I spent a total of four years in Gaza, six months of which were during the ongoing war. I’ve never felt so helpless in the face of a fearsome war machine that shoves a new round into its rifle as soon as it fires the previous one, and has a seemingly unlimited supply of ammunition.
In September, I spoke with the matriarch who ran a shelter for displaced people in Khan Younis. I asked her what hope she had for peace. She pointed to the little girl who was holding her mother’s hand and sucking her thumb. “Her father was killed when their house was bombed five days ago, and they haven’t been able to pull his body out of the rubble because the area is under constant fire,” she said. “What hope?”
In hopeless Gaza, sleep is among the most precious commodities. Back in January, we would run to the window to watch the cloud of smoke that painted the sky after a particularly loud and close impact. But over time they have become so common that no one bothers to look anymore.
On an average night in my neighborhood in Deir el-Balah, the bombing would begin at night, just as people were getting ready to try to sleep. We would hear the whistle of a missile and then a loud explosion that shook the windows. The explosion would wake up the local dogs, donkeys, babies and any other soul who dared to sleep, setting off a chain reaction of barking, crying and other agitated sounds. More bombs would come, followed by various types of gunfire until everything quieted down for a while. The call to prayer at dawn would usually trigger a new series of attacks.
The apocalyptic scenes that everyone sees on television are even more harrowing live. I often find myself deleting photos and videos from my phone because the camera doesn’t show how grotesque the surroundings look to the naked eye.
Personally, the images are accompanied by a series of sounds. This includes the now-daily ritual of people scrambling for bread in nearby bakeries as food supplies dwindle, amid the near-total disruption of commercial goods deliveries and ongoing and paralyzing restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid. A week ago, a woman and two girls suffocated after being trampled in front of a bakery when a fight broke out because there was not enough bread for everyone.
My dear friend Khaled, who runs soup kitchens across Gaza, worried that soon there would be no food at all and that his kitchens would have to close. I struggled to find anything useful to say to him given the reality around us and would cry every time we spoke because I too was losing hope. “Don’t cry, Olga,” he always said. “Be strong, as we are.” Indeed, the strength of the Palestinians is unparalleled.
In November, the Famine Review Commission, an ad hoc body of international technical experts that reviews classifications of potential famine established by the United Nations and other actors, released a report, sounding yet another alarm over the imminent threat of famine, particularly in the besieged north of Gaza. Since then, things have only gotten worse. On several occasions, I saw people picking up dirty flour that was spilled on the road after some bags of flour fell from the aid trucks.
Giving priority to the most vulnerable in Gaza is a hopeless task since there is almost no help. With 100 percent of the population of about 2.3 million people in need, do you choose to help a pregnant woman, a survivor of domestic violence, or someone who is homeless or disabled? Are you looking for all these risks in one person? The agony of this election will keep us awake long after our work in Gaza is over.
During the months we spent in Gaza, my colleagues and I witnessed so much pain, tragedy and death that we are at a loss for words to describe the horror. We picked up dead bodies from the side of the road – some were still warm and bleeding profusely, others were stiff, half eaten by dogs.
Some of those bodies were young men. The boys who were senselessly killed, some of them slowly dying as they bled out, terrified and alone, while their mothers agonized over why their sons didn’t come home that night. To the rest of the world, they have become just another number in the grim statistics of people killed in Gaza so far – now more than 45,500, according to the Ministry of Health.
In rare moments of silence and between the chaos of constant crises, I think about everything around me and ask myself: “What hope?”
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
