Part 1
Peace to the land created for peace, which has never seen peace.
May_ 31st _ Friday_Jumma’h day
First the facts,
36,224 people killed, 81,777 wounded, unknown number trapped, unknown number of cadavers beneath rubble and more than 10,000 gone missing. Last updated May 30th at 3:00 pm and I haven’t had access to a stable internet connection to check it since.
I misplaced it after coming to Rafah in the beginning of May, keeping with the evacuation route outlined by the Israeli government that told people to leave their houses and encampments in the west of Khan Younis and make for south of Gaza Valley.
That was four days before the bombing began here too, ahead of the evacuation orders sent later, well after the most populous residential areas - where the very first evacuees took refuge in had already been blown. I was crouched behind a car after the displacement camp I and three hundred other flockers had sought solace in was bombed, officially-60 times. However, the sheer scarcity of time to flee between each one in the last 48 hours following the international court orders to halt the military offence made me feel like I was caught in a shower of rockets.
My company issued phone went missing in a solar-powered tent where you can charge your phone for cheap among a dozen other phones belonging to people who were also dependent on their devices for communication.
I came here because of the promise of a last safe place. I stayed here to document the inevitable hell that was unfolding in front of my eyes in real time. If any of this was real that is.
Singed skin and beheaded babies, real ones this time. The evidence of which, many journalists, non imaginary ones, all have on their film rolls except me. I’ve captured a lot of dreadful things as I travelled from pillar to post in this valley, but just how much of the dark side could you show to the world before you realise that they see everything, they let it happen, that they ignored it and will continue to ignore it.
I had been shunned so many times over by grieving families, understandably not wanting the most awful moments of their lives exposed, and I had a hard time accumulating what I had so far not due to a shortage of stories like I would have hoped but because of my own difficulty communicating on the spot with people. I was used to holding easels and paint brushes, not microphones and the broken windshield of this car.
No one should have to stream live day in and day out their pain and plight just to convince a blind world that it exists. And no parent should have to beg for more time to bury their children. Naivety would have you think that these are unspoken truths but like many things, they are made to fall apart here.
I arrived here on a Tuesday I believe. I was never sure of the date or the time of day anymore because it was made clear to me in the four months I had spent so far in Gaza that the concept of ‘time’ did not work the same here as it did in the rest of the oblivious universe. It didn’t exist. The fundamental rule of the living world which states that time; as physics should have it- is linear, is nothing less than bullshit here. Not when we’ve been frozen in the state of Nakba for 76 long and laborious years. Years of our youth that were wasted being propelled backwards to the bloody dark ages by bombs, into the time where our ancestors' villages were being raided and robbed.
I left my partner Yazan in Deir Al Balah where he headed in the opposite direction-to Jabalia to report the situation there.
While making a stop in Khan Younis, I lost all contact with my agency because of the damaged communication lines in my area which were about to be mended but not before a shell struck the company van of the only two telecom workers trying to fix it.
I was without communication for the first time since the week long blackout in January so all I could do during those three days was aimlessly wander the camp, a town of tents. I filmed everything from families making Taboon from bird feed to children making paper aeroplanes out of the warning leaflets from the sky that urged or rather “gently encouraged” the 90,000 people holed up in this encampment to migrate west towards what I now know was certain death. I say ‘gently encouraging’ because no matter where we are, they will find us, and they will kill us. I knew this truth, this unimpeachable axiom even as my camera, worn by all the footage of suffering and brave faces, captured the children making these planes oblivious to the fact that the last pickup trucks were already en route to Rafah.
With my local networks down, I couldn’t send live updates or reports anywhere; watchers abroad must have thought I went missing. Thankfully, I had signed up and was on a waiting list for an e sim donation drive back when I was reporting from a UNRWA shelter neighbouring the now desolate Al Shifa. The tech savvy teens in the camp help me set up the e sim I received from an anonymous donor and so I bid them farewell, knowing I might never see them again. And no matter how many times I realise that on the job, it still feels unbelievable. That someone I was face to face with a few weeks ago could be a tally on the death toll now.
The first thing I did upon arriving was call Yazan whose voice I could barely hear in the dead of the night, alive with airstrikes on his side of the telephone. He told me that he gave his camera to some ex PLO officers who still had a car and could record things on the move while he ran around trying to wake up everyone he could. He told me about helping a woman carry two of her three children away on their backs because even after being woken up and splashed with seawater, they couldn’t run more that 30 metres before one of the kids, an especially sickly boy collapsed and was rushed back to the Kamal Adwan hospital by the both of them. He said that people in the north were visibly malnourished and that certain elders he’d met there tied stones to their bellies upon sacrificing their meal portions to feed the young children, afraid that the youth would lie next to them in the grave. Aid trucks weren’t a daily occurrence anywhere on the Gaza map but the situation in the north was extremely precarious . On the odd occasion they drove by, he reported that the provisions barely lasted a half hour.
Hearing that I asked ‘What of the air drops?’ and he sucked his teeth and said he’d rather buy death than resort to those mice crumbs. Some people had bought death by order of being crushed pathetically by these “robust” packages.
He discreetly hung up the call on me, feeling exposed in the flattened ground invasion. He was growing increasingly cautious after our reporter friend Somaya from a Lebanese publication was taken by the surrounding Israeli troops of Bureij in Deir Al Balah. They grabbed her aside by the underarms and we lingered behind them, demanding answers and repeatedly tapping on the ‘PRESS’ of her dulled blue vest, because they refused to speak to us in Arabic and kept replying in Hebrew- the little of which I knew being journalist jargon and slurs hurled at me when I visited the West Bank before all this. Then they dragged her away to ‘determine her legitimacy’ or some garbage in Hebrew that meant ‘we are going to seize this woman on 0 grounds and take her to a prison enclosure in Israel’.
As we, two grown men helplessly watched her fade between two other generously proportioned (horizontally that is) grown men and disappear in their custody behind a school bus turned weapons shack, we wondered if this could have been avoided if those heyawans just spoke the language that had served them and their forefathers for decades until they decided they were too good for it.
A female soldier with straw coloured hair tied in a high knot pelted us away with threats, making us go away with our backs facing the scene, and at the time- I was convinced Yazan was going crazy from the war with me when he swore he heard a yelp from Somaya as the truck they dragged her behind and into revved away.
I crouched behind the hood of the car and watched the people flee west on their heels. I hoped and prayed to God that the ones who were going to land up in Deir, if they weren’t shot down first, wouldn’t come to meet those soldiers we faced. I made a silent prayer for Somaya, wishing the sacrifice she was making in prison would relieve us of even a fraction of what we were faced with.
Yabna shelter was overrun with military brigades and it was obvious to anyone who had two eyes that this was the final stage of cleansing of the land inside out of its people.
A string of organs shot into the street and I dug my fingers into the broken headlights, drawing blood but not noticing as the scene of a man with a hole blown through his back, falling down in slow motion, filled the corner of my eye.
I scrambled to the concealed side of the car, crawling- when the car body suddenly jerked. It continued violently shaking as a D9 rolled by, people dying under its blade while I shrunk like a coward behind a car.
When it was gone I slid to the trunk, peering through its fogged window. A small hand banged repeatedly, clearing it with moisture and pressed into the window, jolting me back to reality. I started to panic, finally hearing the soft gulps of breath as the ground forces ran amok elsewhere for now. Two faces made themselves clear, their bodies twisted together in the suffocating storage boot. I stuck my fingers under the door and tried to pry it open but it wouldn’t budge. My fingers were now straining against the small groove and it only relented a small rattle accompanied by the banging of the girl and boy’s hands against the glass. I rushed to the backseat and jiggled the handle, and of course it wouldn’t open. The blasted key must have been put inside the car for safekeeping. I didn’t even know if the people that put it there and locked the kids in the boot were alive anymore. I wrung the sidestep free from the frame of the car and crashed it through the window, not caring about the sound I was letting free like an amber alert to where I was.
I threw it aside, climbed into the car and found the key dug between two cushions. I fumbled at first but jump started the car which immediately elicited a bounce from the back, and I looked over my shoulder to see the kids break free from the trunk and catch their breath, but not before violently coughing in the atmosphere of war.
I gave them a minute, anxiously tapping my fingers on the dashboard. Then, I signalled them to get into the backseat. I didn’t know where we were going just yet but it was away from here.
For a moment, just a moment-everything was safe here.
The unbearable droning of the zanana whirred overhead and the small, brown skinned boy, no older than four-froze. His light eyes glassed over while his sister squeezed his palm, looking at me with a pleading face.
I turned my gaze to the road and pulled out of the sidewalk.
‘Wayn ahlik?’
(where are your parents)
She swallowed a cry, still rubbing her thumb on her brother's hand and said, ‘Khwali rahu ala ma'bar Masr,tarkuna hon-’ she sputtered, mouth dry from screaming inside the trunk.
‘Tarkuna hon, wa'aduna ylaqu tareeq wnib'at hada’.
(my uncles went to the Egypt crossing, they left us here)
(they left us here, they promised to find a way out and send someone to take us)
I focused on the road for a minute, heading in the direction of An-Najjar, a hospital shut down since May 10th but a place where I hoped the Israelis would skip in their rampage, having already cleared the hospital of its staff and patients. The girl's shoulders, bare in a polka dotted frock squared as she questioned me with a flare of hope in her eyes, I was afraid to detonate like the ones lighting up the false dawn outside the cocoon of the toyota. She asked me,
‘ba'tuuk asha'an tin'qidhna?’
(did they send you to save us)
My heart, which I didn’t know could be torn more than it already was, broke right there. It had been a while since I had spoken to or interviewed a child and I nearly forgot how dumbfounded the things they said innocently can leave you. I couldn’t salvage any of my broken heart to tell her that her uncles were probably being seized by the monitoring forces at checkpoint. So I diverted the girl from the topic of conversation and asked for her and her brother’s names. She answered for both of them as her brother trembled from the effects of trauma.
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