My friend Ola recently published her story about being a doctor in Gaza before the current crisis:
Summer 2014 A Fifty-Two-Day War: How To Stay And How To Keep Them Safe
The huge bombardment strikes close to the hospital, scattering glass and rubble. It brings an abrupt end to my rare, quiet pause for coffee. Are the babies hit? We sprint to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, our full attention only on those infants, hastily checking every crib. My thoughts are frenzied. What if the next missile strikes us? Will I be able to rescue them? Will I have time to carry their tiny bodies outside through wreckage and fire? How will I choose who to save, and who to leave behind? Could I choose? Will I even be able to think lucidly, act logically for those babies if the fire consumes us? We stay.
Somewhere, a house razed to the ground, a mother and her children dead. This time, our babies are safe.
In the same hospital where Ola tended to her babies, the Al-Nasr paediatric hospital, the bodies of four infants were recently found decomposing, still attached to long-ceased ventilators and in the beds in which they were left after the Israeli army forced healthcare staff to evacuate.
I messaged Ola, “Your story needs an update”.
“For what, dear?” Ola replied. “For the Israeli hasbara? For the wicked media? For Elon Musk? … It was a moment when my heart died a little, when I saw the video of the decomposed babies … They died silently, bothering no-one, bothering no consciousness. And people are still talking about humanity and international humanitarian law.”
How do I reply to my friend?
For 60 days, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have strived to tell their stories to the world. Stories of unfathomable misery and gruesome death. Stories of beautiful histories, of dreams of growing up, of the fortitude to carry on and rebuild.
We have been invited to share in tales of the humdrum and extraordinarily private — of messed-up menstrual cycles, of lyrical verses uttered to the bodies of dead loved ones, of what is left for dinner and how to split a bottle of juice between 20 people. We have been served intimacies and vulnerabilities on a social media platter, all in the name of proving Palestinians are worthy of living in the same world we inhabit.
Those of us across the globe who have felt united by these stories in their awfulness and humanness, whether through direct connections or a collective ethics, have tried to amplify them. In attempts to give them intellectual credence, we have attached them to unwavering appeals to rights, law, protection, proportionality, rationality, equivalence, morality and humanity.
And for what? The bombs still fall.
James Elder, Australian journalist and spokesperson for UNICEF, speaking from Nasser hospital in southern Gaza, shared on X on Monday, “I feel like I am running out of ways to describe the horrors hitting children here. I feel like I am almost failing in my ability to convey the endless killing of children here.”
Bombardments across Gaza have resumed with intensity, Israelis still wait for many of their loved ones to come home, and Israel’s new grid system for so-called targeted evacuation warnings looks more like the numbering of cattle lots for hogs being driven to the slaughter than a representation of the homes, gardens, football fields and lives of real people.
My friend Mahmoud*, a language professor, speaks of the exhaustion of existing, “We are almost returned to the Stone Age. I have to wait for about 10 hours in a queue to get gas or fuel. I have been lifting fresh water manually to the fourth floor to put in the water tank for house use. This is in addition to the other errands I must care for every day. We have been reduced to only think of our basic survival needs.”
Even basic survival needs are relative. Two days later, Mahmoud messages with a photo of his children in their living room: “My place is not safe anymore with the tanks very close. I have to run to get ready to leave.”
My colleague Mohammed, a paediatrician, writes in a desperate plea for evacuation, “Please help. Me and my family are under high risk. They are attacking near our shelter. I should save their lives. I cannot handle more. I have lost everything.”
Ola is delayed in responding to my messages. “I was distracted as usual,” she writes. “My family was safe yesterday. But today, bombardment hit hard and part of their house was destroyed. They might move, but the road is risky. They don’t know what to do. I was not able to say a word. Now every word is followed by consequences.”
Palestinians feel more exhausted, despairing and lonely than ever. Photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, a constant voice in the Gazan story who feels like a friend to those of us still paying attention, posts on Instagram, “Remember that we are not just content to be shared; we are a people being killed, and we are trying not to be erased from existence. Alone, we stand!”. Have the words of Palestinians now run their course, leaving us all crippled and wearied with nothing but “What for”?
Dr Ellen Meyns, an Australian emergency physician, wrote over the weekend to our solidarity group, “You know that feeling where you are mourning the victims of the war, crying over the indifference, the hopelessness of it all. And you have to hold it in because when people say, ‘How are ya,’ they don’t actually want to know. And you feel like a traitor for feeling sad because you’re not the victim here. And no-one wants another sad day from you anyway. Today sucks.”
We have an irreconcilable mismatch between the state apparatus that allows atrocities to continue, and the personal cries of those who want the obliteration of lives and memories to stop. There will be no short path to justice and peace, if ever these are to be attained.
Ola writes on, “My family house was burnt completely, my life memories were wiped away. My martyr brother’s apartment was bombed, my dad’s clinic was hit by an artillery missile, my whole city turned into ashes.”
This is what impunity looks and feels like. The stories must continue to be told.
*Name has been changed.
