Jen Marlowe ran the 2019 Palestine Marathon, and did much of her training throughout the West Bank and Gaza. She writes, “while I realized that there would be challenges during my training runs, what I hadn’t anticipated was the window they would provide into the lives of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.”
Jen Marlowe follows Palestinian paramedics as they try to keep up with dozens of injured protesters during the Great March of Return protests on March 1, 2019.
Jen Marlowe shares a day in the life from Gaza: “The Great Return March earlier that day had been a blur of action. Ribbons of tear gas and repeated bursts of live fire, sometimes followed by shouts of “Someone’s wounded!” Was the last of these incidents that I witnessed the moment that Yousef had been shot in the chest and killed?”
Jen Marlowe reports from the Palestinian village of Duma, where Israeli settlers had poured flammable liquid into the window of the Dawabsheh home and then tossed molotov cocktails inside burning 18-month old Ali Dawabsheh to death. A neighbor tells Marlowe that as horrific as this incident was, violence from Israeli settlers is all too familiar for Palestinians: “We live this action every day. We want to live. We have children, the same as you. We have people who want to live, the same as you. We are humans, just like you are. For all those who can hear me: We want to live. We deserve to live…Enough is enough. Enough with war.”