As told to Jesse Noakes.
The Saturday before last, I spoke at a rally in Perth about the obliteration of Gaza, where my family still live and where I was born and grew up in the Nuseirat refugee camp, which houses Palestinian refugees forcibly displaced from their homes and villages since Israel was established in 1948.
That afternoon, a friend insisted my family join him at his house to get a bit of distraction from the news. Even there, though, we found ourselves watching Al Jazeera, watching bombing that would not stop live on TV.
There are Telegram groups where people in Gaza report where the bombing is happening, and there was a single message in there that named my street, in my neighbourhood, and I suddenly thought: “This is my family.”
I immediately called my mother in Gaza to check if everyone was safe, and she told me not to worry and said she would call me back. Ten minutes later my brother called me from Gaza. He said: “It’s your sister.” I didn’t understand what he meant. He said: “They targeted her house, and the house just obliterated above their heads.”
My sister, Alaa Qwaider, 34 years old and a teacher, and her children: five-year-old Eman, four-year-old Faiz and seven-month-old Sara. My sister and her three kids were killed, along with every single member of my brother-in-law’s family. They’re all gone. My brother-in-law was the only one to survive because he had left the house to go and get them some food.
My parents just broke. I have never seen my father so vulnerable. My sister is a loss for us, and also a loss for humanity, a loss for Gaza. She was a teacher, an educator, with three children who had barely started their lives.
I’m not sure how killing more than 3,000 Palestinian children so far, or destroying schools, hospitals, mosques and churches, is going to serve the objective of bringing peace to Israel or the region. I can assure you it’s not going to work. It’s not going to lead to any immediate or long-term safety or security or peace, for Israel or Palestinians.
We see doctors receiving the news of their families being obliterated while they are working in hospitals. They killed the entire family of a Palestinian Al Jazeera bureau chief and journalist, Wael Al-Dahdouh, who has been covering this story from day one — his son, his daughter, his wife, his grandson. The next day he went back out with his camera to keep covering the siege.
From what I can see, Israel is trying to make Gaza entirely unliveable.
There is no peace until this occupation comes to an end, and people are treated with dignity, justice and freedom.
After 75 years of settler colonial occupation, 56 years of military occupation and a blockade of Gaza for the past 16 years since 2007, people in Gaza are prisoners. Gaza is the world and the world is Gaza for them, because of the separation and isolation that have lasted for more than 16 years.
The first time I saw mountains was in 2010 when I travelled to Europe to pursue my master’s degree. I was struck by how huge a mountain is. That was also the first time I saw a cinema — at the age of 23, it was a scary experience for me to be in front of this big screen. The city that I live in now, Perth, is 17 times bigger than Gaza, and yet the population of Perth is less than in Gaza, where 2.2 million people — half of them children — are packed into 365 square kilometres.
We have lost confidence in the international community. What is happening in front of our eyes — the killing of children and women, and the destruction of the whole community, and the civilian population, happening live on TV — hasn’t led to any kind of concrete, courageous action from world leaders to call for an end to this. So people need to step up and mobilise, to put pressure on our governments, especially here in Australia, to call for an immediate ceasefire.
The occupation has been maintained for all these decades because of the political and diplomatic cover from international governments. People need to take a more moral stance, as Australians, to call upon their parliamentarians to be vocal about the dehumanisation of the Palestinians. We need an immediate ceasefire to save lives now.
It is torturous. It is painful. It is hard and it is heartbreaking to see that your family is not safe and they could be the next victims. That sense of powerlessness is just suffocating. After I lost my sister, people here told me they were so sorry, that they don’t know what to do, they don’t know what to say. And I feel the very same thing. It’s killing me because I don’t know what to do.
This weekend I spoke again at a protest in Perth. I told the crowd what had happened to my family in the week since I spoke at the last rally. The night before, Israel cut all communications in Gaza, as it substantially escalated its bombardment.
This is a recent message that I received from another of my sisters: “We are unable to sleep. We couldn’t sleep last night. They throw barrels of explosives on us. I couldn’t close my eyes for a second — they go off everywhere, everywhere.”
I am left wondering if this is the last message that I will ever receive from her.
