Testimonies from Gaza

Hiba Abu Nada (1991–2023) was a Palestinian writer and educator. Her novel Oxygen Is Not for the Dead was recognized by the Sharjah Awards for Arab Creativity in 2017. Shortly after the final entry in her diary, dated 20 October 2023, an Israeli airstrike killed Hiba and her family in their home in Khan Yunis.

9 October 2023, 16:52

In every previous war, there was some kind of pattern to the entity’s targets. One time it would be families, another time mosques, another time streets, another time border areas or town centres, another time high-rises — there was some kind of plan for the explosions we could grasp, we the ones under the explosions; and based on threat we would deduce the goals and the trajectory and how long we could expect the war to last.

This time there is no pattern. Everything is being bombed. Every previous war is being squeezed into this war. Gaza from the north to the south being bombed in a chaotic, catastrophic manner, mass butchery, senseless assassination of everything. But it is our endurance and our faith in God that allows us to look at the planes and become calm before we start to cry, or when we start to cry after the silence and: “O God, we have no one but You.”

Mohammed Aghaalkurdi, born 1993 in Gaza City, works as a doctor. In his diary entry, he first describes the general beauty of the sea and its current importance as a place to wash and source of food, followed by a child’s perspective on the war.

9 February 2024

It’s a sunny day, and if there was no war I would have spent it swimming in the open sea. As I drive down to Rafah on the coast road, I see people and fishermen gathering by the shore, while the clear water invites those who have no water at home to a dip and wash. People accept the kind of invitation of the sea. I see dozens wading into the water with their shower gel and their joy. I stop to admire the scene and to learn resilience from it. People’s laughter makes me smile.

Suddenly, I hear engines rising. As I look across the water, I see two gunboats racing towards the beach. As they approach the fishing boats, they open fire. Everyone is terrified and tries to get away, while the gunboats continue to fire randomly. Our innocent act of resilience — fishing and keeping clean — represented no threat, but those piloting these boats want us to remember that they control not only the land and air, but also what seems to be the open sea.

8 April 2024

My five-year-old nephew, darling Omar, made us laugh today. He regards this as a war against children. We overheard him telling his mother: “At least grown-ups can find coffee in the market. Children like me can’t find any snacks or lollipops. Now do you understand why this war is against us, not you?”

Ibrahim Yaghi is a Palestinian journalist, human rights activist, poet, and writer living in Gaza. He describes the permanent Israeli surveillance and the irony of “safe zones” in war.

It was 9:00 on 11 December 2023. I was having breakfast with my family at our home on Al-Meshal Street in the al-Rimal neighbourhood of Gaza City, when my brother’s phone rang. The prefix showed it was not a Gazan number. My cousin Hesham answered on the speaker. “Hello Hesham, this is the Israeli Army”, said a voice in Arabic. The room fell silent. My mother, aunts, and cousins burst into tears. “Leave your home and go to the humanitarian corridor”, the voice said. “Take your IDs and a white flag. Now.”

Hesham replied: “We have five elderly people with chronic diseases and injuries, including my uncle who is paralyzed.”

“That doesn´t concern me”, the Israeli soldier said. “Find a solution and evacuate to the south or you and your family will die under the rubble.” He ended the call.

Somehow, the Israeli Army knew to call my brother’s phone — and somehow they knew my cousin Hesham would answer. They seem to know everything about us. They have admitted this. They know where we are all the time. They know which Palestinians will be killed in every airstrike. “Everything is intentional”, one Israeli military source has said. “We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

I felt as if time was suspended. I couldn’t hear, move, or think. I was supposed to be helping others in greater need than myself, but I was the one who needed help. Then my father yelled: “Start packing! Prepare yourself for whatever comes next and help get your uncle ready.”

We left at 10:30 and reached Salah al-Din Street, an area designated as a “safe” zone, where we joined thousands of other refugees and, as ordered, raised a white flag, the emblem of surrender, and began walking. There were so many people that I got separated from my family. With every passing minute, hunger gnawed at our stomachs, a constant reminder of our desperate plight. You could describe the so-called humanitarian corridor in many ways, but it was not human or pleasant. I would call it a putrid corridor. The road reeked of rotting flesh. God knows how many people had already been killed on that road, their decomposing corpses scattered around us.

By 14:30 I and thousands of others had been walking for hours. Beside me was an elderly man clearly struggling to keep up. He was dehydrated and on the verge of collapse, and he stopped to drink some water. By doing so, he delayed people behind him. Next thing I knew he was on the ground and his blood was all over my face. Israeli occupation forces had shot him dead in cold blood in front of my eyes. Bullets began flying everywhere. They were shooting at us to get us to run. I had a knee injury and the pain was unbearable, but I ran anyway. I saw an Israeli tank moving towards us, and ran as fast as I could, my knee getting worse and worse. Then I tripped and fell, injuring my head, but got up and carried on running.

Hossam al-Madhoun is a child protection officer. He specializes in psychological support through storytelling, and is the co-founder of Gaza’s Theatre for Everybody. Now displaced to Rafah, he and his theatre partner Jamal al-Rozzi are developing therapy programmes for children.

17 December 2023

By the wall of the school, where people shelter, vendors lay out their bits of merchandise on a little table, or cardboard box, or plastic sheet on the ground. Tins of meat, tuna, beans, cigarettes, sugar, rice. Some might make 200 dollars, others barely 30. Trying to feed themselves for a day or two. Among them, a middle-aged woman with a veil covering most of her hair is baking flatbread in a mud oven, in front of a line of people waiting to buy. From time to time, she calls to her son, seven or eight years old, to add wood to the fire beneath the oven. It’s a normal scene in Gaza around the shelter-schools.

I was waiting in line when a journalist approached the woman 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 shelters. She shrugged, and the reporter gestured the camera person to start filming.

“Have you been doing this for a long time?”

“Making bread? One month.”

“You built the mud oven?”

“No, I bought it from someone who built it but could not use it. He was too old for this work.”

“Are you from here? I mean Nuseirat Camp?”

(Putting a piece of dough in the oven and turning it over from time to time with a wooden stick): “No. Not from here” (To a customer) “I don’t have change for a hundred shekels. Find change and come back.”

“Where did you come from?”

“From many places since 12 October.”

“Like where?”

“Beit Hanoun. When they started bombing, my eldest son and father in-law were killed. The bombs targeted a neighbour’s home. They were all killed.” (She stops talking and continues her work. The journalist does not rush her. She raises her head, looks at the journalist for a second, then turns back to the oven and continues talking.)

“We moved to my family home in Beach Camp. I was at the market with this little son when we heard a big explosion from an airstrike. I took my vegetables and rushed home. They bombed a nearby house and my parents and my husband were killed. I recognized my husband from his feet sticking out under the rubble, because two years ago he lost one toe in a work accident in Israel. He used to work in construction. My poor husband did not rest until he died.” (To her little son) “Enough wood, we’re almost done.” (To a customer) “This will cost you four shekels.”

She looks at the journalist. He is still holding the microphone towards her, and the camera is focused on her. “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. Then we came here — me and this little boy, my sister’s son and my injured sister. We are at this school.” (She points at the building behind her.)

“How do you manage? Does UNWRA distribute food at the school?”

“Yes. They come every few days, give each family some tins of food, biscuits, soap — barely enough for one day. Anyway, we are still alive.”

“What about water? Hygiene? Toilets?”

“I wake up at 4:00 to join the queue for the toilet. At that time there’s a line of between seven and 15 people. Any later and the line will be 50 or 60. We do our business and go back to sleep again. They give out plastic water bottles, but I don’t use them. I sell them to get some money. We are surviving.”

“What do other women do?”

“There was a pregnant woman, we helped her to give birth in our classroom. She was lucky, it went smoothly. We care for each other in our classroom. They look after my sister and her two-year-old daughter while I‘m out. Not like other classrooms. All day you hear screaming, shouting, cursing, arguments.”

“How do you get the wood for your oven?”

“In the beginning it was easy: I collected bits of wood from the streets and orchards nearby. Then I started to buy it from wood sellers. It was 1.2 shekels per kilo. Now it is three shekels, because there is no cooking gas or fuel. Everything is scarce.”

She starts to clear up. She put the fire out, collects the unburnt sticks and covers the oven with a piece of material. She head off towards the school, carrying her son. The camera operator follows her with his lens and she goes inside.

Abu al-Saeed al-Sousi is a falafel shop owner. He spoke with the Palestinian human rights organization al-Haq in March 2024.

I am your brother Abu al-Saeed al-Sousi, owner of the oldest falafel shop in the Gaza Strip. In the 2021 aggression, our shop in al-Rimal neighbourhood was destroyed — the whole building was destroyed. We worked hard and, thank God, opened another shop in Tal al-Hawa and another in al-Nasr, near the Bahloul roundabout.

Now, all three shops have been destroyed, along with the factory and the entire production line, and we have been forced to move to Deir al-Balah. We’ve started again from scratch here, with very basic equipment. It was really hard to find even these simple utensils we’re using now, including the pan. We’re frying over a wood fire, but wood doesn’t give enough heat and it takes ages. People are standing here for two hours to get falafel — it’s just not sustainable. Wood is terrible, it’s so hard to make falafel like this, but we’re doing the best we can, we can’t do more than this — there’s no electricity, no gas, but we still keep going.

We used to sell eight falafel balls for one shekel. Now we sell three for one shekel, and only because we are trying to help people. Why? Because before we could buy a kilo of chickpeas for four shekels — now is costs 16 or 17 shekels, and that’s if you can even find it. Today you might find it, tomorrow maybe not. As for parsley, there isn’t any. There are no vegetables. And there’s no bread at all, for falafel or for anything else.

It’s a struggle to survive. We are struggling to make sure we simply stay alive. We fight to maintain our existence. I hope one day, if God wills, we will go back and rebuild the shop.

Haifa Farajallah is a singer und musician who lives in Gaza. She is part of the local African community, and is now displaced in Rafah, al Mawasi.

May 2024

My days before the war were filled with music. I couldn’t wait for my work hours to end so I could spend all evening and late into the night in my musical life, listening to music, playing music, singing. My voice is my source of income and the most beautiful thing in my life. I do some radio and commercial voiceover work, but I am mainly a vocalist, singing folk songs and collaborating with bands and music institutions around Gaza.

I’ve sung in France and Egypt, but I’ve never been to Jerusalem or the West Bank. That’s my ultimate dream, to experience the music scene in the other half of this country and meet fellow artists. Once I was singing in Gaza to mark International Women’s Day. I was the only woman — the whole band was men. My solo was the anti-occupation song “Yumma Mweil al-Hawa”, which includes the famous line: ”O my mother, I can more easily accept wounds in my flesh than the rule of the wicked over my life.” As I sang it, I glanced down at three Hamas men from the police in the front row. They made threatening gestures towards me. The show went on, but I was very worried. Luckily, nothing bad happened to me then.

I also want to talk about another aspect of my identity. I am part of Gaza’s African community. We make up about 2 percent of the population, I think. Some people ask about our origins. My family came from Bir-al-Saba (Beerheba) and, according to my father, the Arabian Peninsula before that, but I don’t know exactly. I would like to look into this after the war.

Even within the African community there is diversity, though far as I know the different families are not connected. I love the fact that as people of colour we are part of mixed, cosmopolitan, diverse Palestinian society — but Gaza’s physical and political barriers mean that we don’t have a relationship with other African-Palestinian communities. When I went to France I was very proud of my Palestinian identity, but I met lots of people with African origins who saw me as one of them. One woman even told me that, if I ever felt discrimination in Palestine, they would adopt me in France.

There is discrimination here. When we visit areas of Gaza where people aren’t used to seeing people of colour, we do encounter whispering or comments or hostile looks. It is racism that comes from ignorance. I believe I have lost job opportunities because of my skin colour — and also because of sexism. There are a lot of deeply rooted stigmas: Black men find it easy to marry light-skinned women, but for me, as a Black woman, it is very difficult to find a husband who is not Black. It makes no sense, it’s very unfortunate. I am a Palestinian. I am staying in Palestine. I love music and I intend to continue.

[1]  I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to all the authors from Gaza for their poignant contributions, and hope that they are still alive. A special thanks goes to Mahmoud Muna, Matthew Teller, Juliette Toumd  Jayyab Abusafia, and publisher Elisabeth Briggs for their trust and permission to share these important texts here.