The suffering in Gaza is unprecedented – The Atlantic

My brother, Mohammed has survived almost a year of war in Gaza while working to help the people. He has climbed out of the rubble of an airstrike that destroyed our family home, and he has seen far too many of our family members injured or killed. Through it all, he has somehow remained unscathed. However, he has recently become seriously ill with a hepatitis infection.

Mohammed is the deputy director of programs for one of the larger international medical NGOs working in Gaza. He has worked closely with the humanitarian community to respond to one disaster after another. But now diseases like polio and hepatitis are spreading through an already battered, weak, sick, tired, malnourished and desperate population. Raw sewage, garbage and unsanitary conditions are everywhere in Gaza; Mohammed cannot avoid them when he works in the field.

The spread of diseases, the breakdown of law and order, the increase in crime, the rise in food insecurity and malnutrition, the collapse of the health system and the continued flows of migration from one area to another have completely and utterly devastated the population of Gaza.

After enduring unimaginable suffering and loss, the people of Gaza desperately yearn for a future where Hamas or Israel do not control their lives. They want the sacrifices imposed on them to yield a radically different future. And yet, as I write, there is still no end in sight.

In my brother’s story, You get a small glimpse of what the most devastating war in Palestinian history has meant in human terms. In October, a week after Hamas’s murderous onslaught had killed 1,200 people in Israel and taken hundreds of hostages, an airstrike by the Israel Defense Forces destroyed the four-story house where I grew up with my extended family. My brother, his wife, and their four children miraculously managed to wriggle out of the rubble with only minor injuries. Other members of my family were not so fortunate.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: What I heard from Gaza

That same airstrike killed my 12-year-old niece Farah and seriously injured her twin sister Marah and her parents. In addition, my father’s middle and youngest brothers, Ibrahim and Riyad, were seriously injured. A series of subsequent airstrikes on the El-Yarmouk neighborhood of Gaza City, where the house used to be, destroyed homes where some survivors had sought shelter with neighbors. Uncle Riyad was killed in that attack; his body was not found until nine days later, reduced to pulpy human tissue. Uncle Ibrahim’s daughter, Israa, was thrown from the building by the explosion. She landed on the street and was crushed by a concrete slab, completely paralyzing her.

In the weeks that followed, my brother sought shelter in different neighborhoods of Gaza City. He and his family endured bombardments that often came heartbreakingly close to their refuge. In November, they reached the southern part of the Gaza Strip, which at the time had been designated a safe zone by the Israeli army.

Mohammed met with his colleagues and together they orchestrated a plan to resume their work and provide medical support to the population. They began receiving trucks full of medical supplies and other crucial items, which they distributed to Gaza’s network of hospitals and other medical facilities.

Within weeks of his arrival in southern Gaza, however, he was confronted with another tragedy. An Israeli airstrike on my mother’s family home, my second home in Gaza, killed 29 family members and left others seriously injured. The house was full of people who had fled northern Gaza and sought safety in the south. At the time, the Brazilian neighborhood of Rafah was in a relatively quiet area, far from active fighting. The New York Times‘ Liam Stack asked the IDF why my family’s home was targeted and how such an attack could be justified, given the enormous loss of life among women and children. The IDF gave only a standard answer about Hamas entrenching itself in the population.

The strike killed all my maternal aunts and uncles, and many of their children—my cousins. The oldest to be killed was my aunt Zainab, a matriarch of the family who had worked as a UNRWA teacher for decades. She was known for her enormous generosity, always offering her space, food, and resources to the less fortunate. If you ever walked into Zainab’s house, you could be sure of leaving with a full stomach; she offered one dish after another on a non-negotiable basis, ignoring requests 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 had been hit by Israeli gunfire or maimed by airstrikes and other forms of bombardment. Sometimes he would ride in ambulances with paramedics to pick up the most seriously wounded, hoping to stabilize the patients long enough to make it to the operating room. Once, desperate to stop the bleeding in a teenager’s heart that had been pierced by an Israeli bullet, Uncle Abdullah stuck his thumb in the hole and saved the teenager’s life. He was praised for his effort by the Ministry of Health and the general public.

In addition to his other humanitarian work, Abdullah ran a clinic in his basement. That made the family home a landmark in the neighborhood, where people pointed when asking for directions or hailing a taxi. When his children and I played rough, he would scold us sternly. But when I needed support the most, like when I needed stitches at his clinic, he offered empathy instead. After my uncle Yousef died, Abdullah took on the role of family elder, regularly hosting my mother for family gatherings and taking special care of her as a widow.

My brother had been in the house just two days before the airstrike, having lunch with Zainab and Abdullah. He was in Khan Younis when he heard the news, where he had fled with his family, and he ran back to Rafah in panic. He searched for three days for remains, many of which were so charred that they were difficult to identify. Finally, my brother retrieved Zainab’s remains: headless, her legs completely crushed, recognizable only by the small size of her torso. Too many identification processes play out like a gruesome and painful jigsaw puzzle of human pieces, in which memories of features, shapes and sizes are matched to human remains.

The house in Rafah was extraordinarily special to me growing up. We were there practically every weekend. It was my refuge from school and from life in the busy streets of Gaza City. It was a place where we watched movies, played video games, and did projects in the huge backyard.

As a child in the 1990s, I met Yasser Arafat, Mohammed Dahlan and other leading Palestinian political figures in the Rafah home. Abdullah’s eldest brother, Uncle Yousef, worked for the Palestinian Authority and led the Palestinian Special Olympics. He was in a wheelchair himself and was highly revered for his honesty and independence, and was often visited by other political and social figures.

The Rafah House was like a mini-United Nations, a kind of safe haven in a sea of ​​inflammatory rhetoric, incitement and passionate disagreement about the way forward. Within its walls, people could talk. There I was introduced to the complex realities of the Palestinian cause. And that too was destroyed by the airstrike.

These are the stories of my family, but every family in Gaza has its own. The war has not only erased lives, but generations of history and memories. Monuments and historical sites have been reduced to rubble; family papers and mementos burned; elderly people murdered before their knowledge could be passed on or recorded.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: Israel killed my family, but not my hope

The Palestinian people have never experienced this level of daily suffering. While there have been periods of intense violence, particularly at the height of the Second Intifada and during the 2014 Gaza war, the norm has been low-intensity conflict. In a Palestinian context, the current war in Gaza is unprecedented.

This war must be the last for Gaza. The region’s leaders must abandon any form of armed or violent resistance to Israel and instead focus on making Gaza the best version of itself possible. The Israelis, in turn, must truly relinquish both their military occupation and control, allowing the Palestinians to exercise genuine independence and sovereignty over their territorial waters, airspace, and border with neighboring Egypt, even as Israel’s legitimate security needs are taken into account and addressed.

I still believe that this transformation is achievable. Gaza’s small size and compact population make it relatively easy to implement pragmatic changes that could quickly stabilize the area and end the suffering. Despite its current problems, Gaza has the opportunity to become a model of effective Palestinian self-governance, showing what an occupation-free West Bank would look like.

Gaza can, must and will become the beating heart of a future Palestinian state.