IT’S AN ENDLESS GAME. Nothing but a game. Last night Israel announced the termination of its operations in Gaza. But tonight four people from one family have been killed and others injured while asleep in a house that they fled to in my father’s district. Death followed them from Beit Hanoun, where they had lived peacefully for so many years, and tracked them down in Jabalia.* Death wouldn’t let them go, knew where to look for them, followed their every footstep. The family had rented this house a few streets away. Last night death decided to put an end to that particular game of cat and mouse. The rocket struck the very center of the house, bringing the whole block down with it. Concrete, shrapnel, bricks, great twists of iron, shards of glass—all collapsed into the same hole—announcing the end of this family.
The electricity comes on at about 1:30 a.m. Everyone in the house jumps from their beds. This is now a regular custom. All the kids start charging their mobile phones. I plug in my laptop. My father-in-law checks the water supply. If it is low he has to turn the water pump on to fill the tank on the roof. Tonight is one of the few occasions when both the water supply and the electricity are working at the same time. My mother-in-law starts washing all the clothes. Everybody tries to make the best of the electricity before it goes off again. We know we have two hours at most. I’m still feeling ill; activity rushes backwards and forwards in front of me like a scene from a movie. I can barely stir from bed. I just want to sleep.
We have grown used to explosions sounding like they’re just next door; we no longer jump to the window to figure out who’s been hit and then head out into the street to help. Now so many such explosions can be heard. From one hour to the next, you simply wait in the darkness for the dawn to shine a light on the question of which building and which family has been destroyed.
Everything becomes normal. The barbarity of it, the terror, the danger. It all becomes positively ordinary. The only real worry you have, after so many weeks, is a nagging feeling that this war is never going to end. Inside this fact, hundreds of other facts reside. You might die. Your children might die. Your whole extended family might die. You might lose a limb, become disabled. Your house might be destroyed making you and your family homeless. You might lose your friends, your lover. You might be forced to leave your home and live in an UNRWA school or sleep on the street. Individually, however, these fears lose their power over you; they cannot control you. They have taken refuge in the wider, nagging doubt but, outside of that doubt, you become fearless. The sound of explosions becomes the most normal thing in the world; the blinding light given off just before a drone attack—normal. The constant hum of the drones—normal. The sound of an ambulance screeching round a corner or skidding to a halt—normal. The cries of mothers, the shouts of rescue workers—all perfectly normal. The Israeli army’s recorded message on your mobile saying that you stay where you are at your own risk—utterly normal. Waking up in the morning and finding out the house next door doesn’t exist anymore—entirely normal. Funeral processions passing in the street below almost every hour—thoroughly, implacably normal. Having electricity for one hour a day or not at all for five days straight—normal. Carrying water by hand up three flights of stairs to fill a small tank on the roof. Forgetting what day of the week it is, what date it is . . . all normal, verging on mundane.
We have to form new habits. As time passes, we realize that these are not fleeting exceptions or one-offs. They will be the routines and habits we must live by for a month, two months, six months. At the beginning of the war, in the first days of July, I thought this would only be for a few days more. After the first week passed, I told myself one more week, just one more. Two weeks in, I told my wife, Hanna, “Don’t worry, just a few more days, that’s all.” We keep shifting our guesses and, before we know it, we are talking months, and the war still looks young and lively. It’s not going anywhere. We might not have many days left but the war has got plenty of life still in it.
Despite the Israeli army’s declaration that the people of Beit Lahia and the Bedouin Village should return to their homes, most of them don’t return. It is hard for them to trust any such declaration. The organizer of the UNRWA school shelter across the road said, as he did the day before, that it is up to the people whether they to choose to return home. They can continue to stay in the schools. A few families decide to return. They prefer to be back home. My cousins were among the people who decided to return. Nowhere was safe for them, after five of them were injured when the UNRWA school was struck. My younger brother, Mohammad, who is pursuing his academic studies in history in Cairo, phoned to tell me that Sha’bban, one of our cousins, has arrived at the Palestine Hospital in Cairo. He visited him last night with some Palestinian friends.
Jabalia has become impossibly overcrowded since displaced people from the northern parts of the Strip arrived. When you walk in the street, you see people from everywhere in the north: from Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, the Bedouin Village, Ezbet Abed Rabbo, and Etwam. The streets are full of these people. Most of them are staying in the schools. The lucky ones have relatives in Jabalia to stay with. Either way, every house in Jabalia is currently hosting three or four families. Thousands of people wander in the streets, their trauma palpable. Some have been blinded, some are having difficulty breathing, some look lost in a kind of trance, some tremble and shake with every step. All of them offer a picture of catastrophe.
Another funeral passes in the street below. The bodies of three victims are carried on stretchers. You can see from the outline of the flags stretched over them that these aren’t bodies, these are body parts—piles of meat gathered after an attack. Slogans are shouted angrily. Then the shouts are swallowed by silence and all you can feel is the pain left behind.
While playing in the living room, the kids have broken one of their grandmother’s plant pots. They were running after each other when one of them threw a pillow at the other and hit the pot. This is the worst thing that can happen from their grandmother’s point of view. The children fall silent as she moves sadly to fix her plant that’s been uprooted. I say, “It is very young. Not to worry. It’ll be OK.” She does not reply. She is too busy with undoing the wrong.
Sharif, the pharmacist, has become the new family doctor. Hanna took Naeem to see him as he’s been running a temperature for a day now. Hospitals don’t respond to minor complaints at a time like this. It would be embarrassing to go there with a fever or a headache. People are dying every minute. Sharif is the only option. He guesses each illness and offers the appropriate medicine. The war has made everyone sick, it seems. I feel better today though. I’ve been taking three kinds of medicine. My throat hurts less and my chest is calmer. I barely cough at all this morning. My friend Mamoun—a former colleague from my days at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—tells me he has been coughing as well for the last four days. The gas that the Israeli army fired on his place in Khan Younis made everybody in the house cough. This could have a long-term effect. No one knows. When you are dodging missiles for your very life, you don’t pay attention to little details like a strange, persistent cough. I want to say, “This is serious; this gas could be threatening our lives as well.” But Sharif ignores me. He asks if I have any cold water. I laugh. In this war, the aristocrat is not the person who owns the most amount of land or property; it’s the person who has a bottle of cold water. If you had such a bottle, the world would look at you with envy.
The hum of drones has returned; I can hear one hovering over our heads, choosing its next prey. It’s very hot. Jaffa is crying. My mother-in-law warns the kids not to touch her blessed plants. I write my weekly article for tomorrow’s edition of Al-Ayyam. The article starts with the words “We are OK in Gaza.” But it’s a lie; we are never OK. Nonetheless, hope is what you have even at the worst of times. It is the only thing that can’t be stripped from you. The only part of you the drones or the F16s or the tanks or the warships can’t reach. So you hug it to yourself. You do not let it go. The moment you give it up you lose the most precious possession endowed by nature and humanity. Hope is your only weapon. It always works. It never betrays you. It never has before. And it will not this time. Hopefully.
* The Wadhans family lost twelve members over the course of the war. Some were killed in their house in Beit Hanoun, some in Jabalia Camp.