Gaza’s Suffering Is Unprecedented
7 min read
My brother, Mohammed, has survived nearly a year of war in Gaza while working to aid its people. He has scrambled out of the rubble of an air strike that destroyed our family home, and he has seen far too many of our relatives wounded or killed. Through it all, he has somehow remained unscathed. However, he recently fell severely ill battling a hepatitis infection.
Mohammed is a deputy director of programs for one of the larger international medical NGOs operating in Gaza. He has worked closely with the humanitarian community to address one disaster after another. But now diseases such as polio and hepatitis are starting to spread through an already battered, weak, sick, tired, malnourished, and desperate population. Raw sewage, trash, and unsanitary conditions are present throughout the Gaza Strip; Mohammed has no way to avoid them while working in the field.
The spread of disease, breakdown of law and order, proliferation of crime, rise of food insecurity and malnutrition, collapse of the health-care system, and continued cycles of displacement from one area to another have completely and utterly broken Gaza’s population.
After enduring unimaginable suffering and loss, the people of Gaza are desperate for a future that does not include Hamas or Israel controlling their lives. They want the sacrifices that were forced upon them to produce a radically different future. And yet, as I write this, there is still no end in sight.
In my brother’s story, you can get a small glimpse of what the most destructive war in Palestinian history has meant in human terms. In October, a week after Hamas’s murderous attack killed 1,200 people in Israel and captured hundreds of hostages, an Israel Defense Forces air strike destroyed the four-story home where I grew up with my extended family. My brother, his wife, and their four children miraculously pushed their way out of the rubble, sustaining only minor injuries. Other members of my family weren’t so lucky.
That same air strike killed my 12-year-old cousin, Farah, and it badly injured her twin sister, Marah, and both her parents. In addition, my dad’s middle and youngest brothers, Ibrahim and Riyad, were badly wounded. A follow-on series of air strikes against the El-Yarmouk neighborhood in Gaza City, where the house used to be, destroyed the homes where some of the survivors had sought shelter with neighbors. Uncle Riyad was killed in that strike; his body wasn’t retrieved until nine days later, reduced to mushy human tissue. Uncle Ibrahim’s daughter, Israa, was thrown out of the building by the blast. She landed on the street and was crushed by a concrete slab that fully paralyzed her.
Over the weeks that followed, my brother sought shelter in different neighborhoods of Gaza City. He and his family endured bombardments that frequently came heart-stoppingly close to their places of refuge. In November, they made it to the southern part of the Gaza Strip, which at the time had been designated as a safe zone by the Israeli military.
Mohammed rendezvoused with his co-workers and together they orchestrated a plan to resume their work, providing medical support to the population. They began to receive truckloads of medical supplies and other crucial items, which they distributed across Gaza’s network of hospitals and other medical facilities.
Within a few weeks of his arrival in southern Gaza, though, he faced another tragedy. An Israeli air strike on the home of my mother’s family, my second home in Gaza, killed 29 family members and left others terribly injured. The house was packed with people who had fled northern Gaza and sought safety in the south. At the time, the Brazil neighborhood of Rafah was in a relatively quiet area, far from any active fighting. The New York Times’ Liam Stack asked the IDF why my family’s home was targeted and how such a strike could be justified, given the enormous loss of life among women and children. The IDF provided only a boilerplate reply about Hamas embedding itself among the population.
The strike killed all of my maternal aunts and uncles, and many of their children—my cousins. The oldest killed was my Aunt Zainab, a matriarch of the family who spent decades as an UNRWA teacher. She was known for being immensely generous, always offering her space, food, and resources to the less fortunate. If you ever entered Zainab’s home, you were sure to leave with a full stomach; she would offer up one dish after another on a nonnegotiable basis, disregarding any pleas to stop the hospitable offerings.
Then there was my Uncle Abdullah, a doctor known for running Rafah’s main hospital and for the care he provided during the Second Intifada. He treated thousands of patients who were hit by Israeli gunfire or maimed in air strikes or other forms of bombardment. Sometimes he would ride in ambulances along with the paramedics to collect the most seriously injured, hoping to stabilize patients long enough to make it to the operating room. Once, desperate to stop the bleeding of a teenager’s heart pierced by an Israeli bullet, Uncle Abdullah stuck his thumb into the hole, saving the teenager’s life. He was lauded for that effort by the Ministry of Health and the general public.
In addition to his other humanitarian work, Abdullah operated a clinic in his basement. That made the family house a neighborhood landmark, which people would reference when providing directions or taking taxis. When his children and I would play rough, he would reprimand us sternly. But when I needed support most, including when I required stitches in his clinic, he offered empathy instead. After my Uncle Yousef died, Abdullah assumed the role of family elder, regularly hosting my mother for family get-togethers and taking particular care of her as a widow.
My brother was at the house just two days before the air strike, having lunch with Zainab and Abdullah. He was in Khan Younis when he heard the news, where he had been sheltering with his family, and he frantically raced back to Rafah. He spent three days searching for remains, many of which were so charred, they were challenging to identify. My brother ultimately retrieved Zainab’s remains—headless, her legs entirely crushed, recognizable only by the petite size of her torso. Too many identification processes play out like a gruesome and painful jigsaw puzzle with human pieces, in which memories of features, shapes, and sizes are matched to human remains.
The home in Rafah was extraordinarily special to me while I was growing up. We were there practically every weekend. It was my refuge from school and from life in the crowded streets of Gaza City. It was a place where we watched movies, played video games, and did projects in the massive backyard.
As a child in the 1990s, I met Yasser Arafat, Mohammed Dahlan, and other senior Palestinian political figures in the Rafah house. Abdullah’s oldest brother, Uncle Yousef, worked for the Palestinian Authority, heading the Palestinian Special Olympics. He used a wheelchair himself, and was highly revered for his fairness and independence, frequently visited by other political and social figures.
The Rafah house was like a mini United Nations, a safe harbor of sorts in a sea of inflammatory rhetoric, incitement, and passionate differences about the path forward. Within its walls, people could talk. That’s where I got my introduction to the complicated realities of the Palestinian cause. And that, too, was destroyed by the air strike.
These are my family’s stories, but every family in Gaza has its own. The war has erased not only lives but generations’ worth of history and memories. Monuments and historical landmarks have been reduced to rubble; family papers and mementos incinerated; elders killed before their knowledge could be passed on or recorded.
The Palestinian people had never experienced this level of day-to-day suffering. Although periods of intense violence have occurred, especially at the height of the Second Intifada and during the 2014 war in Gaza, the norm has been low-intensity conflict. In a Palestinian context, the current war in Gaza is unprecedented.
This war must be Gaza’s last. The territory’s leaders should abandon any form of armed or violent resistance against Israel and focus instead on making Gaza the best possible version of itself. The Israelis, for their part, must truly relinquish both their military occupation and their control, allowing Palestinians to exercise real independence and sovereignty over their territorial waters, airspace, and border with neighboring Egypt, even as Israel’s legitimate security needs are accounted for and addressed.
I still believe that this transformation is attainable. Gaza’s small size and compact population make it relatively easy to implement pragmatic changes, which can quickly stabilize the territory and end the suffering. Despite its current straits, Gaza has a chance to become a model of effective Palestinian self-governance, demonstrating what an occupation-free West Bank would look like.
Gaza can, should, and will become the beating heart of a future Palestinian state.
