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

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Monday, 13th November, Day 38 

I spent three hours this morning walking the streets, just walking and reflecting on things. Last night was another violent one. The siege is closing in on al-Shifa. Yesterday the administrators had to excavate a mass grave in front of the building to bury all the dead in, whilst trying not to be shot in the process. Closer to home, we heard renewed attacks on the nearby Indonesian Hospital in the early hours. Many civilian houses were hit. People’s access to that hospital has become impossible. I have given up trying to make phone calls. The signal has gone completely. My wife, Hanna, has grown used to my prolonged absences online. At the start of the war, if I didn’t check in every hour, she would get mad with worry. Now, the signal disappears for days on end, and she knows this is why I haven’t checked in. 

Despite looking downtrodden and dirty, the streets are still alive. People gather in groups to talk. Sometimes these gatherings might erupt into a quarrel, other times you hear laughter emerging. People are tensed, naturally. I carry on walking. This is the longest time I’ve spent in my home city for four and a half years. 

I pass by Omar, a young neighbour, who tells me he’s just spent two hours filling his 200-litre water tank. It was a long, slow process watching it fill. In the end, he managed to hoist the tank up onto a wheelchair to push back to his house. But on the way home, the chair lost balance, and the tank toppled over, pouring its contents out onto the street. He tells me it was water for the Wudu (washing before the prayers), but it seems God does not want him to worship him, so he has decided not to refill it again. I am not sure if he’s joking, so I say, ‘But this has nothing to do with Allah or prayers.’ He replies: ‘Doctor, Allah doesn’t want me to pray, if he did, why would all my water be lost?’

Walking on, I’m stopped by another man. He introduces himself as Alaa’, someone who was at high school with me. ‘You were one year ahead of me,’ he tells me. He smiles and asks if the drone is still eating with me. He’s referring to the title of my previous war diaries. ‘It never stopped,’ I reply. ‘There’s nothing left on the table, surely,’ Alaa’ laughs. ‘It’s eaten us out of house and home.’ Sadly, the drone is feasting right now. Little did I know it, but 2014 was just a starter, compared to this. Alaa’ starts asking more predictable questions about the situation and the future; by future he means the time after the war ends, a time none of us can really speculate about. I ask about his house and family. ‘Everything is OK, so far,’ he says. ‘Let’s pray it carries on that way,’ I add. 

‘It’s like we’re all being played in one big PlayStation game,’ Alaa’ says. ‘We’re the characters and they’—he means the Israeli army—‘are the players. We move when they make us move. We die when they let us die. They control us. We’re not human beings, we’re characters in a game.’ I don’t know what to say to this. He smiles before moving on, shouting as he goes: ‘Your friend the drone is playing you, Atef.’ I keep walking by myself in the street. This is how conversations go in Gaza at the moment, now that the mobile networks are down. You walk around and people we know stop and chat, for no more than a minute, just to share their latest info about the night’s biggest events, and to get yours. Today, the thing people want to hear about most is whether there’s been any talk of a ceasefire or a truce. In our short, one-minute conversations, people repeat what certain politicians have said and quickly analyse it. People try to calm themselves by reminding themselves how long this has gone on for, and of the fact that they’re still alive. They take solace, for instance, if there’s still water in their tanks. They’re even happier if there is still gas in their cylinders, and they feel like kings if they have solar panels. We take comfort in what we can.

Faraj manages to get through to his daughter, Mariam, who’s been trapped in the battlefield of al-Shati Camp for the last week. She has now escaped and fled with her husband and kid to the south. This all happened yesterday. For a week though, bullets had been flying through walls and windows throughout her building. It was a miracle they survived. Many others in al-Shati are staying put. They’re without food and water, Mariam explains. They tried calling the Red Cross for help, but no one came. Those who take the risk and flee left towards Salah al-Din Road cannot know for sure if they’ll make it or not. Many are shot on the way. Mariam explained that many were shot the moment they opened the front door of their houses. On the way to Salah al-Din, Mariam saw death at every step. Tanks, soldiers, rockets crashing into buildings on every side. The sky is loaded with death right now, and the land also. Israeli soldiers flank both sides of the road and often summon young men from the fleeing crowds to one side, to question them. In many cases, they arrest them. But Mariam sounds happy that she made it. Now she has a new life to start, one of displacement. The life of a refugee. Or rather, being from a camp already, a ‘re-refugee.’

~~~

Al-Shati Camp has been under siege in the last two weeks. The Israelis came at it from the west and the north. Perching, as it does, right on the beach, the western side has been controlled by the navy, the north by the tanks. ‘Shati’ means beach. The largest contingent of refugees living there come from Jaffa, originally. My late aunt Khadra used to live there and I spent a lot of my summer holidays as a kid in and around her house. When a place like this is under siege, it completely disappears from the news, as no correspondents or reporters can get in, and no communications are let out. For two weeks, we knew there were operations being carried out in al-Shati but we didn’t know any of the details. This morning, the Israelis ordered those who remained in the camp to flee using Yousef Athma Street to reach Salah al-Din. They were told to walk from the very west to the very east. A long enough journey as it was, but that was just the start. They then had to walk another five kilometres to reach the bridge. No one knows the numbers of the dead in al-Shita during the Israeli invasion of that camp. Some of my brother, Mohammed’s in-laws had been located in an UNRWA school on the northern part of al-Shati. For the last week, we haven’t been able to call them. Faraj suggested Mohammed should try again at dawn, there’s a better signal then. So, Mohammed had to wake up around 4:30 this morning to make the call. He did, but it failed. Around 11am he finally manages to speak to his daughter who tells him that they all fled five days ago to her aunt’s place in Sheikh Radwan. I suggest that he go and visit them today or tomorrow. They will need the moral support, now they are displaced.

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.”