I fell asleep last night after I had finished writing just after 3AM. I was exhausted, and had about four hours to go before work the next morning and the start of another day in the brutal war on Gaza.
Instead I was woken up at around 3:30 by a cold call from Libya. The man on the other end wanted to express his solidarity with Palestinians and the people of Gaza especially. I was groggy and probably didn’t say anything meaningful in return. When he hung up, I noticed that someone has sent me a text message while I was sleeping. It was my uncle Mohammad’s wife, Areej.
“The tanks have entered our neighborhood, the shelling is very violent. There’s smoke in the house. Pray for us.”
I stared at the message, horror-struck. I couldn’t believe the tanks had gone in so deep. I called the number back. She picked up. I wasn’t surprised that she sounded terrified, but I was surprised that she sounded calm at the same time. I asked her to tell me what had happened. She said just before 2AM, the tanks and special forces had suddenly moved north from Netzarim towards Tal al-Hawa. They had met some extremely tough and unexpected resistance-it was a real battle and it was unfolding just a few hundred yards from their apartment. She told me the kids were all up, crying and screaming. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I asked her to put my uncle on the line.
He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “Taminni”, I said, using the Arabic word for ‘reassure me’. He snapped. “Reassure you what? They’re bombing everywhere, randomly, from the sky and from the ground. We don’t know if we’ll see the morning.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say to him either. I was silent for a few seconds. Then I asked him to tell me about the smoke. He said they were firing white phosphorous bombs all over the area, and that the iconic white smoke had drifted through their always-open windows and filled the house. As he spoke, our conversation was shattered by the shrill staccato of heavy machine-gun fire. It was terrifyingly close by. It went one for a while, in short, violent bursts, before a deeper drone took over: the attack helicopters.
I couldn’t think of anything remotely appropriate to say. I asked about the kids again. He told me they’re huddled in the middle of the room, crying. Areej was cowering with the baby. The house phone rang. A neighbor. They seemed to be trying to retreat, he said, the resistance have damaged a tank and they’re providing covering fire.
Suddenly, a monstrous boom. The shells were landing close than ever. The whole building is shaking, my uncle said. I told him hopefully his neighbor was telling the truth, that they are pulling back. He sighed. Another boom. Call me back, he said. I told him to wait. Have faith, I said. It was the only thing I could say. It seemed like a very stupid thing to say over the phone, from the safety of my bed. But it was the only thing I could think of.
He told me to keep praying for them and for the young men outside braving the tanks and planes and helicopters, fighting with the little means they had to defend their families and mine. I told him I’d keep calling back. I got out of bed, and told my mom what I had just heard. She switched on the TV and watched the live feed out of Gaza-the perpetually dark city, lit up every few minutes by a dizzying flash of explosives as the murderous beat of gunfire and tank shells went on in the background. I couldn’t watch. I went back to my room, and I prayed.
I sent a quick email to some friends, asking them to pray for us. Then I tried to go back to sleep. I couldn’t do anything more. I was woken an hour later by another text message, from America, a friend asking if we were okay. I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know. About half an hour later, they called, but in my exhaustion and dread, I assumed it was Areej and rejected her call-I usually call everyone back in Gaza to save them the cost. She picked up and told me things were just as bad, they seemed to be getting closer. I asked to talk to my uncle but she told me he had gone downstairs. The smoke was clearing out, but the explosions were very close by now. She didn’t have to say so; I could hear them. She said she wasn’t panicking anymore. When the bombs and missiles had been falling in the last couple of weeks, their sound and the carnage they wrought had driven her to hysterics. But now that they were so close, she saw that panicking wouldn’t help. We probably will die, she told me. We might as well accept it.
I told her that wouldn’t happen, that we were all praying for them and that we were sure they’d make it. That was a lie. Nobody was sure they’d live. But she sounded so fatalistic. She said she wished she would live so we could all meet again. I told her we would meet again, but it wouldn’t be anytime soon, so she was going to stay alive. She didn’t sound convinced. I heard the explosions outside. I think I was trying to convince myself.
She told me she could hear ambulances screaming around them, but they couldn’t move forward. There were sure to be casualties in the area, but many would bleed for hours. It was around 7AM now. I hung up.
By the time I woke up, the sun was streaming through the windows. It was just past 9AM. I scrambled for my phone. I was about to call Tal al-Hawa but my boss rang. She asked me why I hadn’t shown up to work, if things were okay. I told her what had happened. She told me to take the day off and keep her posted. I called my uncle.
His five year old, Haya, picked up. I wanted to ask her if she was okay, if she was scared. I wanted to tell her last night wouldn’t happen again. But I knew she probably wouldn’t understand. She either felt safe, or scared. I doubted she knew why.
My uncle took the phone off her. He sounded impossibly weary. I asked him if he was okay, if they were all alright. He said they’d survived. The Israeli army had tried to enter the neighborhood through another route at around 6:30AM, he told me. That was the closest they had gotten to them, about 200 meters away from the building. They had faced unexpected resistance there too. They were one street away before retreating at around 7:30. The kids had drifted off to sleep around that time.
He hadn’t. Instead, he had gone out to the street to see the damage. He had been surprised that their street was mostly spared, it had seemed like they were under direct attack, but he had found plenty of bullet cartridges from the attack helicopters. It was about 10 centimeters long. It would tear a human to pieces.
The damage, however, materialized in the next street, and in the area between Netzarim and Tal al-Hawa, the Dahdouh area. They had completely razed it, he told me. He had found an area that had seemed to be directed by one of the small, targeted missiles fired by the drones. There was a small crater at the apparent point of impact, but he couldn’t see a body, just pieces of flesh on the wall behind.
Get some sleep, I said. There will be time to talk about this later. He said he’d try to nap.
I stayed in bed a while longer. My uncle Jasim called-they had had a quiet night but he had been keeping up with the news out of Tal al-Hawa on the radio. I told him about the white phosphorous smoke. He became extremely worried-they had seen the horrific effects the chemical had on people when Khuza’a had been burned two nights ago. I told him that luckily it was just the smoke that had entered the apartment, not the burning chemical.
I called Areej just after 2PM. Haya picked up again. I told her I was her cousin, Mohammad. I doubted she’d know who that was; the last time I had seen her she was a year old, but I could hear her asking her mom if Mohammad was her uncle Abdallah’s son. I smiled to myself. But it underlined how cruel Israel’s insane war is. It was the most innocent, the most precious who were suffering. You can’t call that a childhood.
Areej told me my uncle had gone out, probably to charge their phone batteries. She told me they were all okay now. They were the only family that had remained in the building. Even the ones that had stayed behind before had left. The building on the opposite side of the street was almost empty too. Only 3 or 4 families remained in the entire street. Its scary, she says, it feels like they’re living in a ghost town. I told her that this thing would be over soon, that everyone would move back soon. She told me right now she was just hoping the Israelis wouldn’t be back.
What happened last night wasn’t unique in the context of this horrific slaughter. In Khuza’a, Tufah, Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun, Jabalya and Zatoun, those scenes have actually been ongoing, almost nonstop. The Israelis pulled out of Tal al-Hawa, but they have been mired in Jabalya and Zatoun. The people trapped in those neighborhoods have been terrorized, nonstop, for the better part of 18 days. Nobody knows how many are dead, how many wounded, how long this barbarity will go on.
Fifty people were killed across Gaza since dawn this morning, pushing the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza during this rampage to above 970. The number of wounded has surpassed 4,000. 400 are in critical condition. Many are likely to die in gaza’s overwhelmed, under-equipped and besieged hospitals.
I called my uncle Mohammad again tonight. The kids were all asleep. So was Areej. The area had been calm all day. I asked him if he had slept much during the day. He told me he had gotten a few hours. The calm is worrying, he said. Who knows what they have in store. I told him, optimistically, that maybe the calm would continue into the night. He hoped so. They had seen enough. He told me he had gone out earlier to charge the phones at the house of a friend who still had a working power generator. He had come across several burning chunks of white phosphorous in the street. Its a scary weapon, he told me. They don’t stop burning, we have to bury them in sand. I asked him if he knew of any deaths in the area from the night before. He told me six people had died.
I told him no matter what they do, Gaza wouldn’t fall. He finished for me. They can take over every inch, and Gaza wouldn’t stop fighting. I told him how so many people were rallying behind the resistance, no matter their political affiliation. I told him I had seen Azmi Bishara on TV today, livid when the news anchor had asked him if it was all worth the price being paid by the civilians. He had firmly corrected her, saying the civilians weren’t paying the price for the resistance, they were paying the price of the occupation. It’s true. All this carnage and death is the direct result of Israel’s occupation and oppression. Throughout history, civilians have suffered the wrath of their oppressors whenever they fight back. In Gaza it is no different.
I called my cousin Mosab. He and his brother had left their family in the small house they had broken into to hide in the Shati’ refugee camp, and were staying with a friend in the middle of Gaza City. He told me nobody had slept in the town last night. It wasn’t just Tal al-Hawa. The Israelis had tried entering from several different points in the middle of the night and had faced stiff resistance everywhere. The tanks had reached their abandoned home. I asked him if it was damaged. Nobody knew. He said to cover their retreat, they had bombed the area indiscriminately. Most of the deaths had occurred during this barrage. Twelve people had been killed in their neighborhood.
I asked him if he knew any of those killed. He told me he knew all twelve, six by name, and six were friends. I told him they had gone to a better place. He told me they were lucky, they’d left a pathetic life. I told him its the price we pay for freedom. This is the life that has been written for us. He told me he believed in that. They had died after refusing to flee their own homes.
I asked him about a friend of his, Ahmad, that I had met the last time I was in Gaza. He was the only one I remembered. I asked him if he was okay, or if he had stayed behind too. Mosab told me that Ahmad had gotten married ten days before the massacre began, and that he was with his new bride.
He told me he had managed to catch some of the news today and had seen a Jewish rabbi from London denouncing the war on Gaza. Even some rabbis think they’ve gone too far, he said. I told him that, outside and inside Israel, there were many Jews who don’t support the state’s actions, and that there was a real difference between Judaism and Zionism. I think he still finds it surprising that the state that labels itself the homeland of the Jews does not enjoy the unanimous support of Jews around the world.
That is just one of the lies Israel uses to push its colonialist agenda onto the world. And while it has managed to push most Palestinians out of Palestine, it has failed to push Palestine out of the Palestinians. We still fight, with whatever we can. Mosab, mourning the death of six of his friends, said it best: We just want to live as all people live; free and secure. We don’t want to live and die fighting. But unless the rights we were stripped of are given back to us, we have no choice. In Gaza, they definitely have no choice.
Remember Gaza.
