YOU NEED A little luck to get you through war. All wars are unpredictable. You have to learn to live with that unpredictability, subject yourself to its mechanisms, get a feel for it. But on top of this you also need luck. The dead are not military personnel, the traditional targets in a battle. Most of them are your fellow citizens. Some of them are relatives or friends with whom you shared a good portion of your life. You have not made it this far because you are smarter than them or because you took the right precautions. Many of them took the right precautions as well; many of them were smarter than you. But they still weren’t a match for the unpredictability of war.
The Balata family decided to relocate from their place on the outskirts of the Strip, to live with relatives closer to the center, thinking that their place was safer. Luck laughed on them as the tanks picked out this new home instead, reducing it to a series of piles—of stone and of flesh. Their flesh. While the house they had fled remained untouched.* The same fortune befell those people who left their houses in Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun and returned to the UNRWA school for shelter, like my cousins. They did not die or get injured in their homes, which continue to stand untouched in the crossfire, rather in the safest place they knew, in a UN building.
It is a game of luck that you have no hand in. Today, as I prepare an espresso, looking down from the window of my kitchen, I realize that this longing for the taste of espresso, or my yearning for my desk back in my study, might be part of a scene in the final act of a story. Every action you take, every small gesture, might be part of your final act. The coffee is boiling as I look down from my window, and I ask myself: What if an F16 pilot does not like the smudge my coffee makes on his infrared screen, watching my house; what if the operator of a drone hovering over my building is annoyed by the steam coming from the coffee maker, steaming up the window, and therefore his view into my house on his computer screen somewhere in Israel? What if the pilot in the aircraft is in a bad mood generally this morning and doesn’t mind pressing the button on a whim, seeing steam fog up my window, thinking that will do as a reason? He might have quarreled with his girlfriend this morning or didn’t manage to have sex with her last night . . . and I have to pay for this.
More than half of my coffee has boiled over onto the stove before I return from my reverie. I can’t help having such thoughts. The sound of explosions, the whir of drones, the hissing of warships’ shells, the wail of ambulances, the cries of people in the street, and the worry I see in the eyes of my wife and kids . . . all these make me think of the moment when all my savings in the bank of luck will be spent. That moment will come without pre-notification. I can’t check my balance. It will just happen. Making a simple cup of coffee might put me in the red, or listening to the radio in the middle of the night, or sitting in front of the building with my neighbors, or walking to my father’s place, or having a nargilah with my friends. Anything could potentially drain the last penny of credit from my account. I might be a danger to others too. I might be an omen for someone else’s bad luck, for all I know.
Come evening, I order a taxi to take Mostafa to stay at his grandfather’s house as I need to take him to al-Awda Hospital early in the morning to have a minor operation on his arm. When we near the Falouja area of the camp, an explosion suddenly flashes in front of us, deafening me for a moment. I watch as shrapnel sprays up into the sky in front of us. The driver responds instantly, putting the car in reverse and speeding back down the street. A spray of shrapnel, stone, and brick seems to darken the sky in front us, like a rain cloud or an oncoming storm. Then it all crashes down, just a few meters in front of us. Any one of these pieces could have killed us had it struck the car.
I phone my friend Hisham. He has just returned home from work in Beit Hanoun Hospital. His family is all spread out over the Strip these days. He and his wife are staying in their house in Beit Hanoun. His married sons are staying with their fathers-in-law while his other children are staying at a relative’s. He says this is a good way to prevent the whole family from being killed by a single strike: “Some of us will survive if one of the places gets hit,” he says. I suggest that Hisham and his wife come and stay with me in my place since it’s safer than their house in Beit Hanoun. “Nowhere in Gaza is safer than anywhere else,” he replies. “It’s all dangerous.” It’s the same logic that drove my cousins, after the strike on their UNRWA shelter, to return to their home in north Beit Lahia. It’s all the same.
After forty-seven days of continued attacks and the unbearable burden of trying to survive, it doesn’t matter. You don’t live by choice, just as you don’t die by choice.
Jabalia Camp
* Hanaa Naim Balata, Doaa Naim Balata, Israa Naim Balata, Mariam Naim Balata, Yehya Naim Balata, Naim Nathmi, and Sahar Motawea Balata (ages unknown) were all killed in the same attack.