So, it has been a year already. I was swimming in the sea the morning it all began. What I thought would last for a few days at most ended up being a fierce and intensive war. When I arrived at the Press House in the well-to-do Rimal quarter of Gaza City on 7 October and watched the news come in with Bilal Jadallah, the manager of the House, and two other journalist friends, Ahmad Fatima and Mohammad al-Jaja, none of us would have guessed that this would last for a whole year.
For those of us who have experienced this war, it hasn’t only been a year. It’s been 365 days, it’s been 8,760 hours, it’s been 525,600 minutes and it’s been 31,535,000 seconds. Every second has mattered: one can be alive one second and spread across a street the next. Life is not the same from one hour to the next. With each blink you find yourself in a new moment, a different point in the massacre. This is the hardest experience we’ve ever encountered, because every moment of this experience has been dedicated to the most urgent call in life: the fight for survival.
To live means engineering a situation in which you fool death itself. It means searching for food and clean water; it means staying awake all night and playing out in your head the many different scenarios in which a rocket could take you; it means planning to cover your son with your body to protect him from flying shrapnel; it means carrying the amputated parts of your loved ones; it means seeing the tears on your friend’s face when you bury his limbs and he shouts, asking you to write “Here lies the arm of Mahmoud.” It means living with all of this, and every morning, when you wake up, asking yourself if you are awake, or if you died during the night. It means constantly questioning whether those around you are not really alive, as they appear to be. It means asking: if none of this is real, if it’s just a nightmare, how do I stop it?
For many people around the world, it is just another piece of news. But for us, who lived it, in Gaza, it is all we remember, all we think about, all that matters. If someone had told us, that morning, that the lush villa where the Press House was located would be reduced to rubble, and that three of the four of us would be killed (Jadallah on 19 November, Fatima a week before, and al-Jaja a few days before that), none of us would have believed it.
Even the journalists like Jadallah, who were supposed to report the news, became it. He would spend hours listening to every last bulletin, studying the details, so that he could keep his family safe, moving them from one part of the city to another ahead of each manoeuvre. And he succeeded, for them. He just failed for himself. He became one of the 174 journalists killed in the war so far.
I spent a month and a half in tents near Rafah. For two nights I didn’t even have a tent to sleep in. One night, in the north, I had to sleep in the street beside my car with explosions sounding all around me; it was too dangerous to drive. On another occasion, I was injured in my left leg by a piece of shrapnel. But now, I feel that my son and I were extremely lucky. We were lucky not to have been killed like 135 members of my extended family. I am lucky to still have my legs, and with only a five-centimetre scar on one. I was lucky to have a tent in Rafah. I was lucky to have survived and to be able to talk about it now.
Before I left Rafah with my son on 30 December 2023, my great aunt Noor, living in the tent beside me, asked: “Do you think we will still be here when Ramadan comes?”.
“No way,” I said. At that time, we were three whole months away from Ramadan. The war, I was sure, would be long gone by then. When Ramadan arrived, people started to hope that by “Small Eid” (at the end of Ramadan), they would have returned to their places in the north, and would have been allowed to start rebuilding their homes and their lives. When Small Eid came and went, they looked to Big Eid, which comes 70 days later. When Ramadan and the two Eids passed, people tried to find a new straw to clutch at: perhaps President Joe Biden could force a ceasefire, and would fight the election on that diplomatic achievement. With each new hope people cling to, the harder it gets when they are disappointed.
Thinking back now to the 84 days of hell I lived through, it feels like a time in which the world itself changed, unalterably. Each day, as I looked out on the city, I knew it would not be the same the following day. I saw the city itself being assassinated, not just the people. I saw how it became impossible to plan anything, to have any autonomy, to be a functioning individual. I saw each day how people’s only goal became making it to sunset, and each night become making it to sunrise. I saw all of this – and now, a year on, I can’t stop thinking about any of it. I can’t stop dreading the arrival of more news – the loss of another member of my family, or another friend; the loss of more and more of my memories.
When the war ends, I will go back to Gaza. Many things have to be done. For my wife, Hanna, we have to remove the rubble and bury her sister and her husband and two boys. She still thinks of moving the grave of her mother from Rafah to Jabalia. Her mother died in the tent in Rafah a few weeks after I left her, and was buried in a spot of no particular importance. I need to visit the grave of my father, who died three months after I left the north. He refused to flee. I need to establish a place for all the family to live in, after the destruction of our house. The house of Hanna’s parents also needs to be reconstructed so that her father, an old man, can have a place to stay. When the war ends, we will have so many things to do. The biggest job will be to grieve. To take a moment, and to think of all those who passed away. To mourn them properly. Then perhaps, some memories can be rebuilt. But will the war end? Sometimes I wonder. Until it does, there is nothing to do. Only to wait.
My friend, who gave birth in the first month of the war, is terrified that her child is going to say his first words in a tent. What terrifies her more is that his words might be “booooove”, the sound of an Israeli missile exploding, or “tent”, instead of “daddy” or “house”. When she saw him starting to crawl, she cried. Instead of crawling in the garden of their big house in the Rimal quarter, he was pulling himself up to stand with tent ropes. These are the memories he and his mother will have of his first years. Only if this war ends and he returns to a normal life will these indignities be eradicated.
How, though, can one live “normally” after experiencing all this horror? After seeing the bodies of relatives, neighbours and friends torn to pieces? People in Gaza have modest dreams. Dreams that would not cost the world anything. They want to live as they used to before the war. They want their lives back.
My sister Eisha still longs to go back to her house in North Gaza. That is too ambitious for now. All she wants is not to be displaced again. She is hardly happy with her life in a tent, with having to carry her dishes, pots and bowls hundreds of metres to the sea to wash them. She is hardly happy having to stand for hours beside a clay oven, baking bread. But even these hardships have become normal. Two months ago, when the tanks approached their part of the new camp, she had to wake her three children and carry them, fleeing to the shore. The four of them had to spend the whole night by the water, listening to the crashing of the waves and the explosions of tanks’ shells until the army retreated in the morning.
Two days ago, she managed to get internet signal. She was very happy to be able to video call me and show me her tent from inside. I could see three shelves, stuffed with canned food, five mattresses, stacked on top of each other, and two gallon bottles of water. But she dreads having to run again, and having to carry it all, and having to search for a new supposedly safe area.
Everything becomes normal. Then it gets worse, then that becomes normal. People find themselves lamenting their lives before the war. People share images and videos of the way life in Gaza was: vivid, crowded, well-lit streets, with cars and people shopping and dining in the restaurants. Couples walking together, children playing joyfully or holding the hands of their parents; a young man with his fiancée driving a cabriolet, or sitting in a horse-drawn carriage in what looks like a scene from an old film or a passage from Madame Bovary. All this joy has gone. Only nostalgia remains – and grief for those who have been murdered.
A year has passed, and as well as not knowing what will come in the next moment, the question of what comes after that remains an even greater puzzle. No one pretends to know how more than two million Gazans will be administrated. Perhaps one of the reasons why the ceasefire has been postponed indefinitely is that no one wants to think about what happens the next day – least of all Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. None of the interested parties seem to have discussed it. While the war continues, the question of what’s next is easy: just war. More war.
So without a total ceasefire, any talk of a “day after” is a way of wasting more time, of prolonging the war. The more time passes, the more people are killed and the harder the mission of reconstructing the Gaza Strip will become. The world isn’t serious enough to ask for a ceasefire. It doesn’t want to know. While the fighting continues, it can ignore the guilt. Imagining a Gaza after the genocide is too difficult. I know the legal arguments against using this term and the debate surrounding it, but for me it is impossible to see this war as anything else.
So far, international and humanitarian law has been impotent in this war. It has achieved nothing. For people in Gaza, all the well-meaning words and values of bodies such as the United Nations disappear under the treads of the tanks, under the rubble and mud of the city. For an innocent Gazan whose name is written on a yet-to-be-fired Israeli missile, semantics don’t matter. Terms don’t matter. What matters is what is being done to save them, to stop the missile from being fired. And apparently nothing is being done. People in Gaza are left for their own destiny.
One cannot be sure of anything when it comes to the future of this war. With time, the tragedy in Gaza will attract less and less coverage in the news and less and less of politicians’ attention. The world will betray the Palestinians, as it has done before.
Israel is wrong in thinking that, in this killing and destruction and intimidation, it is sabotaging the consciousness of Palestinians. Peace can only be achieved through talks, not through killing. The child who saw their mother torn apart, their father lose both legs, their house demolished… how will you deter them from thinking of revenge in the future? By convincing them that tomorrow will definitely be better, and that their family’s loss will not be in vain. Only by giving them a guaranteed prosperous and stable life will their aspirations as a Palestinian be addressed.
Now, a whole year into this continuous bloodshed, the international community should be more determined than ever to stop it. Poor families cannot be left waiting to be killed by military air strike, or the cold, or starvation. It is time to put an end to this suffering. While you have been reading this, others have died. While you have been reading this, many more will have been waiting for bread, trying to start a fire and patching a hole or leak in a tent, or trying to find a new tent. While you have been reading this, children have been crying.
My sister’s only hope is that she is not forced to dismantle her tent and carry it somewhere else. Can I truthfully tell her this won’t happen?
Atef Abu Saif’s “Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide”, is published by Comma Press
[See also: the fury of history]
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This article appears in the 02 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The fury of history