Palestine Letter: Reporting on daily massacres takes its toll

Since the beginning of this war, events have been unfolding at a staggering pace. Death continues to snatch away our friends, loved ones, and family members. Unlike previous wars, which were considered brief battles with limited, identifiable casualties, this war is entirely different—it spares no one. Everyone is falling, everyone is being killed.

As journalists from Gaza, we write about what is happening here and publish it to the world. Most of the time, we write stories about our own loved ones, about our friends who were killed, about our colleagues who still live in Gaza and who fear death at every moment as they go out into the field to document the crimes of the occupation. It is not easy, even for those journalists who survived the massacres and managed to leave Gaza. They continue their coverage, staying in touch with colleagues who help them secure interviews and sources inside.

That is precisely what happened to me. I lived through six months of genocide in Gaza before I was miraculously able to leave. I did not go out of fear of being targeted or killed. The only reason I left was because I lost my mother due to a lack of medicine, and I was on the verge of losing my newborn son because there was no food or milk. I wandered the streets, markets, pharmacies, and hospitals to find him milk. With great difficulty, I could barely secure a single can of milk, and only at long, irregular intervals. Even so, I do not feel that I have survived. I do not think that leaving Gaza is something to celebrate or be happy about. Quite the opposite—I often wish I had never left. I wish I had stayed there with my friends and colleagues who are falling down, one by one. Because even when one of them falls, I feel compelled to continue their path. But nothing comes from mere wishes.

Over the past months, we have focused our reporting on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)  that deceives the world by claiming it provides food to Palestinians. It posts misleading pictures on its social media accounts and official website showing children and teenagers waving at its workers and forming heart shapes with their hands to thank them. Their deception has reached shocking levels. They take these photos to promote the idea that this is how Gaza’s people respond to the American organization’s work. The truth, as we have proven through a series of articles published on Mondoweiss, is that these so-called aid centers are nothing but mass execution sites for sniping and killing.

Today, for the first time, those soldiers and the employees of the GHF, in cooperation with the Israeli army, used a new method of killing: death by suffocation. Imagine tens of thousands of hungry people gathering at a relief center, carrying small bags, hoping to fill them with a bit of food to take back to their starving families in displacement centers and tents. But instead, they return soaked in blood, carrying their friends on their shoulders, and those bags turn into shrouds. Imagine that crowd and massive stampede, soldiers throwing canisters of toxic gas at the gathered people. Today, more than 18 people died by suffocation—a new method in these aid delivery centers, where we have grown accustomed to recording cases of snipers shooting people in the head, chest, or heart. Now, there are new cases of death by toxic gas suffocation, according to a statement issued by the Ministry of Health in Gaza.

Amid these statements and this daily killing in the displacement centers, some might ask: what drives a Palestinian in Gaza, knowing full well that these so-called aid delivery centers are death traps and that he might never return, or only return killed and drenched in his blood—what drives him to go there at all?

I have kept asking people this question in phone interviews, and the answers have sometimes been shocking and at others logical and understandable. In Gaza—or generally—hunger is the most extreme human feeling one can experience. To go days without food, to watch your family starving while you can do nothing for them, is a crushing experience. For many men in Gaza, seeing their families hungry diminishes their dignity as men and as providers. When a man feels he cannot provide food for his family, that feeling, combined with hunger, creates a sense of helplessness that he rejects with all his being.

I asked this question in a call a few weeks ago with a friend who goes there daily. He told me, “I’ll go even if death is waiting for me there. Death is easier for me than seeing the look in my wife’s and children’s eyes, realizing that I, the man of the house, can no longer provide for them. I go so I won’t feel humiliated by their looks or feel helpless before them. I go, and if I die, I do not care. But if I return, I return to them with some food.”

These answers reveal a massive shift in the lives of Palestinians in Gaza. They now place death on one side of the scale and food on the other. They feel that death equals food—that getting food, even just once, is equal to escaping death.

When I speak to the people – my friends, neighbors, family and strangers – who go to these aid traps every day, risking death in search of food for their family, I think back to when I was still in Gaza during the genocide, walking the markets under threat of bombs and airstrikes, in search of milk for my son. And I know that if I was still in the position of my people in Gaza, I too would have to risk a cruel death if it meant providing for my family. 

These are the thoughts that cross my mind every day when I report on Gaza.