Selma Dabbagh

When a building under construction collapsed in George, South Africa, last week, dozens of workers were buried beneath the rubble. Delvin Safers, an electrician, was trapped next to a colleague who was ‘already deceased’. His girlfriend sent him photographs of their two-year-old son to keep his spirits up. Without the light from his phone, everything was dark. That was the hardest part of it, Safers said. ‘When you close your eyes, it is dark, then you open them, it is the same thing.’ He was freed after a couple of days, with the use of his legs. ‘That was the main thing,’ his father said, ‘when I saw my son walk.’ His life was saved thanks to the large teams of rescue workers with hard hats, sniffer dogs, cranes, bulldozers and trucks who came to his rescue.

In Gaza more than ten thousand people are trapped under the rubble, according to the United Nations.

Last November, I wrote of waiting for the grey ticks to double up and go blue when sending WhatsApp messages to my friend Ghassan Abu Sittah, who in October had narrowly missed being killed in the bombing of al-Ahli Arab and al-Shifa Hospitals in Gaza, where he had travelled from London to work as a surgeon. He survived and was inaugurated as the rector of Glasgow University, with 80 per cent of the student vote, on 11 April. He has set up a fund for Palestinian children, planning ‘for the day after’, and is speaking tirelessly to the media and audiences across the world. 

Gaza’s economy has been stifled since the time of the British Mandate, a process exacerbated by first Egypt’s and then Israel’s occupation. The nail in the coffin was the land, sea and air blockade that Israel imposed in 2007, placing Gaza under siege, severing its economic links with Israel and strong ties to the West Bank, turning it into an isolated enclave where the free movement of labour, material or expertise was impossible.

The support for Palestinians among ordinary people in Pakistan is genuine, palpable and widespread. Audience members asked what they could do with the outrage they feel when they watch images of slaughter and starvation. They described their sense of isolation and distress when watching these clips on social media on their phones. M.A. Jinnah Road (formerly Bandar Road), lined with crumbling colonial-era architecture and packed with lawyers’ offices, was festooned with Palestinian flags, especially near the mosques, strung up between the banners of the parties that had run in the recent elections. In Pakistan, two things get stolen, a man joked at the Sind Club: lighters and elections.

At the end of last month I went to an event at the Photographer’s Gallery, where the grandson (and namesake) of the Armenian Gazan photographer Kegham Djeghalian (1915-1981) took us through what is left of the archive of Studio Kegham.