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 four of this blog series. Read part one, part two, and part three.

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Saturday, 2nd December, Day 57 

All of a sudden, with the resumption of war, Khan Younis has become the Israeli’s primary target. It’s like they have followed me here. Last night, shelling and missile strikes could be heard on all sides. I hadn’t seen a ‘ring of fire’ style attack since I left the north, but as I lay on Mamoun’s floor, trying to sleep, the orchestra of war struck up again. Likewise, the old habits kicked in: counting the attacks, speculating on the types of rockets being used, wondering where each strike landed.

Yesterday evening, I went over to Nasser Hospital to recharge my mobile and laptop. It’s become a habit now to sit in one of the tents set aside for journalists and catch up with some of those working there while my phone charges. Since the war resumed, the hospital has filled up again; those who spent the few precious days of the truce back in their houses, have now returned to their tents inside the hospital grounds, or the corridors and stairwells that sheltered them before. On my way to the journalists’ tent, I saw the rows and rows of tents that have filled up every inch of free space. A new refugee camp was coming into life here, with its back alleys and main routes, its neighbourhoods and networks. I saw people standing around a fire, cooking. A woman was making bread. Two girls were whispering to each other, looking at three young men smoking nargilehs. A new community was taking shape.

Mostafa, a producer from Russia Today, told me that many of the journalists there had come down from Gaza City and gathered, with their families, in a space next to the walls of Nasser Hospital, pitching their own tents and making it their home now. Like a special mini-camp just for journalists. In truth, the whole of Khan Younis is one big camp now. Tents stand on every street corner. New arrivals come with dreams no more ambitious than to buy a tent and find a place to pitch it. During the day, Mostafa and scores of other journalists stand in front of their cameras, delivering their hourly reports. Then at night, they walk a few yards, climb inside their family tents and resume their lives as fathers and mothers.

I woke up at 6am. Mamoun was already awake. He listed the places, houses and streets that had been hit while I was sleeping. Though strikes happened all over, the fiercest ones were in the eastern neighbourhoods of Khan Younis. A ground invasion has started there. Civilians are being told to leave their homes. ‘Do you think the Israelis are going to invade our neighbourhood?’ Mamoun asks me. From my own experience in the north, I can only say yes. It might take some time, it may even take longer, but they are coming. The Israelis burn everything in front of them to the ground. They leave nothing standing: no buildings, no trees, no people. They kill everything. ‘Well, I’m not going anywhere,’ Mamoun says. ‘I left my flat in Rimal and now it’s rubble. From here, I have nowhere left to go. I won’t move anymore.’ He reminds me of the way Bilal and I used to talk.

In the north, the Israelis have resumed their operations, mainly in western parts of Jabalia. I phone my sister Asmaa who’s been sticking it out in her house in Falouja. She sounds terrified as shrapnel from a rocket struck her back garden yesterday and incinerated all her plants. On the same night, a huge fire raged through a nearby souk, spreading into the complex beside it and a neighbouring school. ‘Everything was on fire,’ she says. ‘The heat from the flames made it warmer than daytime.’ After speaking to her, I call my father but can’t get through.

This morning, some 80 new members of Mamoun’s extended family arrived from al-Qarara, a village north of Khan Younis. They started to arrive around 7am with whatever they could carry with them: clothes, mattresses, pillows. The Israelis fired on their village, destroyed several houses, then asked those that were still alive to leave. So now Mamoun’s admittedly large house, which has already accommodated 70 displaced relatives from Gaza, has to absorb another 80. Street ‘2’ in al-Qarara took the brunt of the attack, with the homes of the Abadalla and Kidra families being destroyed. Across farms and homesteads around the village, many were injured. Three local mosques were also damaged. As the place becomes more crowded, I realise family comes first, they are Mamoun’s priority. We need to move to Rafah and look to stay with my brother and cousins.

A new atmosphere dominates the city this morning. The war is back and, and for the people of Khan Younis, it is far more severe than before. The truce lulled everyone into a false sense of security. Now that veil has been lifted and we can see the true face of the Israelis once again.

Walking in the street, I see how much more crowded Khan Younis has become. The Israeli military chiefs talked about 50 different strikes on the city last night. The tanks are coming in from the eastern border of the Strip, ploughing through villages and farmlands and heading straight for us, but before they get here, a tidal wave of humanity pours into the city.

We find a car to take us back to Rafah, but we end up spending an hour waiting at one particular intersection. A huge crater sits in the middle of the road where an F16 missile struck last night. The traffic is backed up around it, on both sides, as drivers try to keep their cars from toppling over the edge. As I look down into it, I can’t help wondering if this crater will become the new dividing line between Khan Younis and Rafah in the ground invasion to come. The way the Wadi was the natural line between the old north and the south. Rafah will soon become the last refuge in the whole of the Strip, especially the western, coastal side of Rafah. Everyone will be told to go there. Then what?

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.”