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Testimony of the First 85 Days of Israel’s Invasion of Gaza: Day 4

By Atef Abu Sai

Atef Abu Saif
Atef Abu Saif in Gaza.

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 one of this blog series. Read part two. Read part three.

***

Tuesday, 10th October, Day 4

I hardly slept last night. For the last two nights I’ve managed to keep a kind of routine: dinner at 8pm, smoke a narghile till 9pm, catch up with WhatsApp messages till 9.15; call Hanna and the kids and talk to them till about 10.45, after which I’m ready to sleep. For two nights it worked. Last night, though, it didn’t.

As I lay on my bed, in a shared room with [my brother] Mohammed and [my fifteen-year-old son] Yasser, I saw the lights of explosions in the harbour, and watched as fishing boats burned. I clearly wasn’t dreaming. Then I felt the hotel shake so violently I nearly fell out of bed at one point. But when we suddenly heard a knock at the door, I wasn’t so sure. Mohammed jumped out of bed and shouted: ‘Who is it?’

The explosions continued as a member of the hotel staff explained to Mohammed that we had to evacuate the building within two minutes. The Israeli military had phoned through and informed them they were going to be bombed. Earlier that day, I had washed my casual clothes—trousers and pullover—and draped them over two chairs on the balcony. Either side of the table, they looked like two friends talking to each other forlornly. They were still wet, so I opted for my suit. As I was threading the belt around my waist, I caught sight of my stubble in the mirror. I don’t want to die looking so unkempt, I thought, so I headed to the bathroom to shave, only to be stopped in my tracks by the sound of the hotel worker, shouting ‘Last call!’

Down in the foyer, the hotel suddenly seemed to be full—heaving with people taking refuge from neighbouring buildings. I asked the hotel worker: ‘Why do they feel so safe here? Aren’t they going to attack this place now?’ ‘They’ll attack the whole area,’ he said, ‘but here is probably safer than wherever they were before.’ ‘So it’s ok for me to go back to my room?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said decisively. ‘Upper floors are dangerous.’ I didn’t really follow the logic of this last point, but now wasn’t the time to argue.

Several hundred people were by this point crammed into the lobby of the hotel. A boy of about six was holding his younger brother’s hand, who couldn’t be more than two, trying to calm him down. A man in his fifties was trying to make his teenage daughter smile. ‘All this will be a memory that you’ll bore your children with,’ he said.

The journalists, with their camera crews, had already set up in front of the hotel, and were busy waiting for something to happen. You could see each one talking on their phones or through their earpieces to their editors and producers back in the studio, wherever in the world that was. A young reporter was talking in English about a ‘terrifying night’. Mothers around me were trying to calm their kids down. An anxious anticipation hung over the entire lobby like a great tent, as we waited to see where the strike would land.

When it came, the first explosion lifted everything in the hotel several feet into the air. Debris flew over our heads. A man grabbed my hand and dragged me towards a more covered area. A huge slab of concrete crashed to the floor from the ceiling above, right where I’d been standing. I looked at the man, to say thank you with my eyes. There wasn’t time for words.

There was a thunderous groan outside and we saw a huge building opposite us slump into rubble. Other buildings lost parts of themselves, corners dropped away, balconies fell off, things started to sway one way or the other. All the world’s possessions seemed to shower down on us: clothes, furniture, pillows, lipsticks, bottles of juice, bottles of perfume, children’s toys, it lay all around us, haphazardly, scattered. Around me, screams turned to cries, as people in the lobby watched their homes free fall into nothing.

After half an hour, the explosions seemed to be slightly further away, so I ventured back up to my room. The bombing continued in the background, and I couldn’t shake off the sound of a girl I saw in the lobby, holding a toy, bawling her eyes out.

~~~

In the morning I read the news. The news is about us. But it’s designed for people reading it far, far away, who couldn’t possibly imagine they could ever know anyone involved. It’s for people who read the news to comfort themselves, to tell themselves: it’s still far, far away. I read the news for different reasons, I read it to know I’m not dead. Presumably the dead don’t read the news; I could be wrong.

Three journalists were killed last night while trying to capture the strikes on video: Said Radwan Taweel, Muhammad Rizik Sobh and Hisham al-Nawajah. They had each rushed out to cover the bombing of Hajji Tower on Institutions Street. Only yesterday, I had seen them talking with Bilal, asking for their press flak jackets. When their friends carried them to the cemetery, they placed their suits over their bodies before bringing them back to the Press House.

The drone operators and the F16 pilot will all have seen those bright blue jackets, with the tech they’re using they would have seen the word ‘PRESS’ writ large. But they chose not to read it. Yesterday morning, at the Press House, they were alive and well. I saw them again about twenty minutes before they were killed. Looking at the images of their funeral on my phone, I wonder how many times in the next few weeks I will escape death.

I drive to Jabalia. In the inner neighbourhood of the town, you find people in the streets. But Jala Street, by contrast, is deserted. No cars. No pedestrians. Smoke and dust hang over the city. Before I get to my father-in-law’s house, a small house in his street is attacked. Another attack takes place nearby a few minutes later, just as I arrive. Later, I learn, that in these two attacks, my friend Hisham lost his wife while another friend, who we used to call ‘Lahsa’, was killed. Lahsa used to go with me and other friends to watch football matches on TV. He’s a huge Barcelona fan. In the 2014 war, we watched most of the World Cup matches together.

We cross Jala Street and head towards Palestine Square, and buy bread from the Families’ Bakery. There is no falafel for sale nearby so we continue to the Square to find a small shop that makes the falafel balls. The man refuses to sell us fried potatoes as he needs them to prepare sandwiches for his customers.

We walk quickly to the Rimal quarter, passing piles and piles of rubble on both sides. Complete neighbourhoods have been erased. It looks like a scene from black and white footage of World War II. An old lady waves her arms around, saying, ‘The whole neighbourhood is gone.’ Rimal is no more the Rimal we all know. My friend Mamoun’s apartment, situated on the top two floors of a beautiful building, has been destroyed. Just two days before the war started, I had been sitting on his terrace and looking at the sea. Mamoun, one of my close and best friends, has spent his whole life savings on this two-storey penthouse apartment and making it his haven. Now it’s gone like most of the neighbourhood.

At the Press House, there are hardly any journalists. Just a handful. One of them, Hatim, tells me this is because there’s no internet here. After the attack on the telecommunications building, the internet in the region has been down, so most journalists have left.

The jackets of the three killed journalists have been placed in the hall where, just yesterday, they had sat working. The blood on them looks fresh, paying testimony to the night’s horrors. Bilal hasn’t come in today. He calls to say he’s moved to another office, owned by the Press House, which does have internet. ‘If there’s no internet, there’s no news.’ I drop Yasser off back at the hotel then go to visit Bilal. The office is in a five-storey building. Bilal and four other journalists sit working around the news desk. I drink a coffee but suddenly feel very tired and need to carry on sitting. All energy has left me.

When I get back to the hotel, I don’t read the news. All our life is news. Instead I put my head down on the pillow, and start to wonder about fetching some books from my old flat. In wartime, you have plenty of time to kill. But I fall asleep thinking about what book I should read.

 

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 TimesThe NationSlateThe 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.”

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