Palestine Letter: As you read this, all of Gaza’s fathers are afraid to close their eyes

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have worked hard all their lives, facing hardships and difficulties to provide their children with food, shelter, and an education. They spend their entire lives serving their children without interruption, and this is how the very fabric of Gaza’s families is formed. Most are extended families living in shared buildings between uncles and their sons. 

Every father boasts about his educated children whenever they reach a new milestone, such as graduating from university or getting married. Fathers also cover the costs of their children’s weddings and the associated expenses of building a new life with their spouse. In the Gaza Strip, married sons remain with their fathers in the same house or building, living as a collective unit. 

Every father has a son waiting for that moment. But parents in Gaza, in the shadow of the ongoing war, have to worry about entirely new circumstances now. Not just fathers. The loss in Gaza has become so immense and horrific that it has become regular to say that entire families have been wiped out. There are even more families with at least one or two survivors, often a child. They end up living with a surviving uncle or grandparent, if that. 

For these reasons there is something that can shake anyone to their core when witnessing an elderly man who has lost all six of his sons in a single Israeli airstrike.

In recent weeks, the story of Ibrahim Abu Mahadi, the man who lost all six of his sons in a single airstrike on the central Gaza Strip, spread widely on social media. For a father, his children represented all he had ever amounted to. According to prevailing tradition, they are the true legacy of a father in Gaza.

“I raised them like my own eyes, waiting for them to grow up day after day, and in the end, there was no one left,” he said with great difficulty, his voice choking with tears between each word. He was reciting the funeral prayer for them while they were wrapped in six white shrouds, lying on the ground before him. Beside them was another person killed in the same raid. 

The image of Abu Mahadi bidding farewell to his sons circulated widely on social media, alongside the observation that he was an example of the strength and resilience of Palestinian fathers. And the image of Abu Mahadi dressed in his finest suit, standing between his sons before they were killed. Then the more devastating image, the man bidding six shrouds farewell. 

“Do you see the magnitude of the calamity I am going through? Can you imagine? Can you imagine what I have lost?” he says in a widely-shared video, trying to muster something to say but falling short from the pain, his voice quickly fading as he tries not to cry.

Abu Mahadi’s voice is not just his own, but the voice of every father in the Gaza Strip who has lost a child, or several. It was the voice of all fathers clutching at their children in their tents, afraid to close their eyes and sleep for fear of what they might wake up to.

Words are no longer sufficient to convey the enormity of the calamity, so we watch, monitor, and document what happens anyway, hoping it might help prevent it from happening. But it seems that the world has grown accustomed to our stories, to the point that there is little left to tell.