In Partnership with the Institute for Palestine Studies
Gaza has gone dark. There are no more working hospitals in northern Gaza. Hunger and thirst are ravaging the population. There is sewage in the streets, and as more and more people are forced into ever smaller enclaves, health officials on the ground are sounding the alarm over the increasingly likely possibility of a cholera outbreak. Mass graves are being dug—and worse, they are being filled. Aid is trickling in, but it is never enough. A pause in the fighting has just been announced, but it remains to be seen if it will be implemented and how long it will hold. Journalists on the ground in Gaza continue their heroic efforts to relay the news, and Israel continues its efforts to murder them so that its atrocities might remain hidden from public view. Every message that Palestinians manage to transmit may be the last.
The team at The Institute for Palestine Studies has been translating and publishing these messages so that the world can see the humanity buried under the rubble, and the spirit of resistance that has, does, and will continue to animate the Palestinian struggle.
To help maximize their reach, we are republishing these messages here. This is the sixth post of letters—the fifth post in the series can be found here, the fourth can be found here, the third can be found here, the second can be found here, and the first can be found here.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
Bahaa Shahera Rauf
November 21st, 2023
The following testimony was first posted on Bahaa’s Facebook page on Nov. 8, 2023. It has been translated and republished with permission.
In the early days of my college life, I met a girl named Mariam. She was a beautiful girl, alone in Gaza pursuing a university degree. Despite her quiet demeanor, she was ambitious and had an extraordinary ability to comfort those around her in an unparalleled way. She was the one who introduced me to the concept of “first time,” the idea that first-time experiences are always challenging to surpass or overcome. And indeed, she became the first friend I allowed myself to rely on.
One day, I suggested to her that we should do something new — wandering the streets of a city that felt foreign to us. This idea came to me after I spent all my money on cigarettes, a habit that I had recently picked up. As a proud man, I couldn’t bring myself to accept money from a girl, no matter how close we were. Exhausted from our long journey on foot, she quickly realized the truth when I refused to get into a cab. After declining to take her money, she scolded me sharply, marking the first time a girl had ever cursed at me.
Mariam was the first girl with whom I openly shared my religious views. Despite her initial apprehension about my beliefs, she calmly expressed her thoughts, even laughing at the number of lectures and books I had consumed on the subject.
When I experienced the sensation of falling in love for the first time, I immediately confided in Mariam. She listened and helped me make sense of those overwhelming, overflowing emotions. She assured me that it was “true love” and encouraged me to embrace this experience, accept the bitter with the sweet, and share our story with everyone.
However, things changed when Mariam got engaged. And because we live in a society that disapproves of friendships like ours, she tearfully told me that we should part ways as our friendship would be inappropriate now that she was engaged. She promised she keep in touch occasionally, and that she would pray for me, despite my lack of faith. True to her word, we went our separate ways, and Mariam transferred to another university to pursue a different major.
Mariam built a beautiful and loving family, dedicating all her care to them away from the hustle and bustle. She would occasionally send me her greetings through people.
The pilot who bombed Mariam’s house yesterday was unaware of the fact that she was the inventor of the “first time.” He didn’t realize that the bomb that would take her life was the “first time” someone tried to kill her. I am certain that Mariam will come to tell me about her “first time” experiencing immortality, with the same serene calmness she always exhibited.
She was Mariam. She is Mariam. And she always will be.
[Translated by Aya Jayyousi.]
H. K.
November 17th, 2023
H.K. is a Palestinian from Gaza based in Chicago. The writer’s initials are used at his request to protect his privacy.
My mother, Feryal Ezzeldine Aldajani-Khayal, was born in 1939. On Nov. 10, 2023, she was killed by Israeli shelling in Gaza. She was with her daughter (my sister) Soha and grandkids and great-grandkids sheltering in a family house. The house was bombed at night and became uninhabitable. They waited for the morning to move to another house, but an Israeli tank shelled them while walking and killed my 84-year-old, my 31-year-old niece, and my sister’s daughter-in-law, who was 28 years old, a mother of two babies. My mother was very loving, compassionate, endearing, kind and protective. She was strong, extraordinary, supportive, intuitive, caring, and mindful. I have received a lot of words of support, sympathy, and condolences from many family members, friends, neighbors, and people who worked with her in the past. They shared memories of her.
My sister, Soha, tried to save my mother, but an Israeli sniper targeted her and shot her three times in the leg. Soha’s daughter, my niece, had a disability. She was also targeted by the sniper. She was shot and bled to death for seven hours. My injured sister and her family have been seeking shelter in a building and have been unable to go to the hospital since Nov. 10, 2023. No one has been able to send help for almost a week now. They are slowly running out of resources, including food, milk, and medicine.
Feryal pictured in a garden in Gaza in October 2022.
My sister Soha is kind, strong, loyal, determined, and dedicated. She has always taken care of her family; her husband, daughter, and two married sons with their families. Tarek, Soha’s oldest son, lost his wife to Israeli shelling during this war. He has two kids.
Twelve years ago, her husband suffered a disabling stroke that left him completely dependent on her for all his daily functions. She feeds him and takes care of his personal hygiene and other needs. Despite all the hardship she has suffered, she still has a great sense of humor.
My hope now is for the suffering of innocent civilians in Gaza to end, for the genocide to end, for the ethnic cleansing to end, for an immediate ceasefire, for humanitarian aid to enter, and for the criminals to be punished for what they have done to us.
Ali Abdel-Wahab
November 13th, 2023
Ali Abdel-Wahab is the proud father of Nasser. Specializing in data analysis and evaluation and monitoring (M&E) at several organizations in Gaza, Ali holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, and is interested in issues of political economy, digital transformation, and social networks, with a particular focus on Palestine. He is also a member of the political youth forum in Gaza’s Masarat Center and a policy analyst at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. His hope is to be able to give Nasser a beautiful life.
It is the thirty-seventh day of Israel’s genocidal rampage on us Palestinians in Gaza, Nov. 12. I write these thoughts not to waste precious energy condemning our occupier or international complicity, nor the futility of human rights laws and bodies. None of it is worth the time. I write these thoughts for myself, for my son, for loved ones in Gaza and afar, to share reflections on existing under genocide. I also share these words with my Palestinian brothers and sisters everywhere, for whom our sumud (steadfastness) as a people carries and has carried profound meaning and significance for decades. But here, I share with you the limits of sumud under genocide through my own eyes.
We Palestinians in Gaza are familiar with solitude, with abandonment, with shouting into the void, “Where are the Arabs? Where is the world?” We’ve always felt it, and perhaps we once hoped we would be wrong if it came to this. But it came to this, and we were right.
This solitary existence manifests differently in the global imaginary, and even in our occupier’s imaginary — the latter casting us as the besieged enemy, two million strong, who voted for a “terrorist” government and who must, therefore, suffer the consequences. Perhaps this is how they sleep at night.
And when I imagine our brothers and sisters in the region, our friends in the world, helping us any way they can and amplifying our voices, I imagine them holding on to a romanticized idea that we Gazans, alone and unlike any humans in the world, don’t fear death; that we have gotten used to living under unending bombardment from the air, land, and sea; and that we can therefore continue to withstand it against all logic and reason.
“There is no one like the Gazans,” they say in awe of our survival after decades of siege and war that led to this, as if we alone can somehow continue to weather the unending unspeakable. But we can’t. None of the more than 5,000 children who have been massacred in this war, and none of the thousands more still buried under the rubble, could either before they were taken. None of them voted for Hamas sixteen years ago. Most of the more than 11,000 slaughtered didn’t. Sixteen years ago, almost all of them were children. Their voices weren’t yet counted, and now they can’t even be heard.
Most of the 11,000 slaughtered and over 30,000 injured in this war lived and survived at least one more in 2021 — to say nothing of the periodic airstrikes between the wars that don’t make it to mainstream news networks. When they were reduced to numbers in this war while seeking shelter in their homes, mosques, churches, and hospitals, they died already suffering from untold traumas, just like their parents and grandparents who survived several more wars, and some even 1967 and 1948, and who died beside them.
Their parents and grandparents may have developed some understanding of the meaning of it all while they lived, some reckoning with fate and what comes after life, a reckoning with martyrdom. Even after surviving decades in refugee camps within the most densely populated place on earth, this tiny strip of land under the longest military siege in modern history, they must have grasped that transcendent knowledge and thanked God for His blessings and for taking them at that moment when that missile came through the roof of their building — at least I hope it did, for their sake and ours.
But what do the children know of God and martyrdom? What do they know of life after all of this?
And for those of us who somehow remain, we still struggle to breathe after thirty-seven days, as anyone would, when we hear the deafening military jets and bombs overhead. We hold our children tightly and tell them not to be scared, that this too shall pass, as any human would. We doubt God, as anyone would, as yet another missile somehow misses our building, sparing us, while tearing through our neighbors’ home next door. Even as we say al-hamdulillah that we are still alive every minute of every day, we struggle to make sense of existence if this is existence.
Even if we are impressed, as the world should be, with the unprecedented might and perseverance of the abandoned Palestinian resistance; even if we are proud that Gaza gave life to it and nurtured it for all these decades; even if we continue to support our fighters in their lonely, incredible struggle — how could the blood of all of our children, of our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and grandparents, of our uncles, aunts, and cousins, of our neighbors, colleagues, and friends, be washed from their hands? They knew there was no turning back when they stunned us all on that Saturday, Oct. 7, but as in every war before all this, they didn’t have the foresight to formulate a contingency plan for Israel’s inevitable retribution, for the world’s inevitable abandonment.
We Palestinians in Gaza are grateful to our brothers and sisters all over this world writing to us and about us, organizing, protesting, crying, and staying up at night with us. We understand why they must tell themselves and tell us that we, Palestinians in Gaza, personify sumud. It’s true that we alone know what it means to live and die through this, after 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021, but we never chose to be the experiment of how much genocide and ethnic cleansing Palestinian sumud can endure. Our children certainly didn’t.
Like anyone anywhere, our instinct is toward survival, despite our unmatched sumud. And so perhaps we Palestinians in Gaza alone can tell our Palestinian brothers and sisters in the West Bank, in ’48 (heartland), and in the shataat (diaspora) that no land, no cause, and no resistance struggle is worth the erasure of entire families and bloodlines centuries-old. No land, no cause, and no resistance struggle is worth surviving this carnage only to bear witness to it, to the total destruction of every aspect of your life beyond your physical body.
As I wish my son a happy second birthday exactly one month and one day into this war, mere days after our home in al-Rimal was torched, all our memories reduced to ash, I kiss him on the head and say al-hamdulillah that we were of the privileged few who could flee our home in Gaza City in the first days of the war and secure refuge with family south of the valley. I thank God and praise Him for these blessings.
But as I look at what’s become of us — my wife and me, my parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins — and as I envision what more we may endure if we survive this, how could I not want to be anywhere but here? How could I not want to be anywhere that we Palestinians of Gaza can rebuild our homes, restore our family lines and communities, and give our children a chance at life? How could sumud overcome all of this? ♦
The author’s son, Nasser, photographed looking at the destruction wrought on their street the morning after a night of heavy Israeli bombardment of the neighborhood of al-Rimal, Gaza City. October 10, 2023.
