Bengali.
Refaat believed that stories have a huge power of transcending ideas and people. He used to tell us that the Zionist movement didn’t colonize Palestine in one go — Zionists worked for decades to build a narrative justifying the occupation of Palestine. Zionism first created an imaginary homeland in the minds of its followers through mythology and stories.
Refaat argued that for Palestinians to keep their memory and cause alive, they have to carry on telling their side of the story. If we stop telling stories, we’ll betray our ancestors, he would remind us constantly.
In 2014, I traveled with Refaat Alareer and Rawan Yaghi, another contributor to his anthology, to the United States to talk about Gaza and Palestine’s storytelling culture. Refaat always left a huge impact on people he met. We toured seven states together, speaking at churches, unions, community centers and schools, and Refaat used his knowledge and sense of humor to convey Gaza’s story effectively.
Refaat’s wife and kids were at another location when he was killed. He would always speak about his children and what they meant to him.
Refaat had a sense of dark humor and language was his game. He was quick to make jokes or puns, entertaining those around him. He had multiple skills and was active on social media tweeting about Gaza in English. Once, he assigned his students the task to create a Twitter/X account and tweet in English to plant in them the seed of storytelling. His use of social media is how many people around the world came to know Refaat.
I happened to be on the same flight as Refaat in 2013. We both were heading for postgraduate studies in Malaysia, Refaat for his PhD and I for my Masters. He asked me if I had a place to stay to which I answered no. He invited me to stay with him until I found lodging. He was so kind to me, but his dark humor was always there. After I left, I had dinner at another friend’s place, and I posted that I could finally say that I had dinner. He called me “ungrateful,” and demanded that I buy a watermelon — a fruit we Palestinians love — and visit him to show remorse, and so I did.
Refaat was a threat to the Israeli narrative and that’s why Israeli intelligence called him and told him that they would get him and that they knew he was taking shelter at a school. Refaat chose to leave the school and headed to his sister’s house where he was killed by an Israeli airstrike at 6:00 pm on December 6.
In his introduction to Gaza Writes Back, Refaat quoted Chinua Achebe, writing, “storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control. They frighten usurpers of the right to freedom of the human spirit.” “There is a Palestine inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be rescued where all people regardless of color, race and religion could co-exist…Palestine is a martyr away, a missile away, a tear away or a whimper away, Palestine is a story away,” he wrote. Refaat’s stories always brought us closer to our homeland and we remember Refaat carrying a book in his hand and rushing to yet another appointment, always multitasking. As Refaat wanted us to do in a poem titled “If I must die,” he wrote in 2011, but pinned to his timeline in November 2023, we will turn your story into a tale.
Naast schrijver is Aljamal ook coördinator voor Gaza bij het Palestine Activism Program van de American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Aljamal heeft een doctoraat in Midden-Oostenstudies en is een senior extern onderzoeker bij het Hashim Sani Center for Palestine Studies, University of Malaya, Maleisië.
Op 14 augustus 2024 publiceerde 972 Magazine onderstaand artikel van zijn hand, over de onmenselijke omstandigheden waarin Gazanen proberen te overleven.

The daily battles to survive the Gaza genocide
Since October 7, my life has been split between two parallel realms. In the first, I go about my daily life as usual here in Turkey, where I work, visit my friends, do my routine shopping, and take care of my immediate family. In the second realm, I am immersed in the daily reports of the death, destruction, displacement, and fear that my family, friends, and neighbors are enduring in Gaza, and try to help them as much as possible.
My family in Gaza count themselves among the lucky ones: they have a roof over their heads. Thirty-five of my relatives are currently sharing my parents’ overcrowded house in Nuseirat refugee camp, in the center of the Gaza Strip. In January, they were temporarily displaced when Israel issued evacuation orders and sent tanks into the camp, but they subsequently managed to return.
With around 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents displaced and living in makeshift tents, ill-equipped displacement centers, or on the streets, my family are better off than most. Yet they still face severe hardships and indignities every day, forced to drink polluted water and search for food and cooking supplies. This is what the daily struggle for survival looks like inside the besieged and bombarded Gaza Strip.
Queuing for days for two tins of beans
Since October, Israel’s “total siege” on Gaza has led to full-blown famine throughout the Strip. Humanitarian aid has been held up at entry points, and the little that has entered has been vastly inadequate. Israel’s destruction and takeover of the Rafah Crossing in May — through which most aid had been entering — has made the situation even more disastrous.
The U.S.-built pier off the coast of Gaza also proved ineffective, delivering only a fraction of what trucks can bring in before being dismantled after 25 days. Airdrops have done more harm than good, falling on Palestinian homes and tents and even killing several people.
In order to receive what limited aid is available, residents must stand in line for long periods; in some cases, friends have queued for days to get two tins of beans and some biscuits. What’s more, because Israel has routinely obstructed the entry of aid, residents have been getting ill from eating canned meats that expired while being held up for weeks at the Egyptian side of the Rafah Crossing.
“Even the cats refused to eat that meat,” Abdullah Eid, my 27-year-old neighbor from Nuseirat, told me.
When aid shipments are distributed inside Gaza, residents receive small quantities of flour — some of which is also expired. But because most bakeries are no longer able to operate, Eid noted, “we have to buy wheat [that arrives in aid packages], grind it by hand, and bake it at home. Cooking gas is very limited and expensive, so we have to use wood from bombed-out houses and trees uprooted by airstrikes.” Some people have also resorted to building bread ovens out of clay, animal dung, and straw. Soon after the onset of the war, Israel shut off the pipes supplying Gaza with water, and the cessation of aid entering through the Rafah Crossing since May means bottled water is increasingly hard to find. Water tanks connected to people’s homes have been largely destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. Tap water, drawn from Gaza’s aquifer, is polluted with sewage and seawater, yet people have no choice but to use it for drinking, bathing, and cooking, causing many residents to fall ill with gastroenteritis and hepatitis. Skin diseases are also spreading rapidly, and polio has been detected in wastewater.
A few small-scale water desalination facilities are functioning, while some mosques and other institutions have their own water purification systems, so residents queue to collect water from there. “We carry buckets of water from far away so that we can go to the bathroom, wash clothes, and bathe at home,” Eid said. “I swear, even as a young man, in the prime of my life, my back has become exhausted.” In the scorching heat of summer, friends and family manage to shower only once every 7-10 days. Shampoo is not available, and some corrupt hygiene products have contributed to the spread of skin infections.
Renting slippers for an hour
As quality of life has deteriorated in Gaza, the cost of living has spiraled exponentially. The price of basic goods in the market such as meat, flour, water, and vegetables is now 25 to 50 times higher than before the war.
“We are all dying slowly,” Eid told me. “We are no longer able to provide daily food [for our families]. A bag of flour that used to cost NIS 30 [$8] now costs NIS 500 [$137], and is very difficult to obtain. Each household needs four bags of flour per month because of the large number of people living in one house. We can see a difference in our children’s bodies.”
Most people have been out of work for 10 months, and are struggling to afford these prices. My brother Ismail, 32, who is a smoker, laments “the skyrocketing price of cigarettes,” adding: “Items [in the market] that you would previously not hesitate to buy are now too expensive or too rare to find.”
Even obtaining cash is increasingly difficult. Almost all of Gaza’s banks and ATMs have ceased functioning. In central Gaza, most people get cash by paying large commissions either at exchange offices or from a branch of Bank of Palestine — the only bank that remains open in the city of Deir Al-Balah — where they queue for hours, if not days, to receive small sums. On Aug. 11, the branch was stormed by gunmen whose identity and intentions are not known.
Israel has blocked imports of cash into the Strip, and sending money to Gazan bank accounts from abroad is expensive, with exchange offices deducting up to 25 percent of the transfer sum as a commission. The overuse of banknotes has devalued them — albeit creating new jobs for people trying to repair them and make some money — and criminal gangs are exploiting the lack of cash by operating a black market.
Most Gazans were initially displaced from their homes during winter, but because Israel has prohibited the entry of clothing, summer clothes and shoes are scarce and people do their best to reuse or convert their own remaining items. Ismail, my brother, laughed as he told me that some Palestinians in Gaza “even rent out slippers for an hour or two for less than a dollar.” As comical as they may sound, these stories speak volumes about the reality Gazans are facing, deprived of even the simplest necessities — and doing whatever they can to support themselves and their families.
Making tents out of aid parachutes
Even before October 7, Palestinians in Gaza were limited to a few hours of electricity a day under Israeli’s military blockade, and relied on alternative methods of generating electricity such as generators and solar panels.
However, with Israel’s imposition of a “total siege,” the fuel required to power generators soon became scarce. While car batteries and other smaller batteries could provide electricity at the beginning of the war, most have now been fully drained. As a result, most Gazans, including my family, use solar panels to charge their phones in order to speak to loved ones and watch the news — most of which replays the horrors they are living through.
Many residents already owned solar panels; others bought from those whose houses were bombed, or paid neighbors to use theirs. Nowadays, however, they are in short supply and prohibitively expensive — and have even been targeted by Israeli airstrikes.
With the shortage of fuel, most people no longer have the luxury of being able to travel by car. Some get around by donkey carts, while most are forced to walk. Donkeys, Gazans joke, have been more useful than most governments and international actors.
My family considers themselves lucky that their home is still standing, even if it is overcrowded with relatives. Most Gazans have been displaced multiple times, and now hundreds of thousands live in tent camps, where they are forced to use communal toilets and showers, and construct their own shelters — a skill that many learn out of necessity.
Tents are made from whatever materials are available: wood, nylon, cloth, or the remains of parachutes from airdropped aid. Right now, in the heat of summer, the tents feel like an oven; during the cold winter months, they did little to protect from the elements.
Burying new martyrs in old graves
One of the most difficult moments during the last 10 months was when my father passed away in May. He had dealt with chronic blood sugar and blood pressure problems, and had suffered multiple strokes — which had recently led him to be diagnosed with Dejerine Roussy syndrome. I was only able to send him the necessary medicine via an international delegation that entered Gaza.
My father felt his time was coming to an end, and he refused to leave Gaza, eventually suffering a brain stroke that took his life. I spent long hours on the phone trying to help save his life, but with the lack of medicine in the Strip, we were ultimately unsuccessful.
Sadly, my father’s case was not unique among the thousands of chronically or terminally ill Palestinians in Gaza, who have long struggled to access proper care under the Israeli blockade. Many cancer patients, in particular, have lost their lives over the years waiting for Israeli permits to leave the Strip. Some patients receive permits for one chemotherapy session, but no follow ups. The military has also blackmailed cancer patients, offering medical permits only if they agree to collaborate with Israeli intelligence.
In November, the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital in Gaza City, which had been the Strip’s main cancer treatment center since it opened in 2017, ran out of fuel and stopped functioning. The Israeli army subsequently occupied the facility and used it as a base.
“The war and the siege are especially difficult for patients like us who cannot receive treatment or necessary medical imaging, and there is no one to follow up on our condition,” Najwa Abu Yousef, my 58-year-old neighbor who is a cancer patient, told me. “We survive by eating the canned goods that come as aid, but these are unhealthy and people like me, who are sick, should not be eating them. My health condition has severely deteriorated, and since October I’ve lost consciousness twice — both for a period of 10 to 15 minutes — due to my illness and weak immune system.”
Ahmed Masoud, auteur en theatermaker
De romans en theaterstukken van Ahmed Masoud zijn allemaal gesitueerd in Gaza. Ook al woont hij er zelf niet meer, hij komt er nog vaak en ziet de Gazastrook als zijn biotoop. ‘Zoals Ruiz Zafon alleen maar schreef over Barcelona, schrijf ik alleen over Gaza’, zei hij onlangs in een online interview. De smalle straatjes in de vluchtelingenkampen, de kleine huizen bevolkt met grote families, de cafeetjes met terrassen aan zee, de ruïnes en ingestorte panden, de scholen en universiteiten, ze vormen allemaal het decor van zijn boeken en bepalen de couleur locale van zijn verhalen. ‘Maar op dit moment schrijf ik niet’, zei hij in datzelfde interview, ‘Want wat nu in mijn regio gebeurt en de berichten die ik dagelijks ontvang, zijn zo aangrijpend dat ik aan niets anders kan denken.’


Tijdens het festival Arabische Literatuur in Den Haag begin december werd zijn toneelstuk The Shroud Maker opgevoerd als leesvoorstelling ondersteund met live muziek. Hoofdpersoon van dit stuk is Hajja Souad, een 84 jarige Palestijnse vrouw die haar brood verdient met het maken van lijkwaden. Ze woont in het Jabaliya vluchtelingenkamp, dat nu grotendeels is ontvolkt, belegerd en gebombardeerd door Israelische troepen. Ook in het verleden was het vaak doelwit van aanvallen. Oorlog en verwoesting zijn constanten in het leven van deze leverancier van lijkwaden maar ze is een overlever mede dankzij haar sarcasme en zwarte humor. ‘Only in Gaza’ zegt ze herhaaldelijk als ze vertelt over de omstandigheden waarin ze moet werken. En ze neemt geen blad voor de mond als ze vertelt over het tekort aan geld en grondstoffen, de tunnel-economie, de vrouwen die steeds vaker een hoofddoek dragen en het grote aantal kinderen dat in Gaza geboren wordt.


Haja Souad heeft echter ook een andere, gevoelige kant en een veelbewogen levensverhaal. Dat begint in Jeruzalem, waar ze tijdens het Brits Mandaat in huis werd genomen door de vrouw van de Engelse gouverneur, en loopt via vluchtelingenkampen, eerst in de Westbank en later in Gaza. Tijdens haar vlucht uit Jeruzalem vindt ze een kind dat is achtergelaten en adopteert dat. Zo wordt ze gelijktijdig wees, vluchteling, maagd en moeder. Haar zoon en later haar kleinzoon brengen haar geluk maar ook groot verdriet en weerspiegelen hoe in Gaza trauma’s overgaan van generatie op generatie.
Fragment uit The Shroud Maker:
… Four years ago, I could hardly keep up with the demand. I ended up selling yards and yards of cheap crap in customers too grief-stricken to know the difference. ‘Oh yes, finest organic Palestinian muslin, handwoven in Gaza by virgins from the purest East Indies cotton (fairly traded, of course) that‘ll be a thousand shekels. So sorry for your loss.’
It’s what I do. I make money when people die. But now and again, I make a signature shroud just for me. Like this one I am making now, inspiration descends, you hit a run of lucky stitches and you end up with a really pukka, grade A, twenty-four-carat burial garment and you think, Hamdullah, it’s all been worthwhile: the Nakba, the Occupation, the Siege – everything. Just for this: a shroud to make you proud.
Tonight may be the night to finally wear it. I can almost hear the Israeli tanks moving across the border. I better be ready for their royal arrival. They’re coming to destroy some smugglers’ tunnels which they apparently forgot to bomb four years ago. And they’ve chosen to do it today. Om my birthday! Eighty-four years young today! How kind of them to provide some genuine fireworks to mark the occasion – F16 rockets no less!
A burial shroud is like your wedding dress and christening robe rolled into one. .. A shroud is an once-in-a-lifetime investment, you only wear it once, so you’d better make sure it fits comfortably. Your last opportunity to make a good impression – last pose for posterity, so don’t scrimp on the fabric. You can’t take it with you, so why not go out looking like a million dollars?
Listen habibi, we are all going to die. Allah has provided two guarantees for this – the Angel of Death and the Israelis and before you ask this is not pure cotton, hence the lower price tag. In fact it is not cotton at all, it’s polyester.
How are we supposed to get cotton in Gaza? Since the fucking Egyptians destroyed the tunnels, there’s barely a scrap to be had. But I have my ways. I buy it from old Abu Shihada, down in the old market in Gaza City, another indefatigable octogenarian like me, and he gets it through Refaat, the mechanic on Salah Eddin Street. Cotton from a mechanic, eh? Only in Gaza.
Hello, you’ve reached Hajja Souad, Shroud Manufacturers & Suppliers. Due to unprecedented demands on our services all of our lines are currently busy, but your call is important to us. If you’d like to place an advance order press 1, for prices and special offers press 2, and if you’re the Israeli army press any button – I don’t give a shit and you can stick it up your arse.
In zijn romans Vanished. The mysterious disappearance of Mustafa Ouda (2015) en Come what may (2022) is Masoud echt een chroniqueur van gewone mensen met uitzonderlijke levens. ‘Vanished’ is opgezet als een thriller, ‘Come what may’ als een detective. De schrijver maakt de spanningen en conflicten tussen buren, familieleden en vrienden invoelbaar. Zij wonen dicht op elkaar en hebben voortdurend te maken met geweld en intimidatie. Maar ook schildert hij de loyaliteit en solidariteit tussen mensen en de veerkracht om in bizarre omstandigheden overeind te blijven.


Fragment uit Vanished:
“Yes, of course I will look after you,” my masked companion said. “You will have to wear that scarf if you want to leave. However, you cannot go anywhere near your home, masked or not. Do you understand?” He continued to give me instructions as Um Marwan disappeared. There was only one windowless room in the house where we could turn a light on, the rest had to stay dark. Food could only be cooked during the day, so that the light from the cooker wouldn’t show in the dark. Tea or coffee could be made in the daylight and saved in two large flasks. There was no heating and fire was not allowed; we should have to make do with the plentiful of blankets they had. There was a small portable Sony radio player that had to be kept low. The maximum volume allowed was marked clearly with a small piece of blue tape. I sat there listening to all instructions, trying to take them all in. Finally, he asked if I had any questions. “Where are we?” “I will show you in the morning. No doubt you will recognise where you are,” he said as he took his pistol apart and began to clean it with a cloth. “Do you know how to use this?” “No, we don’t study weapon handling at school.”
He laughed loudly at this, which made me nervous. He had a distinctive laugh and a high-pitched voice that made him sound like one of these evil jinns from the One Thousand and One Nights.
“Well, consider this school from now on. You will not be able to go to classes anymore. In fact, you will not be able to go anywhere the Israelis might look for you.”
Atef Abu Saif, dagboekschrijver en politicus
Atef Abu Saif is minister van Cultuur en opsteller van het rapport over de culturele schade in Gaza (dat hierboven al vermeld werd). Daarnaast is hij schrijver. Tijdens de oorlog van 2014 hield hij een dagboek bij dat later werd gepubliceerd: The Drone Eats with Me. Dat doet hij ook nu. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/06/gaza-diary-war-truce-palestinian-authority
Hoewel de huidige oorlog veel verschrikkelijker is dan toen, geeft zijn dagboek van 2014 een indringend beeld hoe mensen in onmenselijke omstandigheden op de been blijven, wat hen helpt en hoe ze ook elkaar helpen. Zo schrijft Abu Saif over vaste routines die hem steun geven, over de gesprekken met zijn vrienden en over de zorg voor zijn kinderen.



Hier een gedeelte uit het Oorlogsdagboek:
In een oorlog wen je jezelf aan nieuwe routines en maak je nieuwe tradities. Een routine die anders misschien saai zou zijn maakt in deze omstandigheden het leven draaglijk. Ook al ben je omgeven door geweld en gevaar, een eenvoudig ritueel kan helpen om te ontkomen aan de kwelling van alleen maar zitten en wachten tot het onvoorspelbare gebeurt. Het geeft je houvast. Als je in een voortdurende staat van onzekerheid bent wordt angst deel van elk aspect van je leven: het tikken van de klok, de onverwachte klop op de deur, het rode balkje onderaan je tv scherm: ‘Laatste Nieuws’, het geluid van je mobiele telefoon, het bezoek van een buurman, het signaal van je telefoon dat je een nieuw bericht ontvangen hebt. Midden in die draaikolk van nieuws die je zenuwachtig en in de war maakt, moet je je eigen ordening aanbrengen. Je moet zorgen dat je erboven blijft staan, voorbereid bent op wat komt. Je wordt als een schildwacht die voortdurend alert is en berekend op het onverwachte. Het is een merkwaardige paradox. Je komt erachter dat je niets anders kunt bewaken dan jezelf, je staart in je eigen gedachten en merkt dat je eigen geest een microkosmos is van de huiveringwekkende, kolkende buitenwereld. Je geeft jezelf de opdracht om die microkosmos te kalmeren en op orde te brengen want op de chaos van buiten heb je geen invloed. In plaats van ten onder te gaan in het labyrint van het onverwachte, leg je jezelf herhaling op en zorg je ervoor dat elke dag zoveel mogelijk lijkt op de vorige. Voor mij zijn de avonden het beste moment om die orde te scheppen. Als de zon is ondergegaan in de zee en ik het vasten heb gebroken, loop ik naar het hart van het Jabaliyya Kamp en bezoek het huis van mijn vriend Wafi waar ik in de woonkamer elke dag dezelfde drie vrienden ontmoet: Faraj, Abu Aseel en Wafi, gezeten in dezelfde stoelen als de avond ervoor. Faraj en Wafi ken ik al van jongs af aan. We zijn opgegroeid in dezelfde straat en gingen samen naar school. Abu Aseel is de eigenaar van een van de internetwinkels waar ik vaak te vinden ben. Wafi’s huis is klein en smal, te smal om als doel te dienen voor een drone bestuurder. Vakkundig maakt Wafi de waterpijp klaar voor gebruik en serveert even later glaasjes sap. We bespreken dezelfde onderwerpen en verhalen als de avond ervoor. Iedereen deelt zijn angsten en zorgen. En net als de avond daarvoor veranderen die angsten, meningen en theorieën uiteindelijk in grappen en komische verhalen. Na een uur verplaatsen we ons naar het huis van Faraj even verderop, om naar zijn grote televisiescherm te kijken. We drinken koffie en bespreken wat we hebben gehoord. Als er geen elektriciteit is, verbindt Faraj de stroomdraad met een kabel van het internet café en kijken we alsnog. Dat zijn mijn rituelen. Ik moet eraan vasthouden.
*Meer fragmenten uit dit Oorlogsdagboek op VerhalenPost: www.verhalenpost.org
Atef Abu Saif is ook de samensteller van The Book of Gaza. A City in Short Fiction, een verhalenbundel uit 2014 die inzoomt op menselijke ervaringen in benarde omstandigheden. We maken kennis met personages die verlangen naar meer bewegingsruimte en toekomstmogelijkheden en die moeten omgaan met teleurstelling en verdriet. In deze bundel ook veel aandacht voor het lot van vrouwen, bijvoorbeeld als ze verliefd worden of een gezin stichten.
Nayrouz Qarmout, schrijver en activist voor vrouwenrechten
Een van de verhalen uit The Book of Gaza werd de basis voor een andere bundel (vertaald in het Nederlands): De Zeemantel en andere verhalen, van de jonge schrijfster Nayrouz Qarmout. Ook zij is een belangrijke getuige van Gaza omdat zij van binnenuit vertelt hoe het leven van jonge vrouwen en kinderen eruit ziet. Zij heeft oog voor hun dromen en verlangens en hun botsing met de harde, soms conservatieve en patriarchale samenleving in Gaza.


Fragment uit het verhaal De Zeemantel:
Haar vader kon niet zwemmen. Hij was wat aan het pootjebaden, vertrouwde op zijn lengte om niet kopje onder te gaan. Hij beende moeizaam door het water maar keerde al snel terug naar het strand. Daar zat hij zo diep in gedachten verzonken over het water te staren dat iedereen wist dat hij was weggedreven naar een zee die ver verwijderd was van de zee die voor hen lag. Haar moeder was druk bezig met het inrichten van de tent en hield ondertussen de salade die ze net uit haar tas had gehaald nauwlettend in de gaten, bang dat die oneetbaar zou worden door de zanderige bries. Ze zette alles klaar voor hun feestelijke lunch en dekte de tafel net zoals thuis. Pas toen ze ging zitten besefte ze hoe moe ze was. Haar dochter zat wat stilletjes achteraf haar familie te observeren.
En daar had je oma, in haar geborduurde jurk die wapperde in de wind. Ze grinnikte onafgebroken, een oude sigaret bungelde in haar mond. Al rokend en puffend zong ze weemoedige volksliedjes van vroeger. Af en toe wierp ze een zijdelingse blik op haar chagrijnige kleindochter. ‘Ga lekker zwemmen, schat. Als ik kon, zou ik met je meegaan.’ ‘In mijn eentje?’ ‘Je hebt toch benen?’ ‘Ja.’ ‘Je moet nu gaan, voordat het te fris wordt.’ ‘Oké, ik ga al.’ Haar zussen waren giechelend en met veelbetekenende knipogen hun verschillende kennissen aan het bespreken. ‘God vergeef ons al die kletspraatjes, we hebben gewoon een beetje lol!’ riepen ze spontaan uit na elke roddelronde. Glimlachend om de woorden van haar zussen en haar grootmoeder stond ze stilletjes op en liep naar de zee. Ze kwam langs haar broers, die vis grilden op de barbecue, en ving flarden van hun luide discussie op, die heen en weer sprong tussen politiek, herinneringen aan de oorlog en de Intifada, en spottende opmerkingen over hun huidige situatie. Damp en as van de waterpijp dansten samen met hun gelach in de lucht. Niemand merkte haar op toen ze door de rook liep. Het was alsof de zee haar had betoverd, waardoor ze onzichtbaar was voor haar omgeving en gedragen werd als een bruid op haar trouwdag.
Heba Hayek, schrijver en activist
Heba Hayek is een andere vrouwelijke getuige van Gaza. Haar bundel Sambac beneath unlikely skies kwam uit in 2021 en bevat korte schetsen: jeugdherinneringen en ervaringen van het leven in ballingschap. Hayek schrijft met veel liefde, gevoel en aandacht voor details. Ze combineert haar verhalen met een speellijst met nummers uit de westerse en oosterse muziekcultuur. Bij elk verhaal staat een bijpassend lied.

Fragment uit het verhaal Ask me anything (Song: BiGSaM Feat. DaMoJaNad ‘Ya Gamar’)
We were never trained for emergencies at school. We just knew what to do. We would sit on the floor under our tables each time we heard recurrent loud explosions – ignore the first two, exchange a few nervous looks, and then, in one swift move, we’d all be in our places by the third. That consistency was comforting. The fact that we had survived the first two was a good enough sign that it’d be worth shielding ourselves from the rest. In an attempt at reassurance, our teacher would remind the class: ‘The one you hear isn’t the one that kills you.’ On particularly bad days, she’d allow us to choose our bench partners. ‘We should always sit at the table in the middle of the classroom,’ Lubna observed. ‘This way, we’ll all be safe if the bombs fall on either side of the classroom.’ ‘What if they come through the ceiling?’ ‘They don’t. I don’t think that’s possible.’ Lubna said things very convincingly, but sometimes she was really bullshitting me. Even then, her intentions were always to make me feel better.’Yeah, I don’t think their weapons are strong enough to go through the ceiling…’ I commented, in what was half a statement half a question. ‘Totally’, Lubna replied.
Most days. We would spend around ten minutes under the tables until local radios confirmed what was going on. It was always a disappointment if classes resumed, but only because we never let ourselves consider the other outcome. Being sent home, while providing the immediate pleasure of missing school, was never a good sign. Those ten minutes were ours. They felt sacred – as if bombs couldn’t reach or interrupt us, as if the whole world, including the European soldier controlling the warplanes from an office, had stopped and were counting the seconds with us. We tried creating routines that would help us adapt. Most girls cross-clapped or told riddles. Some would space out in the dusty light that burst through the windows – light that possessed all of the world, and all of its possibilities.
Mosab Abu Toha, schrijver en bibliothecaris
De Gazaan Mosab Abu Toha heeft zich jarenlang ingezet om zijn liefde voor literatuur en cultuur om te zetten in tastbare projecten. Als student Engelse literatuur merkte hij dat bibliotheken en boekhandels schaars waren in Gaza en bovendien regelmatig werden verwoest of gesloten. Daarom besloot hij zelf een openbare bibliotheek op te zetten. Hij schreef allerlei universiteiten, docenten (onder andere Noam Chomsky) en ngo’s aan met de vraag boeken op te sturen en met behulp van al die donaties kon hij in 2017 The Edward Said Public Library openen. Later volgden meer vestigingen ook met collecties voor kinderen. Het valt te vrezen dat van deze bibliotheken niets over is. Abu Toha zelf werd onlangs gearresteerd toen hij met zijn gezin en vele andere wanhopige Palestijnen de grenspost bij Rafah probeerde te passeren. Inmiddels is hij weer vrij en in ballingschap in Cairo. Abu Toha schrijft prachtige poëzie die is gepubliceerd op online platforms en gebundeld onder de titel Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza (2022, City Lights).


Twee gedichten van Mosab Abu Toha:
Untitled
A father wakes up at night, sees
the random colors on the walls
drawn by his four year old son.
But he’s dead after an airstrike.
The colors are about 4 feet high.
Next year, they would be 5 or 6.
But the painter is dead and the
museum has no new
paintings to show.
What Is Home? – eerder gepubliceerd op www.LitHub.com:
What is home:
It is the shade of trees on my way to school before they were uprooted.
It is my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding photo before the walls crumbled.
It is my uncle’s prayer rug, where dozens of ants slept on wintry nights, before it was looted and put in a museum.
It is the oven my mother used to bake bread and roast chicken before a bomb reduced our house to ashes.
It is the café where I watched football matches and played –
My child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold all of these?
Nederlandse vertaling – door Evelien Klijweg
Wat is thuis?
Het is de schaduw van de bomen op mijn weg naar school voordat ze ontworteld werden.
Het is de zwart-witte trouwfoto van mijn grootouders voordat de muren afbrokkelden.
Het is het gebedskleed van mijn oom, waarop tijdens winterse nachten tientallen mieren sliepen, voordat het geplunderd werd en in een museum terecht kwam.
Het is de oven die mijn moeder gebruikte om brood te bakken en kip te braden voordat een bom ons huis tot as reduceerde.
Het is het café waar ik naar voetbal wedstrijden keek en speelde –
Mijn kind onderbreekt me: kan een woord met vijf letters dit allemaal omvatten?
Drie gedichten uit: Things You May Find Hidden in my Ear. Poems from Gaza. Mosab Abu Toha (City Light Books, 2022)
Things you may find hidden in my ear
I
When you open my ear, touch it gently.
My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.
Her voice is the echo that helps me recover equilibrium
When I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.
You may encounter songs in Arabic
Poems in English I recite to myself,
Or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.
When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my ear.
Put them back in order, as you would do with the books on your shelf.
II
The drone’s buzzing sound,
The roar of an F-16,
The screams of bombs falling on houses,
On fields, and on bodies,
Of rockets flying away-
Rid my tiny ear canal of them all.
Spray the perfume of your smiles on the incision.
Inject the song of life into my veins to wake me up.
Gently beat the drum so my mind may dance,
With yours,
My doctor, day and night.

Everyday meals during wars
In previous wars, our neighbours would share meals with us, in our basement.
My brother would start a fire in the old brazier,
and I would prepare tea and put the kettle on the burning coals.
There were truces every couple of days. My father could go out
and check on the hens and ducks in their coops. My mother
would climb the ladder to the roof to put water in bowls
for the sparrows and pigeons.
Men would be taken to jails and concentration camps. They could
see those who were fighting and killing them and their families.
Nowadays, we don’t see those who take everything beautiful away from us.
We don’t even see our shadows during the day.
The F-16s swallow the light from the sun, casting the shadows
Of their fat bellies on us, dead or alive.
Bombs punch the houses, knock them down, smash the fridges and the dishes.
A house turns into a stew of concrete-and-blood.
We no longer share meals with the neighbours.

Eind 2024 kwam een nieuwe bundel van hem uit: Forest of Noise (Knopf, New York, 2024).
Hieronder een selectie uit deze bundel.
Every child in Gaza is me.
Every father and mother is me.
Every house is my heart.
Every tree is my leg.
Every plant is my arm.
Every flower is my eye.
Every hole in the earth
Is my wound.
No Art
You know everything will come to an end:
The sugar, the tea, the dried sage,
The water.
Just go to the market and restock.
Even your shadow will abandon you
When there is no light.
So just keep things that require only you:
The book of poems that only you can decipher
The blank map of a country
whose cities and villages only you can recognize.
I’ve personally lost three friends to war,
A city to darkness and a language to fear.
This was not easy to survive,
But survival proved necessary to master.
But of all things
Losing the only photo of my grandfather
Under the rubble of my house
was a real disaster.
True or False: A Test by a Gazan Child
To the West
1. Palestine was empty of people before 1948.
2. Gazans can travel whenever they wish.
3. A father in Gaza can afford to take his child to a hospital and even to pay for a grave if his child is dead.
4. Gaza has an airport but no a seaport.
5. All people in Gaza come originally from Gaza.
6. If dolphins do not show up near the shore, Gaza’s children ask their parents to sail them to the sea to meet the lazy dolphins.
7. Every day one can hear airliners crossing the sky over Gaza.
8. Parents take their children to parks every month.
9. Schools in Gaza are open for students to learn, not shelter in.
10. People in the West Bank and Gaza can invite each other over for a meal.
11. Our aunt and her family in Jordan can visit us in Gaza, or we can visit them.
12. The only things that fall from the sky in Gaza are rain and bird poop.
Note: When you finish with answering the questions, hand the test to any Palestinian child and they will be able to grade you.
Rescue Plane
I wish I had a rescue plane
To fly over Gaza
To drop wheat flour and tea bags,
Tomatoes and cucumbers,
To remove the rubble of the houses,
To retrieve the corpses of my loved ones.
I wish for a second rescue plane
To drop flowers for children-
The ones still alive, to plant
on the graves of their parents and siblings
in the streets or schoolyards.
The wish behind the wish?
I wish there were no planes at all.
I wish there were no war.
I wish we never had to wish.
Sunrise in Palestine
The smoke of bombs
dropped from F-16s
has covered the city’s sky.
Fighters smuggle the sunlight
through tunnels
beneath our houses.
For a Moment
Her small body rides in my arms
As I run to the hospital.
There is no electricity
And the inner hallways are
A forest lined with cots.
The girl I carry
is dead,
I know that.
The pressure of the explosion
Tore apart her thin veins.
I know she is dead,
But everyone who sees us
runs after us.
You are alive
For a moment, when living people
run after you.
Hossam Madhoun, theatermaker
Hossam Madhoun is medeoprichter van Gaza’s Theatre for Everybody, dat – zoals de naam al zegt – producties wil maken die aantrekkelijk zijn voor een breed publiek. Vanwege de erbarmelijke omstandigheden in Gaza lukt dat nu niet meer. Daarom werkt Madhoun nu samen met Jamal Al Rozzi aan dramatherapie voor getraumatiseerde kinderen.

Ook hij schrijft een dagboek over zijn ervaringen en gevoelens. Hier twee fragmenten.
Disabled Words
What can words do when you feel they are unable to describe, explain, to express a feeling or an event?
It is almost 10 days now without writing anything. There are many things I want to talk about but words are disabled, words will not reflect what I see, what I feel, what I want to tell about.
Yesterday I was at the clinic waiting for my colleagues, the counsellors, to hand over to them their duties and distribute them to the shelter/schools to provide some psychological support for the children. One of them was not there. I asked about him. Someone told me that something happened: Two people they host were killed in a bombing. The person we were talking about, I know his uncle. His uncle is my friend and I know that he took refuge at their home. I panicked. I finished with my colleagues and went there fast to see my friend and find out what has happened. I arrived. My friend and my colleague were there sitting outside the house. Their faces were talking. Their faces said everything. Their faces told me that something terrible had happened.
My friend told me what happened. His daughter’s husband and his grandson were killed. They were taking refuge at the same home but yesterday his daughter’s husband went to see his mother in another home with his extended family. He took his oldest son, Waseem, a six-year-old boy.
The home, a building of four floors hosting 37 people was bombed. They died. They all died; men, women, boys, girls are dead, all of them.
While he was speaking, his daughter, the one I have known since she was seven years old was not far away. She was hanging the clothes of her dead child on the laundry line, as if nothing had happened. She washed the clothes of her dead son and she put them out to dry in the sun so when he came back he could put them on.
I looked at her and I looked for the words that would explain what she feels, what she thinks. I did not find the words. What words can describe this? Damn it, where are the words? Why don’t words help? Words are weak. Words are disabled. Words are crippled. No words can explain what she feels or thinks. She lost her husband and her six-year-old son. The son was found and buried, and the husband was still under the rubble with another 14 out of the 37.
I hate words. It makes me feel helpless, makes me feel stupid even to think of talking with words about this.
And while we talk they mention Mahmoud, Mahmoud, my friend. He is the uncle of the husband. He took refuge at the big family home with his wife and children, his brother and wife and children and their parents. They were all there. They all died.
No! Please, no! Not Mahmoud! No, he can’t be dead. I can’t accept this. Mahmoud did not die. Mahmoud is alive. Please tell me he is not dead. Please.
I ran into him in Nuseirat market three days ago. We hugged, we talked, we laughed. You can’t meet Mahmoud and not laugh. He looks so good, so smart, well dressed, always with shaved face and shaved head, and a big smile never leaves his face for a single minute. His beautiful smile fills the air with joy and happiness. He is the one who makes everybody feel good and relaxed. Mahmoud’s smile opens all the windows for hope and comfort. His heart is so big, bigger than the world itself. He can take all the world in his heart. He is the one who is always available to help, to support, to solve problems, to be beside people, people that he knows or people that he never met before, he is just available for anyone, as if God created him for others. He can’t die. Oh God, Mahmoud, my friend. Why? Why? Why?
After writing this about Mahmoud I feel so bad, very bad. All these words are nothing. It tells nothing about my friend. It makes him small and he is much more. Words are cursed. Words are weak. Words are helpless. No words can tell what I feel now. Words won’t say what I want to say about Mahmoud.
November 24, 2023
Untold Story from Olympus
While sitting bored on his throne at the top of Olympus, Zeus ran his fingers through his long beard, looking down at Earth. There were lights in many places on Earth; there was darkness in many places as well. But he noticed a spot of light shining more than any other place. It was not artificial light; it was not sunlight, nor moon or starlight. He looked closer. It is coming from there, from a tiny place on the Mediterranean, a place called Gaza. He wonders, what is shining there? There should be darkness in that place so what is shining?
Lucifer was not far and he heard the wonderings of Zeus. He said in his deep, low voice — these are the children and women of Gaza. They always shine. How does the God of Gods not know that?!
Zeus, frustrated that he did not know, said: “I want some of them here. Whoever can bring some of them now will be rewarded.”
Lucifer said: “Only the Army of the Dead can bring you these children and women.”
Zeus was shaken, “No! Not this army! They are brutal. They are gruesome, fierce, horrifying, inexorable, merciless, hideous.”
Lucifer: “This is the only army that can make your wish come true.”
Other Gods: “Please, no, not this army. Not the Army of the Dead. Take any other army. Send the Amazons, they are good and strong. Send the Trojan army or send any one of us and we will bring them to you. Send Mars, Neptune or Hera. Send Hercules or Axel but not this army.”
Zeus, as usual, acts as he always acts. He acts selfishly. His will is an order, his dreams must come true, and his wish must be met. Zeus with his loud voice, holding high his lightning rod to spread fear among the other Gods, said: “Silence. No comment. No one speak. Let it be. Send the Army of the Dead. Get me some children and some women from that Gaza. My desire is a demand and my demands are orders. Send the Army of the Dead now.”
All the Gods looked angrily at Lucifer. They wanted to kill him. But he is protected by the God of Gods. Lucifer said: “Lord, you know that the Army of the Dead has demands too.”
Zeus: “What demands?”
Lucifer: “No one should ask or question the means they will use to get you the children and women and no one can ask them to stop until they stop. Do you swear to do this?”
Zeus: “This is an Oath of Zeus, the God of all Gods.”
The Army of the Dead was waiting with anxiety and joy, waiting for Lucifer to give them the good news. He was not late, he arrived with the happy news. Lucifer said in his deep voice: “Go, my friends, put the Palestinian to the sword. You are free, with no questioning, don’t stop until you quench your thirst with their blood.”
The Army of the Dead did not wait until he finished his speech. They launched their heavy hammers, their swords and spheres, their daggers and knives into the bodies of the Palestinian children and women. Palestinian men were there, helpless, unable to do anything but to weep in pain and sorrow. Just like Prometheus in his chains. Hundreds and hundreds of children and women ascended to the Throne Hall of Zeus. Group after group.
Zeus looks at them. They are not shining anymore, they have lost their beauty, they are not as he saw them from the top of Olympus. They are arriving in pieces, some are beheaded, some are without arms or legs, some are cut in half. Zeus starts to get frustrated, this is not what he wanted.
The Gods said with one voice: “Yes, this is what you wanted.”
Zeus: “I asked for some, for a few children and women. Some means three to four, ten but not tens, not hundreds, not thousands.” All the Gods: “You get what you ask for.”
Zeus: “Why do they slaughter their men? Why do they destroy their homes? Why do they cut their trees down? Why do they burn their fields? Why do they kill their cattle? Why do they deprive them of food and water? Why?” All the Gods: “You get what you ask for.”
He called for Lucifer but Lucifer had disappeared. Lucifer hid among the Army of the Dead. Zeus became angry. He shouted “Enough.” But his loud voice was covered by the screams of the Palestinians and the roars of the Army of the Dead. Children and women continued ascending with no light, with no shine, ascending dead. The Throne Hall started to be filled with their bodies. The huge hall, which could contain all the Gods, half-Gods, their wives and children and even their servants, became full — completely full up to the ceiling with piles of bodies. Thousands of Palestinian children, thousands of Palestinian women and thousands of Palestinian men.
Zeus on his throne was astonished, speechless, unable to break his oath. And while all the Gods were watching him sadly, helplessly, they saw something they had never seen before. They saw Zeus with tears in his eyes. Tears of regret. Tears of sorrow, tears of weakness. The God of all Gods is crying for the Gaza bloodshed and yet the Army of the Dead continues putting the sword into the soft flesh of Palestinian children and women.
Drie dagboekfragment van Hossam Madhoum: Messages from Gaza Now. Deze fragmenten zijn ook opgenomen in Daybreak in Gaza. Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture. Mahmoud Muna & Matthew Teller (eds). (Saqi, 2024)
Mother Courage (Not Bertolt Brecht)
By the wall of the school, the shelter, many sellers lay out their small amount of merchandise on a small, old, wooden table, or a cardboard box, or even on a plastic sheet on the ground. Small quantities of cans of meat, cans of tuna, cans of beans, cigarettes, sugar, rice. Some have quantities worth $200 and others, all their merchandise is worth no more than $30. Trying to make enough profit to feed themselves for a day or two.
Among them a lady, a middle-aged woman with a veil completely covering most of her hair, is busy cooking bread in an oven made of mud. A line of people standing to buy a piece of bread or two or whatever. Calling to her seven or eight-year-old son from time to time to feed the fire under the oven with some bits of wood — a normal scene in Gaza, mainly around the shelter-schools.
I took my place in the line to buy some bread, when a journalist approached the lady asking her for an interview. Without looking at him she said, “You can see that I’m busy.” The journalist was patient and polite. He asked if he could film her as part of the market and life in the shelters. She shrugged with a sense of not caring if he did or didn’t. The reporter made a gesture to the cameraman to start filming.
The journalist: “Have you been doing this for a long time?”
The woman: “Cooking bread? One month.”
Journalist: “You built the mud oven?”
The woman: “No, I bought it from someone who built it but could not work on it. He was too old for this work.”
Journalist: “Are you from here? I mean Nuseirat Camp?”
The woman (while working, putting a piece of dough in the oven, turning it over from time to time using a wooden stick): “No. Not from here.” (To a customer) “I haven’t change for a hundred shekels. Find some change and come back.”
Journalist: “Where did you come from?”
The woman: “From many places since the 12th of October.”
Journalist: “Like where?”
The woman: “From Beit Hanoun. When they started bombing, my eldest son and father-in-law were killed. The bombing was targeting a neighbors’ home. They were all killed.” She stopped talking and continued her work. The journalist did not rush her. She raised her head again, looked at the journalist for a second, then turned back to the oven and continued talking.
“We moved to my family home in Shati Camp, ‘Beach Camp,’ I was at the market with this little son, when we heard a huge explosion from an air strike. I went home with some vegetables. They bombed a nearby home and my parents and my husband were killed. They were all under the rubble. I recognized my husband from his feet that appeared out of the rubble. He was missing a toe; he lost it in a work accident in Israel two years ago. He used to work in construction. When the accident happened, his boss did not do anything for him, he sent him home and never allowed him to work again. Of course, no compensation. In Israel they don’t register Palestinian workers as a legal workforce, so no one can claim any compensation. They just use us as cheap labor, that’s all. My poor husband did not rest until he died.” (To her little son) “Enough wood, we’re almost finished. (To a customer) “This will cost you four shekels.” She looked at the journalist. He was still there holding the mic towards her, the cameraman focused on her.
The woman: “So, we moved to Zahra City, to my sister who is married and lives there. They followed us with the bombing. My daughter and my mother in-law were killed. We came here; myself and this little boy, my sister’s son and my injured sister. We are at this school.” She pointed at the school behind her. Journalist: “How do you manage? Does UNRWA distribute food at the school?”
The woman: “Yes. They come every few days, give each family some cans of food, some biscuits, some soap, food barely enough for one day. Anyway, we are still alive.”
Journalist: “What about water? Hygiene? Toilet?”
The woman: “This is another story. I wake up at four in the morning to join the queue for the toilet. At this time there will be a line of seven to 15 people. If I’m late, I’ll find a line of 50 or 60. I take my injured sister, her daughter, and my little son. We do our business there and go back to sleep again. They distribute mineral water bottles. I don’t use them. I sell them to get some money. Here we are surviving.”
Journalist: “What do other women do?”
The woman: “Other women? Yes, there was a pregnant woman, we helped her to give birth inside the classroom. She was lucky, her delivery went smoothly, she did not need a hospital. We care for each other in our classroom. Not like in other classes, all day you hear screaming, shouting, cursing, disputes. We are lucky. They look after my sister and her two-year-old daughter when I’m out.”
Journalist: “How do you get the wood for your oven?”
The woman: “It was easy in the beginning. I collected bits of wood from the streets, from the nearby olive orchards. Then I started to buy it from wood sellers. It was 1.2 shekels/kilo to begin with and then the price rose, like all prices, now it is three shekels/kilo. Everyone is using fire now as there is no cooking gas or fuel. Scarcity in everything.” The woman started to clear up, put out the fire, collect the bits of wood which were not burnt yet, and covered the oven with a piece of material. She carried her son and went towards the school. The cameraman followed her with his camera lens until she disappeared inside the school.
Fear, Loneliness
Since the start of this brutal massacre and killing of the Gazan people, I was always afraid. The kind of fear that you think you control by caring for your family, by keeping busy, securing their needs, by following up on the work of my colleagues, the counsellors and social workers at the shelters, by writing my diaries and sharing them with friends around the world. The kind of fear that you keep in and ignore, although all reasons for fear and panic are there — the random bombing, shelling, shooting, destruction, the number of people killed and injured reaching more than 27,000 killed and more than 54,000 injured. Yet I keep it deep inside.
Since yesterday my feelings are different. My fear is different. Since the Israeli army ordered people in Bureij Camp and part of Nuseirat Camp, where I am displaced, to leave, I don’t feel the same. I could have been killed before, at any minute, by any of these bombardments, yet now I feel it coming towards me and my family. There are only three of my friends from Gaza City displaced to Bureij and Nuseirat. The three of them are in the areas ordered to evacuate and leave. Yesterday I tried to reach them by mobile. Did not work. I walked to one of them. He was not there. It was too late to walk to the others — one in Bureij and the other in Nuseirat near Bureij, the Salahaldeen Road separating them. Bureij, east of Salahaldeen, borders Israel, and Nuseirat is west of it. Today I went to Al Awda Hospital. The first message was from my friend and colleague, Mohammed:
Dear Hossam,
I am preparing to leave with my family for Rafah. I am now busy searching for materials to build a tent there in Rafah. I don’t know when we will communicate or meet again. I hope soon.
Stay safe until then, Mohammed.
I don’t know why after reading this message, the feeling of fear came up to the surface and overrode my ability to tolerate it. I could not stay. I thought about going to Bureij to check on my friend Eyad. Bombing and heavy targeting started last night. I rejected the idea, I felt like a coward.
Then I thought about Maher. He is in Nuseirat. I will go. I walked two kilometres, arrived to find there are no cars in front of his home. It’s a building of three floors. Up until yesterday it was hosting more than 80 people. Maher’s brother, the homeowner, was there, taking things from the house and loading them into a mini-bus. Mattresses, blankets, bread, flour, suitcases, bags …
“What’s up?” I said. “We’re leaving.”
“Where’s Maher?” “He left yesterday with his family, they all left, myself and my wife are the last.”
“Where to?” “Rafah. We’ve a brother living there, Maher and his family went there. Myself and my wife will go to my daughter’s home in Zawayda.” There was nothing to be said. The man was busy and rushing to load his stuff. I said: “Goodbye, be safe.”
Walking back to Al Awda Hospital, holding my mobile the whole way and trying to call Eyad. I tried more than 50 times and all the calls failed. Suddenly I stopped. I feel something is wrong. I feel dizzy, unable to walk properly. The fear invades me from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. I don’t feel well. I continue walking. Arrived at the hospital, went to the office. I started to collect my stuff; the laptop, the mobile charger, the small battery that I use to light some LED lights. I finished and got ready to leave. Then I sat down again. I don’t want to go home with these feelings, in this condition. I must control myself. Arriving home, talking to Abeer about what we shall do.
She has a sister in Rafah, a widow with five girls living not far from Alnajjar Hospital, living in a very small house of two rooms with a small living room. Shall we go there? Shall we send some of us so if something happens here we can move more easily and lighter? We are around 22 people. Maybe her mother and sister and her sister’s family can go tomorrow and then we can figure out what to do next.
We do not decide yet. We are still discussing the options when her brother, his wife and three children arrive with their luggage. They were in Nuseirat, not far from the area ordered to evacuate. So he is seeking refuge at his father’s home. Fair enough.
What next? We finished our talk without deciding anything. No safe place in Gaza Strip. People moving from place to place seeking non-existent safety. I am one of them. There is a storm outside, the wind is screaming, heavy rain and the cold is reaching my bones while the bombing is continuing and this time not far at all. I am afraid. I feel so lonely.
The Third Displacement, to Rafah
Finally, I must decide — my wife Abeer’s brother and his family, Abeer’s female cousins and their daughter arrived at my parents-in-law’s home. A full house of women and children, some of us must move to Rafah, the next destination after Gaza City and Nuseirat. They are all one family. I am the outsider. I decided to take my mother and leave. Abeer decided to stay with her parents and sisters. Now we have to separate. I don’t know how long for. I don’t know if we are going to meet again.
Finding a taxi to Rafah was not easy, I had to walk from Sawarha to Salahadeen Road where taxis are found, five kilometres walking, in fact almost running. It was 14:40, dark falls in less than three hours. I must be in Rafah before dark. Dark is another fear, another uncertainty.
Found a taxi, asking for lots of money. No choice, I agreed. $100, almost 20 times the normal price. We drove back to Sawarha, I loaded our stuff, two mattresses, two blankets, two bags of clothes. A half full cylinder of cooking gas enough for two weeks. I did not know even then where to go in Rafah. I called a friend there asking him to find me a place. I know that I am giving him an impossible task. More than one million people displaced to Rafah, a city of less than 100,000 people now hosting ten times the original population.
From Nuseirat taking the sea road, anxious, not comfortable, the Israeli Navy on the horizon, we heard many stories of shelling and killing of people on the sea road. Arriving at Khan Younis, west of Khan Younis, Mawasi area, the area which is mostly uninhabited, agricultural land. We used to drive and spend our weekends there running away from the crowds and noise of the city, Gaza City. It is unbelievable how it has become, thousands and thousands of people on the main road, which became similar to a flea market, selling some food items, second-hand clothes and other stuff. On both sides of the main road, hundreds of tents made from cheap plastic sheets.
Arrived in Rafah, same image, same situation doubled. Crowds everywhere, tents everywhere, small sellers everywhere. People moving all ways, back and forth, huge chaos. Dirt, garbage everywhere, destruction everywhere, bombed houses everywhere. Gray and black are the dominant colors, as if the colors of life have been taken away from Gaza. Trees in the street are all cut, people cut them to use for fire. No green color anymore, even the sky in this season hides its blue color and shows its gray, gloomy color. Some of my friends who arrived in Rafah earlier are in tents in the streets, tents that don’t prevent the cold or rain, but this was their only option, their only possibility. What will I do with my 83-year-old bedridden mother?
Calling my friend all the way and the connection is not going through. More than 60 times trying until finally it works. He asked me to come to his family house in Rafah. I know already they have no place, no room for any more people. I know they are hosting more than 100 people there.
Arrived at his place and he received me with a big smile. “Are you lucky or are you lucky?”
“Why? What?” “I asked a friend who has good connections to look for an apartment for rent. He is a wealthy businessman but he could not find any place for rent. “So, what is the news then?” “He asked me again, ‘Who wants the place?’ and I told him it’s for my friend and his bedridden mother. He decided to host you and your mother in his home.”
“Really?! I don’t want to bother people.” “Don’t worry, let’s go.”
He took a ride with us, guiding the driver to his friend’s address. Arrived at a fancy building of three floors, with a side yard with a decorated, wooden roof. The man was there, waiting for us with a big smile, very friendly and welcoming. He asked his sons to unload my stuff. They did not let me carry anything. The ground floor had a big living room and one bedroom with a toilet beside it. The man said: “I hope this is ok for you.” I was speechless. Could not express my feelings of appreciation but kept saying: “Thank you, thank you.”
I put my mother to bed. They brought food and offered for me to take a shower. A shower? Wow. A hot shower. The first time in three months, since then, I have been washing my body using a plastic can with cold water. My mother was so tired from the journey. She slept.
After the shower I went to the side yard. There were some men around the fire, brewing a pot of tea. We sat, chatted until 8pm. Then we all went to bed. They did not stop asking me if I needed anything, they did not stop saying, “Your mother is our mother, you should not worry about her.” I slept. My mother slept.
Dagboekfragment van Hossam Madhoum: Messages from Gaza Now.
22 January, 2024
Don’t believe the hype about the IDF lowering the intensity of the war when you have reliable eye-witness reports from inside Gaza’s war zone.
Day and Night
I wake at 6:30 am every day. My host is amazing. At 6 he is in the side yard of the house lighting the fire, preparing breakfast and hot tea. I am not allowed to leave without breakfast. He asks about my mother, repeatedly asking if she or I need anything.
Leaving at 8 a.m. for the office of my organization, Ma’an Development Agency, in Rafah. Full house, people from everywhere, from many associations that have no offices, trying to follow up on the interventions they are making for people.
Rafah, which used to have 170,000 inhabitants, is now hosting more than a million, at least half of them on the streets, building tents from plastic sheets that do not prevent cold or rain. But this is what is available. The market in the town center is over busy. It feels like a million people are gathered in this town center.
I’ve realized that there is plenty of work that we do besides providing psychosocial support; we distribute food; we build kitchens and distribute hot meals; we distribute hygiene and dignity kits to displaced people; we distribute water tanks to shelters and random collectives of displaced people; we distribute clothes for children; and we are trying to bring in better tents for people, we employ staff to clean the schools and mainly the toilets on a daily basis. All of this, as well as what the UNRWA do, as well as what all the humanitarian organizations offer, meets almost zero of people’s real needs. With the stoppage of normal life, no one has any kind of income in Gaza; all that 2.2 million people look for is shelter and food. But above all, people are in need of safety and dignity. It is not here anymore. I got involved in all of this as a member of Ma’an emergency team. I have no chance to think about anything. It’s like a beehive. But I can’t stay at the office more than five hours; I must go back to my mother who gets panicked if she doesn’t find me around her at 2 p.m.
Back home, my mother must blame me for being late whether I am early or late. I provide her with what she needs, then try to rest.
Rest!!! I hate it. While trying to rest, thinking starts. What has happened to my brother and sister’s families? Are they alive? Did they survive? Maybe some died, and some survived. My wife Abeer and her family — no contact for the last three days. I will go to Nuseriat tomorrow to check on them. I wanted to go earlier but could not. When will this nightmare end? Does it have an end? What kind of end? What will life look like when it ends, with completely destroyed cities and towns? Who is going to be the ruling authority? A new Israeli military occupation? The corrupt authority of Ramallah? Hamas again?
As much as I try to get busy with the family hosting me in order to avoid thinking, night is coming. Dark thoughts invading my head, falling asleep I don’t know how, and waking up in the morning so tired as if I did not sleep or rest at all.
Horror and Relief
It is six days without any news about my brother and sister’s families, since my nephew told me that the building behind their house was bombed and collapsed on their home. No news about whether they were inside or had left before. I did not stop trying to reach them but communication between the south and north is cut.
Today more horrific news: in the morning, calling my daughter in Lebanon, which is much easier than calling my wife in the middle area, she told me that her mother, my wife, Abeer, is in a panic. She saw a video of an injured person taken to Al Aqsa Hospital who died before reaching the operating room and she believes it is her brother. She shared the video with me. There was no way to tell who this person was; his face was mostly covered; his body is similar to my wife’s brother, but wait!!
My wife’s brother is in Gaza City, even if he is injured, he won’t be brought to Al Aqsa Hospital in the middle area. The road between Gaza City and the middle area has been completely cut for more than a month and a half. Calling Abeer, can’t reach her. She told Salma that she is going to Al Aqsa Hospital to check. I called my nephew, the son of my other brother who took refuge in that hospital with his family. After several attempts I finally reached him. I asked him to go to the morgue to check if Abeer’s brother is among the martyrs there. He calls back after an hour. He says that the 30 bodies that arrived yesterday and this morning are without names and he does not know my wife’s brother so he could not help. Yet he continues talking. He says that finally he got news from Gaza City; my brother and sister with their families are safe. They left home a day before the invasion of their area and before the bombing of the building behind their home. “How do you know?” I ask my nephew.
A neighbor had a SIM from Cellcom, an Israeli telecommunications company. He called my nephew and told him my brother went to a shelter-school far from the area and that my sister went to another shelter-school in the north. I keep calling Abeer with no success. Contacted my daughter Salma. Finally Abeer had called her and told her that the body she believed to be her brother is not her brother, yet she had no news from her brother for more than a month.
Some relief after a time of heaviness and horror. Keeping hope.
Agony
Today I went to Sawarha to see my wife Abeer and bring her some food and hygiene items, which became very difficult to secure in Sawarha. I left home at 8:30 a.m.
In Rafah, the crowds are unbelievable. Moving, walking one hundred meters takes at least ten minutes. A city of 200,000 inhabitants with very weak infrastructure, received one million people. (I will write later about Rafah at another time).
Looking for a taxi to Sawarha. The normal cost of one is $1.5. The first taxi asked for $150. I left him for another one, arguing the price, finally there was no one cheaper than $65 with the condition that he would take other passengers on the way. I have no choice. We start moving. Thirty minutes to get out of the city toward Khan Younis but not really reaching Khan Younis as there is the Israeli invasion there. Before reaching Khan Younis City, the driver rook roads that I never knew about, until we reached the coast road. Tents everywhere, people everywhere, street sellers of food items received from humanitarian aid are everywhere, making the road busy and crowded. The car on many occasions moved at the speed of a man walking. We reached Deir Al Balah, then Zawaida, then Sawarha. A distance of less than three km took more than 1 hour and 20 minutes. A long line of cars, trucks, donkey carts, all types of vehicles are full of people, mattresses, stuff, cooking gas cylinders, jerrycans for water, bread flour, vehicles full to bursting, stuff tied with ropes, all are moving to the south, evacuated from Nuseirat.
The image is like Judgment Day. People look very tired, very desperate, very unclean. Men are unshaven, young children crying everywhere, very afraid. You could feel the fear. You could touch the fear. They are going to Rafah, not knowing what they are going to do there. Everybody knows that Rafah is completely full; not only the houses, buildings or the public institutions but the streets, the parks, the side roads are completely full with tents and people. They are escaping from the bombing and the military invasion. They are running for their lives but have no idea where and what could happen to them.
Some volunteers were trying to help facilitate the traffic but it was an almost impossible mission. Some cars stopped due to engine problems; no side roads to push them into out of the line of traffic. The road also passes by shelter-schools on the sea road, which makes it more difficult; hundreds of street sellers in front of the schools, thousands of people move in and out, blocking the road. I am worried about being late. I must be back at 1 p.m. otherwise my mother will worry. From Rafah to Sawarha normally takes 20 minutes even with a normal traffic jam. Arrived at 11.30. Sawarha was quiet. It is 2.5 km from the center of Nuseirat, but the invasion continues. The Israeli army started the invasion in a small part of Nuseirat two weeks ago. Now they’ve almost invaded the whole camp, leaving behind them huge destruction and hundreds of people killed. Bombing, shelling, heavy shooting. I agreed with the taxi driver to take me to Sawarha and bring me back to Rafah, so I met Abeer for less than ten minutes. Checked on her and the family. Everyone is still alive but no one is ok. Buddy, my dog, was so happy to see me. I was so happy to see him too. He kept jumping on me and running around. I don’t want to leave. I want to stay with my wife and my dog. I want to go back home. I want to settle down, to lay down on my bed or sit on my balcony with my wife, my daughter and my dog as we used to every evening, having some coffee. I need some rest and tranquility. Nothing more.
I discussed with Abeer the plan of their arrival to Rafah. Her parents completely refuse to leave until they see all the people in the area leaving. Abeer is unable to leave them alone. I don’t know what to do. What a complex situation. Trying to convince them is not helping. I understand that they are tired of moving and being displaced. They are too old for more agony. It is their only way to show that they are giving up. Time is running out. It will take me at least another two hours back to Rafah, to my mother. I deposited the stuff at the front door and left with the agreement of Abeer to communicate further on the mobile. The journey back to Rafah was the same, the same crowd, the same sad people, the same traffic of displaced people in cars and vehicles full of their basic needs, full of hundreds of street sellers of food aid items, full of agony.
Back to Sawarha Again
On Thursday I went to Sawarha with some supplies for my wife and her family — some food and hygiene items. On Friday Abeer called, very anxious and panicked. The bombing, shelling and air strikes did not stop in Nuseirat near Sawarha. People started to evacuate from there. There was random bombing near the house; they did not sleep. The news is that the sea road is safe from north to south but no one is allowed to move from south to north or the middle area.
They can’t leave alone. Our car is there but with no fuel. I spent all day looking for six liters of benzine, just enough to drive from Sawarha to Rafah in the south. Knowing the risk I am going to take by going north, I did not think for a single minute not to go. They can’t manage, they are ten — three children, four women, an old man and a young man, paralyzed with fear— I know that he won’t be able to help. Could not secure the fuel until 9 p.m., never mind the price, (normal price is $2 per liter, I paid $34/liter for six liters). A friend of Abu Khaled, his business partner, a man I had never met before these days, offered to take me in his mini-jeep to help bring the family and whatever belongings we can bring such as mattresses, blankets, food, cooking gas and a gas cylinder and the gas itself, some kitchen items. If we don’t bring these things we will not find any at all in Rafah.
I can never thank him enough. He knew the risk. He could lose his car in a bombing, yet he did not hesitate. He even said that it was full of diesel so I shouldn’t worry about it. Driving very early Saturday morning at 6 a.m., the main road between Rafah and Khan Younis is completely empty. Avoiding Khan Younis city as there is the military invasion there, we turn west two km before Khan Younis towards the sea road. Since I was here the day before yesterday, new homes and buildings were destroyed. Parts of the roads were almost blocked by fallen rubble. But we managed.
Along the sea road, some movement — all kinds of cars, vehicles, trucks, jeeps, full of belongings and people all going south. Some people are in the streets. Driving and expecting the worst, but no choice. We continue. By Deir Al Balah, the city in the middle area, huge crowds of people are blocking the road, moving everywhere, looking for something called safety and shelter. Many can’t find it.
Normally it is only 22 km from Rafah to Sawarha and takes 30 minutes to drive but today is different. I arrived at 8.25 a.m. They were asleep after a long night of bombing, shelling and heavy shooting that shook the house all night. They fell asleep out of tiredness and fear. The good thing was they had prepared everything. All the stuff they need to take was packed and ready to be loaded on the cars. I put the benzene in our car, packed the stuff, distributed the people in the two cars and started the trip to Rafah. Rafah, where there is no place at all any more.
Rafah, the last city in the south of Gaza with borders with Egypt, inhabited by 200,000 with poor infrastructure, similar to all Gaza Strip cities and camps. Now hosting one million two hundred thousand people. Don’t ask how. For sure not in the houses — they are completely full. Wherever you look, in every empty space, at every roadside: tents, all kinds of tents, tents (good ones) received from humanitarian aid organizations, tents made from plastic and nylon sheets, tents made from pieces of fabric. More than one million people in tents — without toilets. People, mainly women, knock on doors asking to use the toilet; men are in lines at the mosques waiting to use the toilets. Without any facilities, in front of some tents, people make small fires to heat or cook. Hundreds of families on the streets did not receive a tent. They don’t have money to buy wood and plastic sheets to make their own — these cheap materials became more expensive than gold for poor people.
Here in Rafah I must bring my wife and her family. I think I was an angel in another life — I don’t know. I don’t really believe that. But I was planning a meeting with my staff who are providing psycho-social support in shelter-schools for children. I was planning to meet them on Saturday to hear from them and to provide them with some support, to check if there is anything I can do to facilitate their work. So I called one of them to ask him to postpone the meeting for another day. I’m busy bringing my wife. This wonderful colleague from Rafah started to call people, looking for a place for them to stay. I was driving back, near Deir Al Balah, when he called me to say that he’d found a store, 6 meter by 2.5 meter-square, including a toilet. It is in the center of Rafah, in the middle of the main market. What luck! It is a 15-minute walk from where I am staying at Abu Khaled’s home, adjacent to Al Awda Hospital in Rafah. We arrived around 2 p.m. In front of the store, a bombed house, rubble in the street. The owner had brought some workers to clean up. The door of the store was damaged. He brought a blacksmith to fix it. The family waited in the cars for an hour until the place was almost ready. Some works still need to be done inside, never mind, Abeer’s brother will do it. They were exhausted. I brought them some food and left. I could not stay any longer. I should go and check on my mother. Two hours later, I passed by to see how they are. For sure no one is happy. They are all so tired. Even our dog Buddy was quiet, sitting in the corner, and did not come to me when I arrived as he would usually. The place is hell. Not good, not comfortable, no light, some candles, yet a million times better than a tent on the street. No complaints. I left them around 5 p.m. It gets dark. I could not stay. I must be beside my mother now. Next day… another story …
Fatena Al-Ghorra, dichter en journalist
Dichter en schrijver Fatena Al-Ghorra is geboren en getogen in Gaza, waar ze ook werkte als journalist. Sinds 2009 woont ze in België, waar ze werkt als journalist, vertaler en dichter. Ze publiceerde meerdere bundels, waarvan Gods bedrog. Diverse scenario’s en Neem dit lichaam in Nederlandse vertaling verschenen in 2014 resp. 2019. Ze ging begin oktober na 15 jaar op bezoek bij haar familie in Gaza. Met ruim twee miljoen anderen raakte ze verzeild in een eindeloze stroom bombardementen, gebrek aan voedsel, water, medische zorg en elke vorm van veiligheid.
Met haar familie vluchtte ze naar het Al Ahli ziekenhuis waar ze ruim twee maanden verbleef. In die tijd schreef ze brieven naar haar nichtje Lamar. Deze brieven zijn nu vertaald uit het Arabisch en uitgegeven onder de titel Uittocht naar Gaza (EPO, december 2024).
Hieronder een korte recensie en enkele citaten uit dit brievenboek.
Poezie uit de hel, brievenroman uit ziekenhuis in Gaza
Lawaai, een kakofonie aan geluiden, alle mogelijke geuren en (de herinnering aan) smaken, alle zintuigen komen aan de orde in de brieven die Fatena Al Ghorra schrijft aan haar nichtje van oktober tot december 2023. Om over de beelden die ze observeert en ervaart maar te zwijgen.
Fatena Al Ghorra is een dichter en dat merk je ook in haar proza. Licht, zachtaardig en vloeiend beschrijft zij de hel die ze meemaakt in Gaza als ze na 15 jaar haar familie weer bezoekt. Volgens haar is het niet toevallig dat ze juist in oktober 2023 terugkeert naar haar geboortestreek. Ze is daar om van binnenuit de ramp mee te maken die haar volk overkomt en om haar familie bij te staan. Als zij, haar ouders en andere familieleden hun toevlucht nemen tot het Al-Ahli ziekenhuis, een ziekenhuis dat wordt beheerd door de anglicaanse kerk, hopen ze daar veilig te zijn. Fatena schrijft haar ervaringen op voor haar nichtje Lamar, ook afkomstig uit Gaza maar nu in België, het land waar ook de schrijver asiel gevonden heeft. Ze wil haar ervaringen met haar delen zodat de herinneringen niet verloren gaan en de geschiedenis niet wordt uitgewist. Ze doet dat beeldend, poëtisch en diep menselijk.
Twee citaten om dat te illustreren:
‘De rauwe waarheid is dat de oorlog de pijler van ons dagelijks leven vormt. Het is waar dat er geen stabiliteit is in oorlogstijden, maar het vermogen van mensen om stabiliteit te veinzen is inspirerend en indrukwekkend. De geur van de dood en diens aanwezigheid doen de stabiliteit op haar grondvesten schudden. Beeld je in dat de oorlog een en al dans is. Het gebouw danst met elke raket die valt, en de mensen lopen of bewegen op voeten die dansen zonder muziek maar in harmonie zijn met het ritme van de bombardementen en de inslagen.’
‘Gaza is zoveel dieper geworteld dan ze denken. Gaza heeft niet alleen wortels in deze smalle strook grond die op de wereldkaart slechts een stip is. Onze wortels spreiden zich vanuit Gaza over de hele wereld uit, alsof de wereldkaart nu een web van wortels is die in alle richtingen vertakken.’



Hieronder een gedicht uit de bundel Neem dit lichaam.
EEN AANHOUDENDE HERFST
Neem dit lichaam
voorzichtig
bedek het
dekens zijn niet nodig
twee handen voldoen
zodat alles kan beginnen
je zult veel gaten en holtes vinden
maak je geen zorgen en laat je niet storen
kleine kooltjes vielen erop
niemand raapte ze op
misschien lijkt het wat koud en kil
maar dat zijn de gevolgen van een aanhoudende herfst.
Wees niet bang
als er plotseling rode rivieren tussen je vingers verschijnen
de geur van lavendel
tevoorschijn komt vanonder de guillotine
door het humeur van het universum
de messen hebben hun deel opgeëist.
De rivieren zullen opdrogen
na een tijd
ik herinner me dat ik ben vergeten mijn lichaam gereed te maken voor je
ik zou op je kunnen rekenen
dat zou me bevallen.
Trek de aderen open met je handen
zoals je een rietstengel opentrekt
om een fluit te maken
open deze aderen
trek je schoenen uit
kom naar beneden
neem een diepe duik
raap alle witte stenen op
ik ben vergeten een nieuwe gebedskrans voor je te kopen.
Dring naar binnen
tot je mijn hart bereikt
misschien tref je het anders aan dan wij geleerd hebben
rood en de vorm van een hart aangenomen
je zult dikke lagen stof aantreffen
en overblijfselen van voortgaande oorlogen
dat zal meer inzet van je vragen
om die lagen te verwijderen
je weet dat je het binnenste hebt bereikt
als je de heldere kleur van vlees ziet
niet rood, zoals ze ons hebben geleerd
maar roze
ik ben vergeten een roos in de zak van je colbert te steken.
Tareq S. Hajjaj, journalist en schrijver
Tareq S. Hajjaj is correspondent van Mondoweiss Gaza en lid van de Palestijnse Schrijversbond. Hij studeerde Engelse literatuur aan de Al-Azhar Universiteit in Gaza. Hij begon zijn carrière in de journalistiek in 2015 als nieuwsschrijver en vertaler voor de plaatselijke krant Donia al-Watan.
Hieronder zijn Brief aan mijn zoon op zijn eerste verjaardag in Gaza (verschenen op 29 december 2023 op de site van mondoweiss.net) waarin hij vertelt hoe hij er alles aan deed om Qais het verjaardagsfeest te geven dat hij verdiende, zelfs na het bloedbad op de dag dat hij 1 jaar werd. De brief bevat twee links naar andere verslagen die Tareq Hajjaj publiceerde op Mondoweiss.

No matter what, my child, we were going to celebrate your first birthday.
Ever since you were born, Qais, I have felt a strong sense of purpose in life to push myself as a father. I have long prepared for this stage in my life, eager to provide you with a good upbringing that I can later look back on with pride. Ever since you were born, your mother would make you little birthdays to mark every new month that you’ve brightened our lives. I would join in on these little parties, but privately, I have been waiting for your first birthday to plan for something big.
I was going to invite the entire extended family, especially your aunts and uncles and cousins. We would gather in our spacious home overlooking our planted garden from every direction, except for the street, which boasted a beautiful palm tree heavy with dates, across the street from the same neighbors I’ve known since I was born in al-Shuja’iyya, in the eastern part of Gaza City.
The last time we laid eyes on our home was through a phone screen. We looked at photos of what remained of the house after we evacuated it a month earlier — before the ground invasion. The entire house, and many other houses near it, had been reduced to rubble.
We left our beautiful home and stayed at your grandfather’s in the Zeitoun neighborhood, also in Gaza City. We didn’t take many things with us; we didn’t know our time away would be so long. Even now, we don’t know when we’ll be able to return, or whether we’ll be able to return at all. We know that even if we are allowed, there’s nothing to go back to. When the house was destroyed, so were our hopes of having your first birthday in that little world we had made for you.
But don’t worry little one. We will have a new house one day, wide and spacious and surrounded by trees and a vegetable garden. Right now, all we have to do is wait and join our hopes with yours for all the good things that can happen to us — to see the end of the war, to live a normal life where your access to food isn’t conditional upon your suffering, and to be able to see and hear what a child on their first birthday are supposed to see and hear.
In the middle of a narrow alleyway in the Yibna refugee camp in Rafah — the latest stop in our story of displacement — one of our neighbors works the entire day making bread for displaced people. Those of us in the camp don’t have access to ovens, so we bring her flour to make us bread, and she only takes a modest, almost symbolic price for her labour. Right beside her, there is a large crater that stands as a testament to the destruction already wrought on the neighborhood. All around us, the houses that are still left standing have been deserted and the charred remains of abandoned cars line the side of the nearby road. The windows of all the houses around us have been shattered, the doors to the homes ripped from their hinges. People in the street farther down the road try to buy and sell everything and anything.
Qais, you saw all of this. These are things I wish you would never have had to see, especially not in your first year of life.
In our house in Gaza City, birds would be in the window beside your crib. There was a wall where we hung all your pictures, and I left a special spot in the center where I wanted to hang a picture of your first birthday party. I wanted to be able to stroll the streets of Gaza City and visit the best toy stores to buy you the best, most expensive, most beneficial toys — maybe something that can teach you a new skill, different from the behaviors you’ve picked up as a displaced refugee, mimicking how the grown-ups around you stoked a fire as you grabbed a piece of plastic and started blowing on it.
But you’ll never be able to have the memories I wanted for you. Those have been buried beneath the rubble, too. We are now in Rafah, in a house not our own, unable to find a cake, or sweets, or anything else you would normally find at a birthday party.
But don’t worry little one. I’m going to throw you a party even in the middle of the war, and I’ll look everywhere for ingredients to make you a cake. Finding eggs will be the hardest. Even though the doctors recommended that boys your age should have one egg a day, you haven’t eaten a single egg for two and a half months. But I’m still going to try, and if I fail, don’t worry. I’ll make it up to you in the years to come if we survive.
I was able to find you a few balloons and a few biscuits that are handed out to people as humanitarian aid. Some sell them to be able to buy other things, but I can’t find much else to buy in the Rafah market. I can’t call our relatives to join us either. Telecommunications have been cut off in Gaza, and they can’t reach us in any event, as several Israeli checkpoints and tanks stand between us. Some of them are now living in shelters. Others are living in tents in makeshift refugee camps, and others are staying in hospital courtyards after your uncle and his family were trapped under the rubble for five hours before being rescued after an Israeli airstrike. You won’t be able to play with your young cousins, who all love you very much, because you’re the youngest member of our family, and they always want to play with you.
Instead of finding little sparklers to light your cake with, the only thing I can do is sit beside you near the window and watch as the bombs drop in the distance on people’s homes, lighting up the sky every now and then.
My little one, it’s hard to think of celebrating in times like these when we keep hearing of the thousands of children who are dying of hunger or dying in airstrikes, burnt and charred and blown into pieces. But it’s not your fault that all this is happening.
On the morning of your birthday, I went to the market again, hoping I would find a single can of baby formula, which I figured would be the best birthday present I could give you in lieu of a cake or a piece of chocolate, or inviting our family over. So let’s celebrate today what we do have, my love, and my birthday wish for you will be the end of the war and our safe return to our home.
I know that if we returned to Gaza City now, we would be suffering more than we already are. I’m telling you now that when the world sees Gaza and discovers what happened, they’ll know that it’s no longer a place fit for a dignified human life. The fog of war is still hiding what happened, but when it clears on the very first day after the war, the reality of Gaza will slap humanity in the face, and it will leave its burning mark on humanity’s conscience forever.
Today, I carried you in a backpack, your face in front of my own so that you could sit nestled comfortably against my chest and look at the world around you. Devastated and barren as it was, you still had a right to go outside for a short while. In our house in Gaza, I would take you on strolls through the entire family building every day, stopping at each floor so that you could visit your cousins. Eventually, we would make it to the rooftop in time for sunset.
On our stroll today in Rafah, I was intent on finding you a birthday candle because your mother promised she’d be able to make a cake from flour, cocoa powder, and sugar. We reached one of the most famous roundabouts in the city, known as Awda Circle, but about 100 meters after passing the circle, two missiles hit a car behind us. Smoke billowed everywhere as people started running toward the wreckage to check for survivors, and dust filled the air as I covered your face with a jacket. I started asking whether there was another way back to the Yibna refugee camp, but people said the only other routes were very long and circuitous, winding through the refugee camp’s narrow and endless alleyways. So I had to wait a while for the smoke to clear and then hurry back the way we came, resolving not to take you out again for the duration of our stay.
On our way back, we stepped over severed limbs. A young man was holding an empty flour bag and filling it with body parts he collected. People around him started pointing out other human remains that had been strewn across the road, as everyone was intent on giving the person to whom this flesh belonged something approximating a dignified burial.
One old man gestured to me, saying, “Cover the young boy’s face, don’t let him see this.” But on your birthday, we walked over rivers of blood and disfigured human corpses. We passed over all of this because we wanted to find a candle with the number 1, which we were finally able to find at a stationary store in Rafah because there is no longer any demand for schoolbooks, notebooks, balloons, or birthday caps. And your mother was able to bake that cake with the ingredients that we had, and she even topped it with canned cream instead of icing. We were able to buy some sweets from a young boy in the street, made by his mother at home, and a few pieces of Za’atar manaqeesh made by a local bakery that used a wood-fired oven.
The abandoned house we’re staying in is three stories high, and four large families are staying under its roof. The children in the families keep stopping by to ask after you because you’re the smallest one here, and they want to play with you. We invited them all for your birthday so we could sing for a new year, and so they could also find some comfort in these brief moments of joy. They were all ecstatic, wearing their birthday caps, playing and laughing with you until they were breathless. And when the party was over, they didn’t want to leave, and they didn’t want you to be taken by your mother for nursing and bedtime. They clearly hadn’t experienced this kind of joy in a long time.
It’s hard to imagine they could ever again, after all the death they have witnessed and that they themselves have experienced and narrowly escaped every day.
But on one day, among all those other days, we tried, despite everything, to find a few hours of happiness worthy of your birthday, Qais.
Op 16 mei 2024 publiceerde Mondoweiss het onderstaande verslag van Tareq Hajjaj waarin hij beschrijft hoe zijn moeder stierf door gebrek aan medische zorg.

How the war killed my mother
The old woman sits on her bed next to the window. Although she cannot see it, the warm sun of her homeland drenches her in light. She places her head in her hands, thinking out loud about how she spent her entire life trying to escape Israel’s bombs. In the background, the same window that brings in the light also lets in the constant buzzing of the warplanes and drones, punctuated by shelling and bombing. Though she cannot see them, she hears every boom, and feels the ground every time it shakes.
That old woman by the window was my mother.
For the past five years, I was her primary caretaker, as she suffered from blindness and a host of other medical conditions, including heart disease and a broken hip. I spent almost every night for the past five years lying awake at night, worried that she might need me.
She always used to say “forgive me,” out of guilt, but I always responded by telling her that she was my treasure, that she was the reason for every blessed and good thing in my life.
My family and I have been displaced five times so far during the ongoing war against Palestinian existence in Gaza. We are a family of eight siblings, and I am the youngest. Everyone is married, and some of my nieces and nephews are even older than me.
We all used to live in the same building in our home in al-Shuja’iyya, Gaza City. There were 23 of us in that building, and 22 more living in the surrounding neighborhood. The war separated all of us in October. By November, the entire building had been destroyed. Throughout everything, my elderly mother stayed with me, close in my arms, as she had done my entire life.
Our fourth displacement was to Rafah, where we stayed alongside 1.7 million other Palestinians. My mother, myself, my 1-year-old son Qais, and my wife Timaa arrived at an abandoned house in Rafah with my father-in-law’s family of four. The rest of my extended family, my siblings, nieces, and nephews — everyone who used to see my mother every day for our entire lives — were scattered across Gaza.
In February, two months after we arrived in Rafah, my mother fell ill. By a stroke of luck and tenacity, I was able to get her seen by a doctor amid the bombings and the ground invasion and the overwhelmed hospitals. The doctor prescribed her medications that were nowhere to be found in all of Rafah. As I carted her between hospitals and medical centers, none of which were equipped to take her in as a patient, her situation continued to deteriorate. They gave me some available medications, but nothing was working. Eventually, she stopped sleeping at night. Then she was no longer able to walk by herself.
I called my brother Osama for help. He came from Khan Younis immediately.
We took her to the European Hospital, just on the border of Khan Younis and Rafah. It was the closest hospital and the only major functioning hospital in the south. When the doctors examined her, they ordered her to be admitted.
In a situation unique to Gaza, and unimaginable to other people, it was because of her worsened health condition and her admittance to the European Hospital that she was finally able to reunite with my nieces and nephews — her grandchildren — who she hadn’t seen in months due to the fact that we were in Rafah while they had been sheltering on the hospital grounds.
When she arrived at the hospital, my family saw her for the first time since the war broke out. They ran to her and hugged her.
Despite the circumstances, it was a joyous moment. At the time, she did not know that my eldest brother had been injured after the home they were in was bombed, trapping him and his family under the rubble for an entire night before they were rescued. She didn’t know that her brother, my uncle, had been killed, or that our family home had been destroyed. These are the things I had to keep from her for fear of what the news might do to her. For months, I believed that all of her fears, all the terrifying moments she had lived through, the displacement, the constant terror of the bombs — all of that would be too much for her tired heart.
And that day in the European Hospital, I think I was right. When someone told her about my brother’s injury, her sadness was inconsolable.
By the end of that day in the hospital, I had to make an impossible choice — either stay at the hospital and leave my wife and son behind in Rafah, or rejoin them and abandon my mother in Khan Younis. I tried to strike a balance and left my mother with my brother Osama. Every morning for the next several weeks, I left my family in Rafah in the mornings, and before the evening, I left my other family at the hospital in Khan Younis and went back to my family in Rafah.
For one month I lived through that agony, every time saying goodbye to my son like it was the last time. And every night, I lived that same agony when I said goodbye to my mother. Would I survive the night and see her again tomorrow?
As the days went on, the hospital was not a hospital anymore. It was flooded with displaced families who had taken over all the unoccupied patient rooms and beds. Even the corridors were full of people, sleeping on blankets and whatever they could find. It was not a healthy environment for anyone, let alone patients. The floors were dirty, and kids who had spent months in hospital corridors with nothing to play with now made toys out of medical waste and ran barefoot in the hospital and its grounds. All the while, my mother couldn’t see any of these things, but she could hear the commotion, the sound of the bombs raining down in the distance, and the din of the crowds and the cries and screams of the injured around her.
A group of doctors were able to give her minimal medications, and I began to feel that it was a mistake to move her to the hospital. But then again, I feared that I would regret it even more if she died at home, helpless and with no medical care. She needs the care, I told myself. This is the only option we have. Three weeks in, her kidneys started to fail. Doctors said they would try their best to avoid reaching the point of needing dialysis, “because there is no chance she will be able to handle kidney dialysis,” one doctor told me. Her body was too weak to endure the process. It was the same reason a doctor gave us many years ago when we sought treatment to try and save her eyesight.
The first couple of days after they put her on medications for her kidneys, she did not get any better, but she didn’t get worse either. I started to come to the realization that she could not stay here anymore. I considered her psychological health first and the toll it was taking on her physical health. I told her dozens of times that we should go back to Rafah, to the house where our family was, but she said no.
“As long as they treat me, I will stay. I may get better and will be able to walk again, I’m very sick and tired,” she said when I insisted that we return to Rafah. “I will not forgive you if you take me out without finishing my treatment.” And so she stayed there.
And I kept going back and forth between the European Hospital and my family in Rafah. I didn’t consider the fact that the army was shelling Salah al-Din road and slowly encroaching upon Khan Younis. She was my mother. I couldn’t leave her, even for a single day. She is the only person who loves me more than herself. In Islam, we believe that our mothers are our keys to heaven, and that paradise lies at their feet. I know this to be true. My mother was the key to my prayers being answered, the gate between myself and God. She was and always will be the reason I have had good fortune in my life. And even though she is my mother, sometimes I feel like she is my little daughter. I knew that she was getting older and sicker, and so I wanted to give her the best moments I could, even in this horrible war.
So I did not miss any opportunity to see her, not a single day — except for one. It was a dreadful day when I had to stand in lines for hours to access an ATM in Rafah, where there were only three ATMs and practically no cash for 1.7 million people. That was the one time I didn’t see my mother — not just during the month she spent at the hospital, not just during the war, but during my entire life in Gaza. I missed her that day.
The day after, she went into a coma.
Alongside her kidney problems, she suffered from a stroke, the second in just a few years. She needed to be intubated and given special nutrition that had to be administered through a feeding tube which the hospital did not have. The doctor wrote the prescription for the supplement — Ensure Plus — and asked me to go out and find it. I hoped that my search through Rafah’s pharmacies would not leave me empty-handed. I was disappointed. When it became hopeless, I went back to the doctor in frustration and asked him how a hospital so large could not secure nutrition for its patients and how he expected me to find it. The doctor understood my anger. He knew what I was losing, and he knew that it didn’t have to be this way.
Day by day, with no proper food or treatment, her body stopped responding to medications. Doctors started saying that there was nothing they could do. She spent 10 days in a coma, breathing, opening her eyes, sometimes not responding to anything. But even though she was not responsive, her body was shaking every second with the sound of every bomb, every scream of every person in the hospital. Once again, the fear that put her here was still taking its toll. I started to say goodbye to her for 10 days. Every day I took every moment to keep her in my arms. I wanted to feel her warm face next to mine before it got cold. I was storing her smile in my mind and the feeling of her gray hair between my fingertips. I felt every day of my entire life pass before me, as I held her hands all day and lay next to her in her hospital bed.
I know that death is coming for all of us. We do not know how and when, but sometimes we can see the signs. I witnessed the death of my father two years ago. I thought after that that I would get to spend more time with my mom, but every day in that hospital, I grew more devastated with time. When I started to give up hope that she would live, I started to at least hope that I could bury her next to my father in the cemetery in Gaza. But I knew this was even more unlikely than her making a full recovery.
My mother, my beautiful, sweet beloved mother, the one who makes me believe that good deeds will always come back to me in different and more generous forms — I wished she would never die. But these days in Gaza wishes rarely come true.
At 2 a.m. on March 4, my nephew called me from Khan Younis. I was sleeping in Rafah.
“My condolences,” he said. I asked, “for whom?” He told me that she had passed away. I couldn’t believe it. How could she die without me holding her hand?
“How?” I demanded of my nephew. I was trying to tell him that I was there all day. I kept asking him, “You’re not serious, right?”
Then my brother Osama called me. He confirmed her death and tried hard to make me believe that she was in a better place.
Oh, Mom, I tried my best. I tried so hard to get you out of Gaza, to get you to any hospital in Egypt, but I couldn’t. I tried to get you the medication and the supplements you needed, but I wasn’t able to. Oh Mom, even dying in a decent grave is impossible. Cemeteries are full and now people bury their loved ones in temporary cemeteries near the hospital. Some people bury their loved ones in the medians between the highway, or on the side of the road. Will that be us? Will I have to put you inside a plastic bag and bury you under the ground on the roadside, in a makeshift grave built of stones and covered in cement?
My thoughts tortured me the rest of the night.
Everybody around me was sleeping. It’s three in the morning, and I can’t move from Rafah to Khan Younis. It’s not safe. I will find no one to drive me, and it is too far and dangerous.
As the sun slowly started to creep in through the window, the reality of losing my mother began to settle in. I slowly lay down on my mattress, covering my head with my blanket, and I couldn’t hold my tears any longer. Every moment in my life with my mom began to fill my mind.
I recall how hard my mother worked her entire life to have her big family and give us a good life. I recall every moment as a child when I would lie down next to her head on her pillow and she hugged every part of my body. I recall that year when I tried my best to teach her how to write her name. She never got the chance to receive an education, but she taught me how to be a human. She taught me how to have mercy in my heart and how to forgive. And she taught me how to be a good son.
The last week of her life, when she wasn’t responding to anything around her, I was talking to her as usual, and I told her, “If you are listening, please just move your finger.” And she did.
So I told her everything I wanted her to know. I told her that I prayed that she would survive, even if it meant I would spend my entire life serving her and taking care of her. I told her how I was lucky to be her son and how much I loved her. I told her that I registered her name on a list to go to Egypt and that we were waiting our turn.
Today, I sit in Egypt with my wife and son. I thought my mom would be with us. I never imagined she would choose a different destination.
Rest in peace, my beloved. I am so sorry I couldn’t save you.
In december 2024 schreef Tareq deze brief waarin hij vertelt hoe de voortdurende ontheemding van de Gazaanse familie ook vergaande invloed heeft op zijn werk.
Palestine Letter: When genocide makes basic journalism impossible
The Israeli genocide on Gaza has made being a journalist a deadly job. But even the most mundane aspects of journalism, like tracking people down to interview, have become a monumental task in the face of mass displacement and mass destruction.
It used to be very easy to find someone in Gaza to interview; all I needed was a person’s name, and then I knew where I could go to ask about them and their families, until eventually finding the person I needed to contact.
As reporters from Gaza, we know where most families are located. For example, if I have a person’s name to interview and his last name is Najar, I will go to Khan Younis, where this family is, and ask about the person I want. His relatives will lead me to him, even if he had moved to a different area, they would know because we had addresses and communication was easy.
Now all of that has changed, and such a simple journalistic task has become nearly impossible because of the genocide.
Now, families are scattered, addresses are non-existent as most buildings have been destroyed, and people now live amongst rubble or in a sea of tents.
Everyone in the Gaza Strip has faced displacement at least multiple times over the past year. Addresses and knowledge about the locations of the families in the Gaza Strip are not helpful anymore because no one is in their own home any longer, or even their neighborhood, or city.
I started to recognize this issue when I was in Gaza during the genocide and I heard the story of an older man, Bashir Hiji. Hiji’s story went viral when a photo of him surfaced on social media in November 2023 of Israeli soldiers trying to “help” him. The photo of the Israeli army helping Palestinians was shared widely, and was being used by Israel as propaganda. But after that moment was captured, when the military finished with the pictures, they killed Hajji and left him on the ground.
We knew the name of the older man in the photo the Israeli army published. He is from a family in the al-Zaytoun area of Gaza City, and I was in Khan Younis at the time the story broke. After making lots of calls, I was given a lead that his family may have evacuated from Zaytoun to Khan Younis. So I went to several displacement centers in Khan Younis asking about anyone from the Hiji family. I was hoping that someone would connect me to the elderly man’s family so I could interview them to tell the world the real story about what the Israeli army did to their father.
I walked through the sea of tents and different displacement centers, tent by tent, asking about this family. In the process, I heard countless other stories that surely needed to be told. But in the end, I could not find anyone from the Hiji family, and I was reminded of one of the most simple things needed to be a journalist – to contact people for an interview – had become so impossible.
I tell this story because I faced the same problem recently. I was trying to reach two families to ask about their loved ones who were killed and turned up in a truck full of decomposing bodies that was returned to Gaza by the Israeli occupation.
Usually, I would go to Rafah or Khan Younis, where both of these families are located. But not anymore. The people of Rafah are scattered, and the people of Khan Younis might be in Rafah. Or are they even alive? I don’t know. No one knows.
It has taken me and a team of reporters I’m working with months to try and find any of those two martyrs’ families, and so far, we have not reached them.
Not only are the stories we telling tragic, but even the process we must undergo in order to tell them is a painful reminder of what this genocide has done to us. The genocide has made the majority of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip homeless, displaced, and scattered.
Hiba Kamal Abu Nada (1991 – 2023)
Hiba Kamal Abu Nada was een Palestijnse schrijver en dichter. Hiba werd geboren in Mekka, Saoedi Arabie in een familie van Palestijnse vluchtelingen. Later studeerde ze biochemie en voedingskunde aan de Islamitische Universiteit in Gaza-Stad.
Naast haar werk als diëtist was ze actief in een cultureel kindercentrum en schreef ze poëzie en proza. Haar boek Oxygen is not for the Dead behaalde de tweede plaats in de Sharjah Awards for Arab creativity in 2017. Ze werd op 20 oktober vermoord door een Israelisch bombardement, samen met haar zoon.
Een paar dagen voor haar dood publiceerde ze het volgende gedicht op X:
Gaza’s night is dark apart from the glow of rockets,
quiet apart from the sound of the bombs,
terrifying apart from the comfort of prayer,
black apart from the light of the martyrs.
Goodnight, Gaza.

Twee andere gedichten van haar:
Each of us in Gaza is either witness to or martyr for liberation. Each is waiting to see which of the two they’ll become up there with God. We have already started building a new city in Heaven.
Doctors without patients. No one bleeds. Teachers in uncrowded classrooms. No yelling at students. New families without pain or sorrow. Journalists writing up and taking photos of eternal love. They’re all from Gaza.
In Heaven, the new Gaza is free of siege. It is taking shape now.
(Vertaling Fady Joudah)
I Grant You Refuge
1.
I grant you refuge
in invocation and prayer.
I bless the neighborhood and the minaret
to guard them
from the rocket
from the moment
it is a general’s command
until it becomes
a raid.
I grant you and the little ones refuge,
the little ones who
change the rocket’s course
before it lands
with their smiles.
2.
I grant you and the little ones refuge,
the little ones now asleep like chicks in a nest.
They don’t walk in their sleep toward dreams.
They know death lurks outside the house.
Their mothers’ tears are now doves
following them, trailing behind
every coffin.
3.
I grant the father refuge,
the little ones’ father who holds the house upright
when it tilts after the bombs.
He implores the moment of death:
“Have mercy. Spare me a little while.
For their sake, I’ve learned to love my life.
Grant them a death
as beautiful as they are.”
4.
I grant you refuge
from hurt and death,
refuge in the glory of our siege,
here in the belly of the whale.
Our streets exalt God with every bomb.
They pray for the mosques and the houses.
And every time the bombing begins in the North,
our supplications rise in the South.
5.
I grant you refuge
from hurt and suffering.
With words of sacred scripture
I shield the oranges from the sting of phosphorous
and the shades of cloud from the smog.
I grant you refuge in knowing
that the dust will clear,
and they who fell in love and died together
will one day laugh.
(Vertaling Huda Fakhreddine)
Hieronder de originele versie van het gedicht, voorgedragen door Randa Awad.
Klik voor een indrukwekkende video met teksten van Hiba Abu Nada, vertaald in het Frans.
En hier vind je nog meer gedichten van haar.
Op 21 oktober 2024, een jaar nadat Hiba was vermoord, schreef haar zus Somaia een brief om haar te eren en de herinnering aan haar levend te houden. Deze brief kunt u hier lezen.
“Everything genuine reminds me of you, Heba.” By Somaia Abu Nada
Dear Heba,
Do you know how difficult it is for an ordinary person like me to describe a distinguished writer like you? My English vocabulary feels too limited to capture your essence. Yet I know how much you cherish these scattered letters when they come together to create something meaningful.
It feels almost unfair for me to have grown up admiring your every step, holding your hand, and always dreaming of getting closer to your level of perfection. As your younger and only sister, your courage to speak out about yourself and our people has inspired me to become who I am today. You were the first person to teach me who we are as Palestinians, and why it is so important to write about our lives. I still remember you were the first hand that held mine on my way to kindergarten. I remember how you used to save part of our pocket money so we could buy sweets after school.
It’s been a year since I last talked to you. I find myself asking how I can reach out to you. When I look to the sky, I think about sending my voice to you. Sometimes, I try to speak to you when I’m alone or even in the middle of a crowd. I whisper, “How are you today?” “Are you happy?” “Have you found your everlasting paradise?”
I try to talk to you whenever I see a butterfly, a flower, a sunset, a sunrise, a beautiful baby, or a cute kitten; whenever I feel a cool breeze or warm sunshine; when I come across a lovely notebook, an elegant pen, an interesting recipe; when I smell an enchanting perfume, hear a silly joke, discover a new song, or stumble upon a classic place, or simply when I gaze at the night sky. Everything genuine reminds me of you, Heba.
I feel delighted when you visit me in my dreams. But there isn’t enough time in a dream to fill you in on all the details of a year packed with life.
It’s been a year! 365 days without your smile, without your boundless kindness, without our sisterly bond. I might be getting better; recently, I found myself able to cry over you. I want to cry every second. Life has become endless shades of black and white without you.
Her Childhood
Heba was born in June of 1991, at the dawn of summer. She was always enchanted by the season—the warmth, the endless blue sky, and the gentle embrace of the sea. Heba was the eldest child, my mother’s firstborn. She came into this world in Saudi Arabia, where my parents lived at the time due to my father’s job as a nurse. My mother, far from her own family and with my father working long shifts at the hospital, devoted all her time to Heba. Heba was nurtured with love, wisdom, and learning from a young age. My mother taught her English, verses of the Qur’an, Arabic literature, religion, and science. By the age of six, Heba surpassed her classmates, excelling in every subject.
As Heba grew, she became a caretaker to her siblings. My earliest memories are of her guiding me and our younger brother to kindergarten, holding our hands. She was a steady presence in our lives, always leading us forward. Growing up in a family with working parents only strengthened the bond between us as siblings. Heba was both mother and father to all of us. She invented wonderful games and always ensured the house was tidy before our parents came home. Even as a child, Heba was our protector, shielding us from anyone who might cause harm.
Heba had a vivid and unique imagination. I remember the fantastical stories she would weave of kingdoms in space inhabited by fairies striving to save the universe. Every day after school, she would gather my brothers and me together and spin new episodes filled with wonder. Her storytelling was rich with vivid imagery, compelling characters, intricate plots, and thoughtful endings. Each day, I would eagerly await the next installment of her tale.
Heba’s creativity extended beyond storytelling. She would bring her characters to life with beautifully illustrated drawings. Her art was a mirror to her vibrant imagination, capturing the essence of the worlds she dreamt up.
Her Education and Accomplishments
Heba’s love for books and poetry began at a very young age. By the time she was ten, she had already written her first metrical poem. Her shelves were always brimming with books and papers—the words that shaped her world.
In 2008, our uncle was killed by the Israeli occupation. Heba loved him deeply, and his loss devastated her. She channelled all her grief into writing, transforming her pain into poetry. This tragic event marked a change in Heba’s personality, and a turning point in her journey as a writer. From that moment, her creative output grew, ranging from metrical poems to free verse, stories, songs, and prose.
Over the years, Heba’s writing abilities developed significantly. She wrote lyrical plays about Palestine and co-authored three poetry collections: Abjadiet Alqied Al-Akheer, Gaza Poet, and Al-Asef Al-Ma’koul. Her work earned her numerous local awards, so many that we dedicated an entire shelf in our home to her prizes.
Alongside her passion for writing, Heba pursued her academic journey with equal determination. She earned her BA in Biochemistry in 2013, followed by a Higher Diploma in Education Methodologies in 2015. In 2016, she completed one semester in Interior Design Engineering. By 2018, she began her master’s degree in Clinical Nutrition. Before October, Heba was preparing to defend her thesis; it was titled: ‘The Effectiveness of Total Energy and Protein Intake on Lean Mass Among Cancer Patients Receiving Chemotherapy in Gaza Strip, Palestine.’
Heba’s literary talent was recognized far and wide. She won first place in the “We Will Return to It” writing competition and, in 2017, secured second place in the Al-Shariqa Novel Award. She also earned fourth place in the “Gaza Poet” competition.
Despite her many achievements, Heba always dreamed of seeing the the world beyond Gaza’s walls. Unfortunately, due to the ongoing siege and the many obstacles Gazans face when attempting to travel (such as obtaining permits from neighboring countries and exit approvals from the occupying forces), Heba was unable to fulfill that dream.
Her Last Days
“I am satisfied. I am calm. There is nothing I am afraid of. You don’t have to worry.” Heba repeated these phrases often in her final days.
When we received the news that we had to evacuate our homes and move to what was called a “safe zone,” I had a heated argument with my family, insisting we should leave the North. But Heba was resolute—she wanted to stay in our home. After much debate, we all agreed to evacuate. Heba, however, was the last to leave the house. I waited for her, watching as the massive crowds rushed to escape. In the chaos, I lost sight of her. I kept moving, looking back constantly, hoping to catch a glimpse of her.
Eventually, I saw her. Heba was carrying her belongings and walking slowly, as if savoring each step. I imagined her quietly saying goodbye to every corner of our home, bidding farewell to the trees, the rooms, the memories, the laughter, and the celebrations. Heba sat beside me on the car ride south. She rested her head on my shoulder, we held hands, and she cried. Leaving our home was heartbreaking for Heba, but witnessing the displacement of her people weighed on her even more.
When we arrived at our aunt’s house, Heba made it her mission to spread calm and to ease our fears. Every time I flinched at the sound of bombings, she held my hand tightly, reassuring me. She went out of her way to help all of us, telling us that we would be okay and that all of this would end soon. I can still see her smile; it never left her face. That smile was like a balm, soothing our hearts and letting us know that everything would be alright.
There was a swing at my aunt’s house, and Heba loved sitting on it, quietly enjoying the moment. On her last day, Heba took a nap in the afternoon. When she woke up, she saw me sitting with my cousins. She smiled and waved at me without saying a word. Her face seemed to glow with a peaceful brightness. She walked lightly, almost as if she were floating, humming a sweet melody. She looked like she had woken up from a beautiful dream. Maybe she knew it would be her last day on earth. She didn’t speak much to any of us that day; her mind seemed far away, lost in thought. She just hummed and smiled. That’s how she went, with a smile, leaving us to wonder what dream she’d had that afternoon, a dream that carried her so gently into the quiet.
Days after Heba was killed, I found myself remembering her absence at my thesis defense. She had spent countless days helping me prepare, so filled with excitement and joy for me. She wanted everything to be perfect. When the supervisors were about to announce the approval of my thesis, I looked around the room, searching for her. But Heba wasn’t there. A few moments later, she appeared. I asked, “Where have you been?” She smiled and replied, “I thought you might not have enough flowers, so I went to bring you a bouquet.”
Though it has been a year, I still find myself waiting for you, Heba, to show up again, holding another bouquet for me, ready to share a new story spun from your wild imagination.
(Somaia Abu Nada is the younger sister of the late Palestinian writer Heba Abu Nada. A former Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant, she holds a B.A. in English Literature and an M.A. in Translation Studies. Somaia is currently pursuing a second Master’s degree in Applied Intercultural Communication at Trinity College Dublin. Throughout her career, she has worked as a teacher, writer, translator, and coordinator.)
Ibrahim Al Sultan
Ibrahim Al Sultan is een Palestijnse kunstenaar uit Gaza. Hij studeert biomedische wetenschappen en bezocht net voor de oorlog in Gaza uitbrak een congres in Nablus op de Westbank. Nu kan hij niet meer terug naar huis. Wanhopig probeert hij contact te onderhouden met zijn ouders, broers en zussen. Hun familiehuis in het Jabalia kamp is verwoest en de familie is op drift. Voor Ibrahim is het elke dag weer afwachten of hij contact kan hebben met zijn familie en wat de berichten zijn. Om zijn spanning af te reageren schrijft hij gedichten.
Zie https://www.outlookindia.com/international/the-earth-was-a-homeland-poems-for-palestine-weekender_story-341192
Zijn werk is in juni 2024 gepubliceerd onder de titel Human Identity. A Portrait of Gaza, Palestine.

Hieronder enkele van zijn gedichten in de reeks Poems from Gaza:
I will die now
I will die now to see God
I will carry my soul with me
I will be free
From the cage of this body
That encircles my heart
Here I will be free
And I will not be broken
I will release the birds of this heart
Birds of peace
In a sky that has not known peace
And has not left a dream for mankind
I will release them all at last
Birds of my freedom
And the remnants of my smile
And I will accept my loneliness
And my death
As a sacrifice for you, O God
Will this ruin stop?
Will the torment be erased in our place?
I will be a sacrifice for peace for humanity
For that homeland and child
For every mother and father
I will be a sacrifice for a life, not for salvation
I will die
For a cup of coffee from the earth
Next to my father and in front of my mother’s eyes
Will you accept, O God?
I will die
And whatever remains of me, take it and burn it and scatter it
For the remaining birds of peace
For the rest of the dreams
And I will go to you, O God, will you answer?
I will go to you in the world of dreams
With my heart and the birds of peace
To light the candle of peace and security
Here in my heart is a noise of roses and flowers
And in my hand a pen that writes a poem of peace
Will this ruin stop now, O God?!
In the Void
I sit alone,
Occupying a space of me and it,
Trying to understand what is going on in this existence,
I seek the goal and purpose,
The answers are not as easy as they seem.
In the void,
I strive to achieve myself!
I search for the truth,
Truth is relative!
I feel that nothingness surrounds me on all sides,
Life in the noise of dreams frightens and terrifies me.
In the void, there is a lot of pain,
And endless questions,
Existence and nothingness are part of life,
Pain and suffering are part of existence.
In the void, I feel nostalgic,
I search for something to keep me going,
I try to create something from nothingness,
In the void, I make my dream,
To rebel against reality to make it a reality,
I search for beauty to touch it,
I try to spread love in existence!
Is life worth living and experiencing?
In the void, I search for salvation,
I know that existence and nothingness are intertwined,
I look to the past and dream of the future,
And I see nothing but a stubborn illusion,
I know that it is impossible to live without hope.
But hope is the biggest lie that a person can believe.
All things are mirages
Nothing is yours
You are a visitor, always dreaming and still waiting
What are you waiting for?
Nothing is yours
All that has been said has been said
You are marginal and less than a number
Do not wait for salvation
Run to it
And cast off your chains
You are in the holy valley!
So it is said, do not believe the prophecies
All that has been said has been said
You are a visitor, always waiting for mirages.
Heba Zaqout (1984 – 2023)
Heba Zaqout was beeldend kunstenaar en docent. Ze werd in 1984 geboren in het Al Bureij vluchtelingenkamp in Gaza. Zij volgde een kunstopleiding aan de Al-Aqsa universiteit in Gaza en werkte in het onderwijs. Daarnaast was ze actief in het Dar Al Kalima kunstencentrum in Gaza-Stad. In 2021 had ze een solo-expositie in Tulkarem met de titel My Children in Quarantaine met werk naar aanleiding van de corona epidemie.
Haar schilderijen zijn levendig, speels en met oog voor detail. Ze getuigen van de liefde voor Palestijnse vrouwen en kinderen, hun dagelijks leven, hun huizen, kerken, moskeeën en gebouwen. Ook maakte Zaqout veel schilderijen van Al Quds (Jeruzalem), de heilige stad die ze zelf nooit kon bezoeken. In haar werk geeft ze het Palestijnse erfgoed en de Palestijnse identiteit weer en drukt gevoelens van vrijheid en schoonheid uit.

In een video van 28 september zegt ze: ‘We weten allemaal dat er politieke spanningen zijn in Gaza die het leven hier niet gemakkelijk maken. Als ik aan het schilderen ben, probeer ik te reflecteren op deze negatieve gevoelens en me ervan te bevrijden. Door mijn kunst breng ik een boodschap over aan de hele wereld over de Palestijnse zaak en de Palestijnse identiteit.’
Heba werd op 13 oktober vermoord door een Israelisch bombardement samen met twee van haar vier kinderen. Ze laat een echtgenoot en twee kinderen achter.
Een overzicht van haar schilderijen is te zien op outsidein.org.uk/news/a-tribute-to-heba-zaqout/
Reem Hamadaqa
Op 2 maart 2024 werden 14 familieleden van Reem Hamadaqa vermoord bij een bombardement. In een echo van het gedicht van Refaat Alareer (“if I die, you must live to tell my story”) beschrijft zij de tragedie die haar overkwam.

The night Israel killed my family
On March 2, Israel wiped out four generations of my family in one night. An Israeli strike at about midnight killed 14 people in my family. It took the very essence of my life, my most precious beloveds, and marked me as a “survivor.”
“Go to the south, or we’ll bring this school down on your heads,” was the warning Israeli soldiers sent us when we first decided to leave our home in northern Gaza. At that point, my family had survived 40 long days of bombing, often receiving dozens of displaced people into our home. After that message, we were forced to flee.
Our first stop was a nearby UNRWA school. Those were our first steps in the journey of looking for an unclear notion called “safety.” We left and walked on foot for over six hours, into the sun. We eventually made it to the south, and in the end, my family was killed in the “safe” zone where the Israeli occupation had told us to go.
Killed at midnight
We survived nearly 100 days at my maternal uncle’s house in Khan Younis. This was not a better place for getting food or water, but it was supposed to be designated as “safe.” His house was located in Block 89, which the occupation designated as a “green” block. For this reason, we stayed there and did not flee. But we were already displaced.
The house was full of a dozen women and children, and on March 2, the intense bombing began at around 10:30 p.m.
About an hour later, I had my last look at my parents, my sisters, my cousins, my grandma, and sadly, my whole life, although I didn’t know it at the time. I read the third chapter of a novel. I chatted with my parents. We called my sister, displaced in Rafah in a tent. I teased my younger sister. I went to sleep, unknowingly closing the final chapter of my life.
I woke up to the massive bombings, the kind that are essentially a series of continuous explosions.
Terrified, I woke up, screaming. My father and mother stood beside the door. Heba, my older sister, stood beside me. We screamed. Through the window, everything I saw in front of the house was on fire. These scenes echoed how our hearts felt.
“Dad! Do not open the door!” we screamed. Within seconds, the house was on our heads. I felt the walls and ceiling collapsing, and the room exploded in my face. I saw Dad’s and Mon’s backs, and I felt Heba standing beside me, screaming. I saw Ola, sleeping, not bothered by the massive explosion.
I woke up in the rubble.
The moon was full. It was so dark that it was probably midnight, and it was so cold. Winter had not yet left us. All alone, I found myself stuck within the rubble and unable to move.
As much as I had read stories about how it felt to be stuck under the rubble, it was never what I had imagined. I could not tell how long I was unconscious. Once I woke up, I thought I was dreaming. A nightmare. It was so much pain.
I screamed my lungs out, looking for something I did not know. I removed the rocks that covered my hands, my chest, and my belly. They were heavy, but my breathing was heavier. I waited for the unknown.
I heard my uncle screaming, calling for his sons, and I heard a man running away from the tanks, calling my uncle coming from behind. I was incapable of removing the rubble from my legs. After nearly an hour, my brother and cousin, who lived in the opposite house, found me. Miraculously, Ahmad rescued me. He lifted tons of rocks covering my body.
Tanks instead of ambulances
Ahmad lifted me and ran, carrying me on his back. Each step and move he made shattered my soul out of pain. He took me to his house, just meters away. This house had been hit, too. Shards of glass and furniture covered everything and cut whoever entered. Ahmad put me down in there.
Children and women sat in horror in the dark as shells fired from nearby tanks surrounded us. They were in shock that these houses had been targeted even though broken glass had showered over us. But to me, it was clear. I was pulled from under the rubble, my face and clothes burnt, covered in blood and dust.
Moments later, my sister, then living at a nearby home, ran into the house after an attack destroyed the building she had been staying in with her husband and her five children. The house had collapsed over their heads. Five young children in tattered, seemingly burnt clothes stood there. All of them were alive and well. She pulled them all out of the rubble, miraculously unscathed.
We called an ambulance, and we called the ICRC, but our calls went unanswered. Although the block we were in, which was bombed, was a “green” one, which meant it was supposed to be safe, the area was now considered “red” due to the invasion, and the ambulances would not come. The tanks and bulldozers invaded instead. The ambulances said, “There are dozens of cases like you. There are dozens of martyrs and wounded. We cannot come.”
They added, “The area is dangerous. May god help you.”
Trapped
Within half an hour, Israeli tanks and bulldozers besieged the whole area. I covered my whole body with a blanket; otherwise, broken glass would have left unforgettable scars on my face.
As we heard the unceasing Israeli artillery shelling get closer, women and children hid in a back room. It was only me, unable to move, and my uncle, rescued but completely and severely burnt, lying near the balcony. My brother, sister, and cousin helplessly went in search of other survivors. They pulled out three of my cousins, Hani, 24, Shams, 16, and Muhammad, 18. As they were getting them out, shells targeted them nonstop. Hani and Shams were completely burnt and broken. Muhammad was bleeding. None of them received any medical treatment. All of them bled to death. All of them had dreams and goals. They were all killed.
As the bombs fell, the whole family hid, each mother with her children. Men went to get any others who were screaming for help. I was moved again to the room everyone was in. Minutes later, an Israeli tank fired a burning shell into the room beside us. The wall fell on my sister’s kids. They were not lucky. The room was set ablaze, a conflagration in seconds.
Kids were trapped under the rubble. The door and the window were sealed shut due to the pressure. My brother tried to break the window. He threw the kids from above as everyone in the room suffocated. Broken is better than burnt, after all. Another Israeli shell was fired. The door was blown wide open and fell toward me. Every mother screamed for her kids. Everyone ran.
I saw Ahmad holding Maryam, my 8-year-old niece, dead. Her long blonde hair swung, blood covering all of her little face, her eyes, her nose, her ears. She bled out. Anas, a 3-year-old, did not bleed a drop of blood. We thought he was asleep. His face and hands were still warm. He was like an angel.
My sister held her two lifeless babies for the whole night in her arms. She kept trying to check their breath the whole time. She called the ambulance in vain.
She asked for their help over the phone. “How can I know if they’re still alive or dead?!”
With the relentless bombardment, the family was divided. No sounds were any longer heard from beneath the rubble. My parents and my sisters did not utter a sound. No one knows if they were killed by shockwaves, bled to death, or suffocated.
We ran away looking for shelter. The sound of the tanks and bulldozers drew nearer. If we did not flee, they would have dragged us and killed us, running over our bodies. I left my family behind. Ahmad bore me on his back, and I left them there, screaming.
We spotted the tanks on the main road and hid in a nearby tent. We waited for long 15 hours until we decided to run from the tent, no matter what happened. I fainted many times. I waited for my family to be rescued. I waited to know what happened with my wounded cousins. I waited to know what happened with Maryam and Anas. “My mum was diagnosed with diabetes,” I kept insisting. “She cannot make it if she bleeds.”
Survivors
At about 11:00 a.m. the next morning, my cousin succeeded in getting an animal-drawn cart to take me, my uncle, and the martyrs to the hospital. The cart was full. I recognized the four people I was looking for. “Those are my family, my parents, and two sisters,” I said to myself. No one uttered a word.
I asked my brother, “Are all of them dead?” He did not reply, but his teary eyes did. They left me there, beside the martyrs. I saw Maryam’s long hair swinging, but other tiny feet appeared, too. “Why are Maryam’s feet that tiny?” I asked. “This is Anas.”
I asked for my wounded cousins. “Where is Shams? What about the boys?” I was told they bled to death. We went two long kilometers to al-Rashid Street, and then to the sea. We waited for the ambulance. People along the whole road were crying. “I survived,” they said.
I lost 14 precious people from my family. I lost my parents, Sahar, 51, and Alaa’, 59. I lost my sisters, Heba, 29, and Ola, 19. I lost my grandmother, Shifa’, 80. I lost my niece and nephew, Maryam, 8, and Anas, 3. I lost my maternal uncle and his whole family, Ahmad, 49, Samaher, 43, his sons, Farid, 26, Hani, 25, and Muhammad, 18, and his daughters, Sundus, 21, and Shams, 16. All of them were deprived of achieving their dreams. All of them were youths and full of life that Israel uprooted.
My fourteen people did not have the luxury of being buried immediately. Only after two weeks, and only after the tanks and soldiers left the area could we bury them. We have not yet been able to bury my uncle’s wife, who is still stuck under the rubble.
I am left with many scars, both physical and psychological, and I have a difficult recovery period ahead. But I, Reem, despite these serious wounds, will almost certainly survive.
If my family must die, then I must live. To tell their story.
Op 14 augustus 2024 schreef Reem Hamadaqa een blog over hoe het is om in een tent te leven (ook gepubliceerd op de site Mondoweiss):
As my eyes roam across the wide sky before me, the scene is dominated by the unorganized tents I see wherever I look. I also see palm trees, fighter jets, drones, kites too, but there are no tall houses anymore. All the high-rises in Gaza City, as far as the eye can see, have been leveled. My home is among them.
Genocide has a sound. It is the buzzing of drones and the sound that a building makes when it is turned into rubble. Amid the destruction wrought by bulldozers and tanks, each of us has been forced to start our own multi-chapter journey of displacement.
Living far from home due to displacement hurts a person’s heart. But at least my family and I were initially displaced to other houses.
After the final house where we sought shelter was bombed and leveled to the ground, we had no place to go. Like hundreds of thousands of other displaced Gazans who have no place, too, our last resort was to make a “tent.”
Building a Tent
When you find yourself homeless on the streets of Gaza during the current genocide, you have two choices.
One of them is to buy a ready-made tent. In theory, these tents were meant to be distributed to the displaced by aid groups, but nearly every single family living in a ready-made tent that I asked said they had bought it. While each tent has the large word “AID” written across the side, people are buying them at prices ranging from $200 to $1000, according to their type, height, and the room inside.
Your other option is to build your own tent. This requires a number of men to help and the cost of equipment. Wood, a tent covering, and blankets are needed. As nearly every family fled under fire without taking anything, you need to buy every single piece.
Building a tent is not that much cheaper than buying a ready-made one. Each tent has a different price according to height, space, pieces of wood, and type of covering. A piece of wood costs about $15 to $25, but you will need many pieces to set the tent up. Blankets and tent coverings cost nearly $70 to $100. Prices vary according to your timing and when you want to build your tent. For example, the cost of supplies always rises when people have been forced to flee to a new location.
Building the tent takes time, effort, and money. You also need a plan to build it efficiently. In the meantime, since building a tent requires days or maybe weeks, you will likely be forced to sleep in the street.
If you succeed in getting all the needed supplies, looking for an empty place may hinder the whole effort. Sleeping in the streets could be your only choice.
Gazans have been forced to flee from one place to another multiple times. And they had to go through all of these previous steps many times. Because you need to build another tent every time you flee.
Your tent is your whole house. You must now fit your old house into a 4×4 meter area: the kitchen, the bedrooms for each family member, the living room, and a small bathroom behind it.
All tent types are hot, no matter the material. Sand is your floor, and the sky is your ceiling. You wake up at dawn. When the sun rises the light brightens the tent, and the heat and buzzing flies invade your sleep. You have no other choice but to leave the blazing tent. You escape looking for shadows.
Tents are built only for sleeping and for nighttime use. During daylight, being inside one is unbearable. Just take your chair, pillow — or phone if it’s charged — and search for a cooler place.
To make your tent your house, you need to buy every single tool from scratch. Since many houses have been bombed, finding utensils, blankets, clothes, and other things becomes impossible. And if you do find them, their prices have increased tenfold.
Not even a drop of water is found at home. It has become a luxury.
And when we talk about water, we mean water for washing, bathing, cooking, and other tasks — not filtered drinking water. Finding water to drink has been an impossible mission since last November.
“I admit that war has challenged us all, but not being able to drink filtered water aches my head,” our neighbor recently commented desperately. My brother added, “finding both water to use and filtered water to drink is a luxury that aches both my heart and my head.”
To find water, you need to walk vast miles to get some and then carry it back yourself. To fill a 15-liter water container, you have to walk long miles and pay about a dollar or two. Carrying these water gallons back is a harsh challenge under the sun’s heat.
If you’re lucky and have a cart, you can use this transport to get water from farther places. This is a luxury. Not all people here at the camp have a cart, though, so people borrow others so they can collect as much water as possible without having to carry it themselves.
Sometimes water trucks come so people can fill their gallons. But the huge number of people who need water overwhelms the very small number of trucks that arrive. You hear the sound of the trucks arriving, and then you see people running, men, women, girls, kids, and elderly people with their gallons in their hands. They all gather, shout, run, hand over their gallons, and get wet by the running water. If you’re lucky enough, you’ll have your gallons, or some of them, filled, but most times you’ll return helplessly, trying to think of other possible options that you don’t have.
Roaming the entire daylight hours looking for life’s basics makes your body and soul exhausted. As the weather gets a little bit better at night, you sit in front of your tent. Sand is your floor and the sky is your ceiling. You start counting the shining stars, but when some start moving fast, and you know they are not stars. Drones are buzzing, poised to kill more women and children, to end many people’s life chapters, as well as those of their families and friends.
I hope soon that only kites will fill the skies. And the unorganized tents will disappear, and our high-rise houses will return to fill the landscape as far as I can see.

Op 2 februari 2025 schreef Reem Hamadaqa, schrijver en vertaler, het onderstaande blog over de terugtocht van haar familie naar het noorden van Gaza tijdens het staakt-het-vuren.
Now that we are returning home will our martyrs return too?
Many of us are returning to northern Gaza, gasping for life. We have no choice but to stand up and recover. But what does this mean for our martyrs? Will they go back home too?
I went to sleep on the night of October 6, 2023 thinking about the long day I would have the next day. I was planning to teach my eighth-grade students the grammar rule ‘used to’ so that they could describe stuff they used to do in the past, but do no longer more. After that I would have to run to my three-hour lecture to present my presentation about ‘translating dialects’ that I had been awake the whole night preparing. The main question I was going to speak about was the distinction between the translatable and the untranslatable, or what to keep and what not.
Of course, I did not give either presentation.
It feels like I went to sleep on October 6 and woke up on the morning of January 19, 2025, the day the ceasefire was announced. I am suddenly back in life these tiring 466 days, full of killing, starving, and displacing Gazan people.
It seemed those days would never come to an end. “After the war ends, I will do so and so;” “If the war ends, I promise I’ll…” These were my family’s slogans the whole time we managed to ‘survive.’ It ended. Yet after uprooting my parents, siblings, and relatives. It came to an end, though.
In the war’s first days, countless displaced relatives and friends started popping up at our house in Gaza City. One family after another arrived due to the barbaric explosions. Seven kids, six women, and ten men were in our house, and the numbers grew by the day. My 80-year-old grandma ran under the rockets and bombs. Another hajja. We slept on the floor: three families, many children, and scared faces. Another five kids, scared. Dozens of children and women.
Each day, Gazans received Israeli warnings to leave their houses, and empty their neigborhoods. Brutal bombarding forced people to evacuate under rockets and sheer fear. We resisted for 40 days, experiencing every single type of bomb, rocket, missile, tank, and other weapons we didn’t even know. Every war has felt like our first experience with one, but surviving this one was really an impossible mission.
‘Eat less, drink less,’ were tips we had to follow. No drinking water. No bathrooms. No laundry. We somehow got used to electricity cuts; rockets might light the sky for seconds. It seemed that there were many aspects of life that became “used to.” My students could have spent days using everyday examples to apply their new grammar rule.
But we did not get used to it. We were obliged to leave our houses, to leave our city. Frightened, we were besieged at a UNRWA school by the Israeli tanks and bulldozers. Tired, we walked for six hours the whole way from Gaza to Al-Nuseirat camp, facing the sun heat, and the soldiers. Humiliated, we started an endless journey of displacement.
My family has unknowingly slept its very last night at our house. My mother baked us bread and manaqeesh, prepared us breakfast for the last time. My sisters tidied up their room for the last time. The Israeli tanks surrounded the neighborhood. Amid the sounds of explosions and the smell of gunpowder, my father opened the windows a little bit so that they might not break from the bombings, and closed our house’s door, for the last time. He made sure all were safe. He bid his house a last farewell, unknowingly.
Abu Muhammad, who lived in the opposite house, did the same thing, closing the door and assuring his family was safe. Abu Mahmoud, our other neighbor, needed kidney dialysis for weeks, but could not receive it because the hospitals were already surrounded by tanks and bulldozers and soldiers, and the roads monitored by military airplanes and bombs. He made sure his family was OK and closed his house door as well. For a last time.
We were displaced. And now you can imagine how much stuff a frightened displaced person could take out of her/his house? One bag. We have been cold, afraid, displaced, and hungry since November 2023.
Breaking news constantly reported stories of residential homes being bombed on top of the heads of its residents. Families we knew. All gone under the rubble. Our turn came, too. In a supposed ‘safe’ zone in the South, designated as ‘safe’ by Israel, we were killed. My family’s tragic and untimely death was the result of not ceasing fire earlier.
Israel kept shedding more and more of the Palestinian blood, slaughtering more fathers and mothers, and killing more children. It killed my whole family. The family with whom I left Gaza City for a ‘safer’ place, as Israel demanded, was slaughtered. Fourteen people, my sister’s babies, my mother, my father, my sisters, and my grandma: two children, seven women, and five men were killed. Israel kills Palestinians no matter what age or gender. It does not matter at all if they were a fighter or not.
Abu Muhammad, his wife, and their eldest son were killed, too. In the ‘safe’ south, they were killed. Again, Israel sheds the Palestinian blood, no matter what. Wouldn’t their lives have been saved if the fire was ceased earlier? They left four daughters and three sons fighting life alone. Abu Mahmoud died, too, from his illness, needing a medical treatment he could not get. But what if the fire was ceased long ago? Long ago before our forced displacement, long ago before our killing, long ago before our slaughter?
Our parents and our neighbors were not allowed to die in their houses, in their beds. And their houses which magically survived endless massive bombarding will not be welcoming back its residents. Some neighbors, like mine, were tragically killed, leaving behind ‘sole survivors’ in their families with physical and psychological wounds and pains of loss. Others were killed in their houses, or due to bombarding in the neighborhood. Others were kidnapped at the checkpoint, and haven’t been seen since, leaving behind families, loved ones, and kids.
Living in shattered tents, summer and winter, we hardly found food and water. Scorched by the sun and drowned by the rain, we experienced heat and flies and coldness. All our possessions and blankets were soaked by rain, and our kids were sick, cold, and hungry. People in the tents yearned for a ceasefire agreement for too long. Each evening, they started screaming and rejoicing, hoping to stop this genocide. The morning of January 19, 2025, was the unfulfilled dream for tens of thousands of martyrs. Now it is time for Palestinian families to reunite with their beloveds in Northern Gaza.
My childhood friends and I will be coming back home, parentless with shattered souls. We evacuated seeking safety but will come back all alone, looking for shattered memories.
But those of us who lost our families will still meet our loved ones, our homeland, our houses, and our neighborhoods where we were raised. We will love them even more, and feel a tie to land even more.
But now I don’t think I could return and present my ideas for my presentation on translation. We have been screaming our lungs out for 466 days and nights. Now I do not know what is translatable and what is not. Or what we shall keep and what we shall not.
In my presentation I wanted to use the translation of dialects to explore the nuance of language and how cultures and identities intertwine. Yet, the genocide imposed on my people in Gaza has shattered all my interpretations. Our stories were left unheard, and the world failed to translate our cries into action. Language should have united the world in response, but instead, we went unheard. We shouted. We hoped. We prayed. We tweeted, wrote, and sang. The problem was no longer language. Gaza’s suffering revealed a world that simply was not listening.
Alaa, my nephew, took his first steps at our house and left Gaza City when he was ten months old. As his father started talking about the house we left behind, his room, and his toys, the little boy stood up and firmly told his dad, “Daddy, stand up, let’s go now!”
We are going back, gasping for life. Recovering and standing up again are our only choices. Until our lives matter, until the Palestine cause matters, we will continue our struggle. But when will our martyrs go back home?
Ahmed Aldaalsa

Ahmed Aldaalsa is kunstenaar – zijn huis is verwoest, hij overleeft met zijn familie in een tent, nabij Rafah in Nuseirat. Hij heeft dus geen woning, laat staan een atelier, maar hij tekent, fotografeert en filmt zijn leven, het leven in Gaza. Ahmed heeft geëxposeerd in galeries en gaf cursussen aan kinderen. Dat is nu allemaal onmogelijk. Met materiaal dat voorhanden is, maakt hij tekeningen en schiet hij foto’s en video’s met zijn telefoon. Tekenen doet hij op z’n iPad, wanneer er even stroom is om ‘m op te laden.


„Hoe kan iemand alles wat hij bezit verliezen, zonder zijn verstand te verliezen?”
In tien maanden oorlog verloor Aldaalsa vrijwel alles wat hem lief was. Veel vrienden werden omgebracht bij de bombardementen. “Zij waren het belangrijkste in mijn leven. Dat ik hen kwijt ben, is iets onvoorstelbaars. Ik kan er niet te lang over na denken, dan raak ik moedeloos”. Van zijn huis in vluchtelingenkamp Nuseirat is nog weinig over. „Mijn stad en haar straten ben ik kwijt, net als een deel van mijn huis.” Na maanden van plek naar plek getrokken te zijn met zijn ouders, twee zusjes en broertje, keerde hij onlangs weer terug met zijn familie naar wat er over was van hun huis in Nuseirat.
„Het lukt me niet meer om mezelf goed uit te drukken. En ik kan er geen geschikt moment voor vinden. Er zijn belangrijkere zaken nu, en dat is proberen te overleven.” Ook de nodige materialen om überhaupt iets te kunnen maken, zoals papier, krijt en houtskool, zijn niet meer verkrijgbaar. „Na verloop van tijd is alles verdwenen. Ik heb niets meer, behalve mijn iPad en een Apple Pen. Daar teken ik nu op, maar dat kan ook niet altijd, omdat ik ze door het gebrek aan elektriciteit niet kan opladen.”
In augustus is er werk van Aldaalsa te zien in de expositie “Gaza ’24” in het Langhuis in Zwolle. Zijn tekeningen stuurde Aldaalsa per e-mail naar het Langhuis, waar sommige werken zijn uitgeprint en andere weer op groot formaat zijn ‘gematerialiseerd’ door een Zwolse zeefdrukker.
Hoe doe je dat, ervoor waken gek te worden terwijl je alles verliest? „Het enige wat me helpt, is er niet aan denken. Ik probeer nieuwe dingen te blijven doen. Sinds vorige week ga ik naar de sportschool; dat helpt. En voor de rest wil ik bij mijn familie zijn, zodat we in ieder geval bij elkaar zijn als er iets onverwachts gebeurt.”
Sama Hassan

Sama Hassan is schrijver en journalist, geboren in 1971. Ze heeft zeven bundels met korte verhalen gepubliceerd in het Arabisch. Haar werk is verschenen in The New Arab en Al-Ayyam, de dagelijkse krant uit Ramallah.
In de onderstaande “Fragments from a Gaza Nightmare” toont ze, via een handvol indringende korte scenes, de schokkende ervaringen die Gazanen moeten meemaken tijdens de genocide.
Dogs
She grew used to sleeping outside the tent to make sure the stray dogs wouldn’t harm the children, while her imagination ran wild with a thousand images of potential assaults. Despite the heavy stick in her hand, she understood she could never shield the children from the rockets and missiles. Night after night, she clings to her stick and weeps.
Two Arms
She sits outside the tent, waiting for her absent son to return. He stays away because he cannot bear to witness her heartbreak and disappointment at the sight of his amputated arm. She who’d believed salvation lay within his wholesome embrace.
Eid Clothes
Despite knowing how poor his father was, every Eid he asked for new clothes. Days before the feast, he’d obsessively repeated the same request: It’s time to replace these old, worn-out clothes. On the morning of Eid, he finally got his wish. They swapped his tattered garments for a burial shroud.
Posterity
I fear the war will claim me, and you’ll forget all about me, he told her, his voice laced with fear while the shells fell all around them. Her hand reflexively reached for her belly, and her eyes swam towards the tattered roof of the tent. Impossible, she replied.
White Lies
Every night, before he sleeps, he asks his mother about his missing arms. Each time, she reassures him that they will grow back overnight. Once morning comes, he discovers her deceit when he sees the neighbor’s child, armless, just like him.
The Swing
As he slept against his exhausted mother’s knee each night, he dreamt of playing on a swing that would soar as far from the ground as possible.
One night, he flew far, far away.
He rose up and up, never to descend onto the earth again.
Bird
His mother always scolded him for chasing after the birds, risking his life so that she had to step in and stop him. Little did she realize that he saw himself as a bird who, one day, would fly away from this grinding war, and she wouldn’t be able to save him then.
Death Certificate
I think there is no need to hold on to the children’s birth certificates, she told her husband, her tone dripping with desperate helplessness. He nodded in agreement, swallowing his own remorse. As the children slept, he wrote their names on their arms and pondered the sky.
Defeats
I don’t want to lose you in this crazy war. I’ve been defeated by everything else in this world, I whispered.
War leaves no room for anything, my beauty, he said. It seizes an idea before it can take shape in the mind and soul.
Pole
He was spent thinking of ways to save his children from the shelling outside their tent. Despairing of escape, he tied each child to a tent pole, sat down and waited.
Solid Back
I wish I had something solid to lean against. The tent’s flimsy fabric only increases my sense of loss, she told him as he sat facing her. He promptly changed position so that her back leaned against the solidity of his. Her smile died on her lips when a bullet ripped through the tent’s fabric, tearing a path through his back.
A Handful of Flour
When the aid trucks approach our tent, do not chase after them for flour, she warned her child. He remained silent, understanding that even if he were willing to do so for her sake and his starving little brothers, he risked suffering the same fate as his father, whose body they had brought back sprawled on the shoulders of the starved.
Lipstick
On the nights when she reflects on her elegant room in their house, now reduced to rubble in the distant city, she takes a deep breath, attempting to summon the lingering scent of the perfume her husband once cherished before tears flood her eyes. She reaches under the worn pillow resting on the floor of the tent, feeling for the familiar stick of lipstick. Then, she waits.
Love
I can’t believe our love brought us to this tent. How could you agree to consummate our marriage in this place? she whispered tearfully.
If only I knew how the homeland ended up in this camp, he answered, broken.
Dummy
Two young children were locked in a heated tug-of-war somewhere among the tents.
The first tugged to free the dummy’s hand, eager to locate the remaining parts for play.
The second was desperate to claim for burial the last remaining part of his baby sister.
Torn Dress
Did the Mukhtar hand you some food or a little money when you went to his tent? he asked her when she returned.
His mother did not respond. Tears streamed down her face as she huddled quietly in the corner of their makeshift tent, painstakingly stitching together the torn cloth across the front of her worn and tattered dress.
Tent Door
Close the door. The insects have feasted on our skin, he pleaded.
No! She responded. Every night, when our children rise from their graves to play, they will be guided by the light of the fire in my heart and run toward it. Can’t you see how all the tents look alike?
A Bottle of Milk
In search of a bottle of milk with which to silence her newborn’s hunger, she left him crying with other helpless infants, alongside a photo of a father killed months ago.
After a considerable distance, she finally managed to secure the milk from a truck distributing supplies to the displaced. By the time she hurried back to the tent, it had eviscerated into thick smoke.
She poured the milk out onto the ground where the tent had once been and screamed, Have you had your fill, my child?
The Embrace
Ever since his lover died in the war, he sifts through the rubble in search of the dead. When he comes across the lifeless arm of a man, he tenderly arranges it around the lifeless body of a woman, reminiscent of the way he used to embrace his beloved while strolling by the boundless sea, feeling like nothing could ever break them apart.
Amal al-Nakhala

Amal El-Nakhala is kunstenaar en cartoonist.
Zij is gevlucht uit Gaza en woont nu met haar familie in Cairo. De voortdurende oorlog en de verschrikkingen die ze heeft meegemaakt, verwerkt ze op een eigenzinnige manier in haar strips.
Drie strips en een aantal losse tekeningen zijn gebundeld in
A Normal Conversation in a Normal Household.
Een paar voorbeelden uit die bundel:


Ibrahim Nasrallah

Ibrahim Nasrallah (1954) is een vooraanstaande Palestijnse schrijver die opgroeide in Jordanië. Hij schreef het historische drieluik: Time of White Horses, The Lanterns of the King of the Galilee en Gaza Weddings. Onlangs verscheen de bundel Palestinian, Four Poems. (World Poetry, 2024). De gedichten in deze tweetalige bundel schreef hij naar aanleiding van de genocide in Gaza. Twee ervan zijn bewerkt tot een video (klik om ze te zien/horen):
Van het gedicht One Hundred Questions and More: a Child in Gaza asks You maakte Podium voor Palestina een video. Het gedicht wordt voorgedragen in het Arabisch door Randa Awad en de Engelse vertaling van Huda Fakhredinne is mee te lezen.
Asmaa Yassin
Studeerde Engelse literatuur en Engelse taalvaardigheid aan de Islamitische Universiteit van Gaza. Ze werkte als docent Engels en is nu vooral actief als journalist en publicist voor verschillende media. Onderstand artikel verscheen in The Nation.
The Women Who Remain in Gaza Will Never Leave Me
I survived eight terrible months of genocide. Now, I’m in exile—but I can’t stop thinking about the women who have remained. Although I am outside Gaza now, I can’t separate my mind or heart from the suffering of the women who are still there, enduring what I lived through, day and night, for eight long months. Their pain is still my pain.
From October 2023 to May 2024, the basic activities of my life were dictated by two things: Israeli bombs and my family’s endless battle to escape them. Every morning was consumed by trying to find food or warmth for my child— tasks that should have been simple but became nearly impossible as Israel’s “complete siege” of Gaza took its toll. When night fell, I couldn’t promise my son dinner or a safe place to sleep. Death felt imminent at every turn, yet there was nothing I could do to protect my family. I drowned in a feeling of terror and helplessness.
My son, who was then two-and-a-half, cried for water constantly. His small voice was cracked from thirst, but most of the time, I had none to give him. The little water we managed to find was contaminated, shared among thousands of displaced people crammed into the same shelter. If we were lucky, there would be enough for him just to wet his lips.
When he begged me for food, I had nothing but expired cans of whatever could be scavenged in the north of Gaza to give him. Watching my son eat expired food, his fragile body growing weaker, broke me. But how could I explain to him that this was all there was? How could I ease his hunger when my own stomach churned with emptiness?
I tried to convince my body that this should be enough. Cooking the food we could find was a battle in itself. With no gas, I had to rely on firewood. The smoke stung my eyes and choked my lungs. Every breath was a reminder of the world we had lost — our home gone, basic medical care facilities destroyed, our health deteriorating in ways we couldn’t control.
Needing to go to the bathroom was another heartbreak. I would stand in line for hours at the shelter, surrounded by tens of others with the same urgent need, each of us silently enduring the discomfort and indignity. Queuing for water was no different — it was a painful wait, standing in front of the aid truck with a growing sense of humiliation, hoping we’d get even a little before the water ran out. Each time, the shame and frustration cut deeper.
Then, in January, I found out I was pregnant. The discovery should have made me feel joyous. Instead, it was like another weight crushing me. I knew my health was more important than ever, but my body was constantly exhausted, and I ached with hunger. Fear seeped into every moment, even in sleep. We woke to explosions, the sound of artillery, gunfire, bombs — constant reminders that there was no safety, no escape.
My son would cling to me in the night, shaking in terror, and inside, I’d feel the baby kick in panic as if even in the womb, it could sense the danger around us. During the night, we huddled together for warmth, but even the shelter that was supposed to protect us offered little reprieve. The cold crept into everything.
As a mother, my first instinct was always to feed my starving son. But malnutrition had already taken hold of him, his father, and me. We spent our days desperately searching for anything to replace the vitamins and nutrients that we couldn’t find in the little food we had. During cold, rainy days, I wrapped him in my jacket, trying to protect his tiny hands from the biting wind, even as my own body trembled from the cold.
I felt a consuming guilt—knowing that while I tried to keep him warm, the baby inside me was also suffering, struggling for the same warmth I couldn’t provide. I couldn’t sleep. Every night brought exhaustion and overwhelming fear that I wasn’t doing enough to save my children.
On top of that, our repeated displacement was taking an immense emotional toll. I was cut off from my parents, the very people I needed most in that moment of terror. The pain of not being able to hold my mother, to collapse into her arms, to hear her tell me things were going to be okay, was agonizing. I wanted to hide, to escape the brutal reality, but there was no escape.
The days blurred together. My son would wake in the middle of the night, asking me if the explosions outside were fireworks. Even the act of breathing felt like a burden, each inhale filled with the anxiety of what might come next.
I watched as my husband’s health crumbled. His face grew hollow, his body weakened by hunger, the sickness from the contaminated water leaving him too weak to stand. He was so often the one who gave me strength, but now I was carrying both him and our son through each day, battling my own exhaustion as I tried to keep them alive. The fear of losing him, of being left to face this nightmare alone, hung over me like a shadow. But I had no time to dwell on it — there was always another explosion, another moment of panic, another day of trying to survive.
Eventually, the moment came when we decided to flee. It wasn’t a choice so much as an act of desperation. We left everything behind—our home, the memories of our life before the war. But fleeing didn’t bring relief. The roads were treacherous, the heat unrelenting, and each step away from Gaza felt like I was leaving behind a piece of myself.
Even as I moved toward safety, I couldn’t shake the shared pain of everyone still behind. The guilt gnawed at me, knowing that while I was escaping, thousands of women, mothers like me, were still trapped in that same nightmare.
We fled, but Gaza didn’t leave us. Every mother I left behind still endures the same horrors: cooking with firewood, struggling to keep her children warm, watching them grow weaker with hunger. I may have escaped, but I carry their suffering with me. Their fight for survival is my fight, and their survival is my survival.
Now, as I sit in relative safety, the cold I feel is nothing compared to what the women of Gaza still endure. Their strength fuels my own, and though my body may no longer tremble from hunger, the ache in my heart remains.
The women of Gaza—my friends, my sisters, my family—are still there, still fighting, still surviving against impossible odds. Their resilience, their hope, is the thread that binds us together. One day, I hope we will not just survive. We will live. We will live free from the fear and violence that have scarred our lives for so long. Until then, I hold their stories, their pain, and their strength in my heart.
Mahmoud Jouda
Mahmoud Jouda is schrijver, journalist en psycholoog. In 2024 werd zijn tweede roman uit het Arabisch vertaald naar het Nederlands onder de titel Een tuin voor verloren benen. (Uitgeverij Jurgen Maas, 2024). Podium voor Palestina maakte een video van de bespreking van dit boek.
Jouda schreef ook een essay voor de bundel Daybreak in Gaza.
Hieronder en belangwekkend citaat uit dit essay over zijn ervaring als schrijver in Gaza:
I am a writer and poet with published work that speaks of love, goodness and beauty. Yet Israel stops us telling the world about our shared humanity by besieging us with continuous killing and a blockade that suffocates every detail of our days, trapping our senses within suffering so we can write about nothing else, draining our emotions until the world grows tired of us from the magnitude of the tragedy we demonstrate. I don’t want my creativity to be linked to tragedy.
My ambition is to create in innocence, freedom and beauty. But Israel and the silent countries of the world insist on dehumanising us to justify siege and extermination.


Daybreak in Gaza
Deze bloemlezing, samengesteld door Mahmoud Muna en Matthew Teller, kwam uit in oktober (Saqi, 2024) en bevat bijna honderd getuigenissen van Gazanen over hun leven voor, na en tijdens de voortdurende bombardementen. In de bundel komen verhalen aan het licht die op allerlei manieren uitgewist en genegeerd worden en wordt de diepe menselijkheid van het dagelijks leven in Gaza onderstreept.
Een paar citaten uit het boek:
If only I had known – Hiba Almaqadma (March 2024)
In this war who am I? To the world it seems I am just a number, a person who is counted on a list of people displaced, people injured or people hungry and thirsty.
And if the next bomb is for me, I will be another number to add to the number of people killed – and then I will be forgotten.
I didn’t feel sorry for the books – Asmaa Mustafa (January 2024)
It is very simple. Here, young and old alike learn at the School of War on Gaza. Here, every day, a thousand stories are told and lived, a thousands wounds bleed. In our deep trauma, war has forced over two million Gazan Palestinians to learn through experience what schools don’t teach and what could never be read in textbooks.
Fragments and splinters – Basel El Maqusi (February 2024)
Time is fragmenting and paths are broken, not just the shrapnel that rips people into pieces, not just the shards that slice buildings in half. Human themselves are splintering, life is shredded, nothing is complete, nothing is perfect, everything is torn. People, buildings, streets, trees, tents, human rights.
Doubly victimized – Noor Swirki (January 2024)
Being a displaced woman is a tragedy. You don’t have your own privacy. You don’t have your own health routine. You don’t have your own pads, because we have a shortage of pads for our cycle, and we don’t have access to hygiene. I miss my home, I miss my bed, my clothes. I’m wearing men’s clothes because there are no women’s clothes that fit me in the market.
Cultivating hope – Khaldun Bshara (2023)
People subjected to colonization, which is inherently violent, inhumane and irrational, cannot be held to conventional notions of rationality. This does not imply that they lack rationality, but rather that they adopt a rationality that is forged by their abnormal situation. For the colonised, stripped of their land and space, lives and aspirations revolve around time, of which they possess an abundance. Time becomes the weapon of the vulnerable; from outside we may label it as sumud (steadfastness) or sabr (patience). Under the constant pressure of siege, in a world where justice seems unattainable, enduring hope and unlimited time are the essential forces that drive the calculations for otherwise incomprehensible actions.
Podium voor Palestina maakte een video van een verhaal uit deze bundel: Daytripping before the war door Caitlin Procter, in Nederlandse vertaling: Dagtocht door Gaza.
Een ander verhaal uit de bundel: De ballade van Lulu en Amina door Izeldin Bukhari is te lezen en te luisteren via VerhalenPost.
Publishers for Palestine
Publishers for Palestine (opgericht in oktober 2023) is een wereldwijd solidariteitscollectief van uitgevers die staan voor rechtvaardigheid, vrijheid van meningsuiting en de kracht van het geschreven woord in solidariteit met het Palestijnse volk.
Klik hier voor de bloemlezing die ze begin 2024 hebben uitgebracht.
Eind 2024 is een nieuwe bloemlezing uitgebracht.
Andere kunstvormen
Zonder te pretenderen volledig te zijn, zijn er behalve deze literaire getuigen natuurlijk nog meer kunstenaars die getuigen van het leven in Gaza.
De jonge rapper Abdelrahman al Shanti maakte deze rap die de wereld overging:
Zo maakte Joe Sacco een indrukwekkende strip: Footnotes on Gaza (NL vertaling: Gaza 1956).
Filmmakers zoals Mohamed Jabaly (regisseur van o.a. Ambulance) en de broers Tarzan en Arab Nasser (regisseurs van Degradé en Gaza Mon Amour) legden de magie van het dagelijks leven in Gaza vast. Ook de film The Idol van Hany Abu-Assad speelt in Gaza en geeft een goed beeld hoe het is om daar op te groeien. Heel veel fotografen hebben indrukwekkende beelden gemaakt en beschikbaar gesteld.
Visualizing Palestine brengt bijna dagelijks inzichtelijke visuals uit: visualizingpalestine.org/#visuals
Er zijn beeldende kunst projecten zoals het bijzonder originele Metro Project van Mohamed Abusal: abusalmohamed.com, en het digitale Sahab Museum in the Cloud: sahabmuseum.community


Andere beeldend kunstenaars: Hiba Zaqout, Malek Mattar, Mohammed Al Haj, Bayan Abu Nakhle, Ahmed Aldaalsa, Amal Alnakhala.
Fotografen die het leven in Gaza vastleggen: Osama Kahltout, Mohamed Salem.
Er is dans, van dabke tot streetdance; en er is muziek, van klassiek tot modern. Mohammed Assaf, opgegroeid in het Khan Younis vluchtelingenkamp, won in 2013 de Arab Idol zangcompetitie, nadat hij op onwaarschijnlijke en spectaculaire wijze een ticket voor de audities had verkregen. Dit verhaal is door de Palestijns-Nederlandse regisseur Hany Abu-Assad verfilmd in The Idol. Het winnende lied, A’li al kuffiyya, is hier te zien en horen: youtu.be/YDnAsplDdX8
En er zijn krachtige, levendige beelden van Parkour teams in Gaza: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMOYRHorngc
Bekijk de video over gehandicapte wielrenners in Gaza op www.gazasunbirds.org/
Mai al-Nakib schreef een prachtige column over de kracht van de Palestijnse pen.
Susan Abulhawa schreef een verslag van haar verblijf in Gaza in februari 2024: “Het is de hel.”
Er zijn gelukkig veel getuigenissen, indringend en van grote schoonheid. Daarom is het des te treuriger dat deze culturele productie nu wordt afgesneden en onmogelijk gemaakt. We zijn afhankelijk van deze getuigen en wij, als lezers en kijkers, kunnen dit werk levend houden. Door er kennis van te nemen, het te bewonderen, erover te praten, het te delen en ons erdoor te laten inspireren.