‘All we are left with is rubble’

There’s a woman, K, whom I find myself trying not to think about. She is a friend of my friend Marwa, who returned to Gaza to work for a humanitarian organisation and lives in a tent in South Gaza. When I do think about K, I think about her in a way which is probably not the way she, or anyone, wants to be seen: she is holding a severed head in her arms. In a message she describes the killing of family members who stayed in Jabaliya:

It was shocking and painful news for everyone, and the matter was made more difficult by the continuous bombing, so we were unable to get them out from under the rubble, and they remained there for three days. When the army finally withdrew, everyone went back to dig them out, and I did not know how I ended up in that place where I saw those who were dear to our hearts in a deplorable state. Their pure bodies were in pieces and burned, and I will never forget finding someone’s decapitated head and could not figure out who it belonged to.

‘Why, I do not know?’ She asks in the message. ‘Why does the spring of our lives coincide with the fall of our homeland? We had big dreams, but they all collapsed, and all we are left with is rubble. Why did our crops burn at harvest time? Why?’

I don’t know how many corpses K has had to see, touch or deal with in recent months. In a message she sent Marwa in June, she said the worst thing was seeing her children injured in front of her eyes, blood covering her son’s face. Her home was bombed on 10 October. She says she tries to cry now but the tears don’t come. By June, she had been displaced more than seven times in eight months. Her husband’s siblings have been killed. She is now responsible for 11 children. She has watched shrapnel be removed from her children’s bodies without anaesthesia.

I find myself looking away. This comes with no small degree of self-loathing. According to one psychologist I spoke to, who has Palestinian patients from Gaza, the worst of conditions have been going on for so long that they are now being normalised; we are at risk of slipping into helplessness. ‘Fall into community, not despair!’ advises a placard at a demo. Edward Said’s daughter Najla posts a quote by him: ‘Where cruelty and injustice are concerned, hopelessness is submission, which I believe is immoral.’

If, in 1948, firing had not been coming in the direction from masnaa al-bira (the beer factory) my family would have headed south to Gaza, where they would, according to my father, have stayed. By the time they tried to leave Jaffa later, by boat, my father was badly wounded, following a grenade attack. If the sea had not been too rough on one attempt to lift him onto a boat on his stretcher, we could have ended up in Lebanon. If a man called Sir James Craig had not walked into the British Council in Damascus in 1952 and discovered my uncle Hussein’s gift for languages, we might not have come to England. My brother-in-law has lost at least 23 members of his family in Gaza, mainly children. A cousin of his, Sumaya, worked as a teacher. She was sheltering in a school when she and her three children Leen (aged six), Mariam (three) and Malik (two) were killed in an airstrike.

‘Over the last eight months I’ve had to make very difficult choices,’ K writes. ‘One was to move to the south of Gaza with my colleagues, or to stay with my family in the north.’ She decided to stay in the north. I don’t know if she regrets this choice. I can only imagine how heavily the responsibility rests on her. She writes:

I did not know what to do? Where to go? Where to get relief, a hundred questions in one moment, and everyone was asking me for help, I was their saviour at that moment, then it started to rain and the rain fell heavily. I pulled myself together, helped my children and my relatives the best I could and we left the place.

But the south, what is in the south? A far away zone on a tiny strip of land severed by tanks, soldiers and surveillance cameras. Atef Abu Saif describes crossing the Wadi checkpoint to the south with his son Yasser and his mother-in-law in Don’t Look Left:

Many people are stopped, apparently just for the way they look … As we walk past, a soldier calls out: ‘The one wearing the dark pullover.’ Yasser is wearing a dark pullover. I whisper: ‘Don’t move. If they meant you, they would have said “the one pushing the wheelchair”. Insha’allah.’ I was right.
For another two kilometres we struggle on, eventually reaching a stretch of road where the Israelis no longer flank us. My back hurts, my shoulders and my arms are sore, but we’re relieved to be walking on an ordinary road again.
But this is the hardest part. Although we’re no longer being told where to look, I give Yasser my own strict orders. ‘Don’t look,’ I tell him. ‘Don’t look.’ Strewn around randomly, along both side of the road, are scores and scores of dead bodies.

‘FYI,’ the poet Mosab Abu Toha wrote on X on 19 August, after 318 days without a ceasefire, ‘what’s called now a humanitarian area in south Gaza is just 36 square kilometres (14 square miles) and crammed in it are more than 1.8 million people, with no water, no electricity, no food, no clinics or pharmacies, and no shelters.’

On the morning of 10 August, Israel bombed a school hall in Gaza City where more than a hundred displaced people were praying. They were blown to pieces. Their relatives could only bury bags of body parts that weighed roughly the same as a whole human being: seventy kilogrammes for an adult man, eighteen kilos for a six-year-old child.

These killings are carried out in what is probably the most spied-on land on earth. In his diary on 15 November, Abu Saif writes: ‘Every corner of the Strip seems to be watched by an array of different devices; optical, infra-red, radio, the full spectrum. Surveillance balloons hover over the border walls. Cameras hang on wires, staring out across the buffer zones along the border.’

‘I am not ashamed to stand in front of the camera and say I am hungry due to the famine,’ the journalist Ismail al-Ghoul said last month. ‘Many children in Gaza ask me for something to eat, not knowing that I, like them, can’t sleep at night because of hunger.’ He and his colleague Rami al-Rifi were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their car on 31 July. Al-Ghoul’s face was known to viewers of Al-Jazeera, who had watched him report from the north for nine months of heavy bombardment. His head was reported to have been severed from his body in the killing. On 18 August, an Israeli tank fired on a group of journalists in press vests, killing Ibrahim Muhareb and wounding Salma al-Qaddoumi. Since last October, according to Reporters without Borders, the Israeli army has killed more than 130 journalists in Gaza.

More than 280 humanitarian aid workers have been killed, the UN says, while the total official death toll has surpassed forty thousand. An article in the Lancet argued that the real toll could be much higher:

Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.

‘They’re showing us what they are prepared to do to us,’ Amber Lone, a Kashmiri-British writer, said to me. Others, too, see the mass starvation and slaughter in Gaza as a ‘warning’ to the world’s non-Western majority.

At the end of June, Reuters reported that the United States has supplied Israel with at least fourteen thousand ‘highly destructive’ two-thousand-pound bombs since last October, among countless other munitions. The Global Legal Action Network is suing the British government to try to stop them sending arms to Israel. They filed their case with the High Court last week, ahead of a hearing in the autumn. One of the GLAN’s senior lawyers said: ‘We thought we had seen everything but these witness statements’ – from Palestinians detained and tortured by Israel – ‘reveal a new layer of depravity we never thought possible.’

On 19 August, Mark Smith, a former British diplomat who resigned from the Foreign Office over arms sales to Israel, spoke to Mishal Husain on the BBC’s Today programme:

For everybody watching their TV screens now, what we can see are appalling acts of violence perpetrated on civilians, on civilian property and so on. Most people, I think, watching that would think this is absolutely horrendous and, me personally, my profession, or former profession, as of last week, was to advise the government on the legality of arms sales and when you look at what constitutes a war crime, it’s actually quite clear, even from what you see in open source on the TV that the State of Israel is perpetrating war crimes in plain sight … Anybody who has a kind of basic understanding of these things can see that there are more crimes being committed, not once, not twice, not a few times, but quite flagrantly and openly and regularly.

When asked if he had raised his concerns internally, he confirmed that he had:

I raised it with the new foreign secretary, and I raised it at pretty much every level in the organisation. That’s my duty and that would be quite normal, I think, for public servants. We are very used to upholding the law and so we would normally raise things internally that we might have a question over, particularly if we have subject matter specialism, as I do.

When asked what the response had been, he was not at liberty to divulge, but he invited listeners to draw their own conclusions from his resignation.