By Atef Abu Saif

Photo credit: Atef Abu Saif

Editor’s Note: Early in the morning of October 7, 2023, Atef Abu Saif, the Palestinian Authority’s Minister for Culture, went swimming. He was on a combined work-and-pleasure trip to Gaza, visiting his extended family with his fifteen-year-old son, Yasser, and participating in National Heritage Day. Then the bombing started.

A year has passed since Israel began its genocidal campaign against Gaza. As pro-Palestine students protest the attacks on campuses worldwide and as activists pressure the current US administration for a ceasefire, we turn back to Atef Abu Saif’s memoir, Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide. We cannot and should not forget his testimony of the human lives surviving the chaos and trauma of mass destruction. This is part two of this blog series. Read part one. Read part three.

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Monday, 23rd October, Day 17 

Last night was most violent. Some 600 people were killed in attacks on different parts of the Strip. At around 11pm I heard an explosion nearby. The usual sequence: the screech of a rocket, a flash in the darkness, then the explosion. I was lying on the mattress, in the middle of the flat (away from the windows), trying to sleep, and had almost dosed off when I noticed a dark and noxious cloud filling the street. No one seemed to be out there. I heard the sound of several ambulances arriving all at once. I began coughing. The smell was that of burning metal and ash. I had to drink some water. My throat stung. Everyone woke up and looked out of the window. The smoke was getting thicker. I counted twelve ambulances heading towards the east end of the street.

Normally the question we ask next is: Where was that? Normally, after half an hour, the news arrives telling us it was near ‘Trans’, for example, an area that can be described as the downtown of Jabalia Camp. I know now that this is what happened in Tirrans on the third day of the war, when more than 50 people were killed. But this time round it takes days for this kind of information to be established. One of the most unsettling things about the war, this time round, is that missiles might be landing just a few metres away from you and you wouldn’t know where it hit, exactly, for hours or sometimes days afterwards. With no news, no internet, and no possibility of going outside, you can only speculate who’s been hit.

I miss real food. Most days I eat falafel in the morning and falafel in the evening. Two days ago, I bought some chicken and quickly fried three pieces so that Mohammed, my son Yasser and I could eat. For us, this was like having a feast. I wanted to save some pieces for the next day, but Mohammed scoffed, saying, ‘Tomorrow they will be rotten!’ He had a point: the refrigerator was out of action due to lack of electricity. So I placed the chicken in a pot outside on the balcony as the air would be cooler there overnight. We all try to improvise, of course, in times of crisis. But this morning we woke to discover the chicken had indeed gone off and smelled terrible. We now have nothing to eat, so I phone my brother Ibrahim and ask if he could buy us some falafel before the shops close. When we arrive at the family house where Ibrahim is staying, we are able to improvise some sandwiches using the falafel. Every time I eat, I feel that this is the most delicious meal I’ve ever had. Deep down, I think I’m telling myself this because it might be my last one.

This morning, I am surprised to see the barbershop open. But my attempts to enter the shop failed as scores of young men stand queuing outside. Instead, I suggest that Ibrahim, my brother, cut my hair using the little cutting machine he has. My late brother Naeem was good at cutting our hair. In the First Intifada, during the curfews, which sometimes lasted as long as 40 days, Naeem used to cut the hair of most of the men in the neighbourhood. For now, Ibrahim will do his best.

This morning, when I woke, I was desperate for something to change. It is hopeless waiting for a war to end. What if it never does? It didn’t end after a week. It may not end after a month, or a year. We, the object of war, have no word in its development. So I realised I needed to have a long-term strategy and plan more seriously how I am going to manage my life over the coming weeks and months.

Today I will stay all day in Jabalia. This means not visiting Wissam in the hospital and not going to the Press House. For me, merely checking in on Wissam crushes me. I guess I am weaker than I realised. And sometimes you have to do what’s best long term. In order to be able to see her tomorrow, I should not see her today. I should rest.

I phone my sister, Eisha, to ask if she would be willing to cook us all a hot meal. She is happy to do so, she replies. Her husband, Maher, is also a good friend of mine. He suggests slaughtering a couple of the chickens he has raised in the little pen in their small garden.

My plan for today is not to use the car, as it’s low on fuel. And there is no gas left in the petrol stations. We haven’t been able to refill the car for over a week, so we need to be careful. Fuel is one of the most pressing issues for Gazans right now: If you own a car, it is best to only use it in emergencies. Some people who own generators also need gasoline. So it’s normal to see hundreds of people queuing up in front of the petrol station, holding up their gallon-tubs in the hope of keeping their generators going. Yesterday I saw the owner of the petrol station at the entrance of Jabalia Camp desperately remonstrating with a crowd of people gathered in front of it, trying to convince them he had no fuel and that queuing was futile. His hope that they would leave his station was in vain. One man shouted: ‘How come you’re a petrol station but you have no fuel?’ Angrily the owner replied: ‘Ask the war.’

I walk towards Eisha’s place in the Tal Azzatar neighbourhood of the Camp. By this stage, I’ve almost become indifferent to the explosions ripping holes in the city around me, because there are so many of them. After seventeen days, there is no use in stopping life: Life has to continue. People are out wandering in the streets again as if there’s been a de-escalation, but there hasn’t. The heaps of rubble and half-collapsed buildings lie everywhere. As I walk, I discover new gaps in the city. Houses of friends, buildings that were integral to the topology of these streets, all gone. Some of them were landmarks of the region. What will happen to us?

Everyone that dies here, dies by sheer bad luck. They just happen to be where the missile strikes at that particular moment. Most of them are on the move, from one place to the next, trying to guess where will be safest. No one is the permanent resident of anywhere anymore.

One small consolation is that when you hear the sound of the rocket, you know it is not going to hit you. You’re not the target. This is a lesson all Gazans learn. When you’re the target of a rocket, you don’t hear it coming. It is just death. You just die. And yet, in my dreams I think I see death, it takes its time, it lets itself be known. I hear its footsteps. I see its teeth.

And nothing we’ve learned as a people, as a species, really helps us at times like these. I have to stop, for a moment, to let a shepherd drive his flock across the road. Hundreds of sheep and goats walk past me. They all look tired. They may not have eaten for days. The shepherd, I gather, is out on the streets because he has been forced to evacuate his barn. He doesn’t know where to hide them, I confirm, so he leads them through the streets. ‘What about at night?’ I ask him. ‘I just sleep where I am and they sleep beside me.’

When I arrive at Eisha’s place, I ask myself the same question: Is it really safe here? One cannot avoid the question of safety even if there is no answer to it.

About the Author 

Atef Abu Saif is a Palestinian novelist and diarist of the Palestinian experience of war and occupation. Born in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza 1973, he relocated to the West Bank in 2019 and is currently the Minister for Culture in the Palestinian Authority. Excerpts from his diaries of the 2023-24 Israel-Hamas war have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Nation, Slate, The Guardian, and elsewhere. In 2015, Atef was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arab Fiction, also known as the “Arabic Man Booker.” In 2018, he also won the Katari Prize for Best Arabic Novel (young writers category). In 2015, he published his diaries of the 2014 war on Gaza, The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary (Comma Press), which was described by Molly Crabapple as “a modern classic of war literature.”