This article contains a topic of a sensitive nature, that may be triggering for some individuals.
There’s a feeling now, across the powerful nations of Europe and North America, that attitudes towards Gaza are starting to change. Denial is no longer working. Most members of the public are horrified by the stories they hear. There is hope that politicians may yet be pressured into dropping their support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime.
In Israel itself, people are beginning to talk about what happens afterwards. There are claims that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers have been told to hide their faces from the media in case journalists associate them with war crimes. Meanwhile, Gazans report other groups of soldiers becoming more aggressive, perhaps because they know they’re running out of time to achieve their perceived aims, or perhaps because they don’t want to leave witnesses.
“I hope the world understands what is happening and I can be a means of conveying the message that we are dying in all ways,” says Ahmad, who is determined to speak out right now.
“Genocide is not just bombing”
Death, he explains, takes myriad forms. “Genocide is not just bombing. Rather, starvation, destruction, lack of life, displacement and homelessness.” He is shocked to hear that there are people who don’t perceive it as genocide. So much of Gaza’s infrastructure has been destroyed that – alongside difficulty in accessing food and clean water – surviving residents have to deal with vermin, disease and exposure to the elements. Ahmad is 26 and used to be in great shape. He has lost 19kg in weight; his face looks hollow and he is often exhausted, but somehow he keeps going.
“I suffer from sinusitis and I suffer from the smell of smoke while cooking and baking. I’m talking to you now and I have a cough,” he says, explaining that he’s been allergic to smoke for a long time. Before the war, he used to take allergy pills, but they’re no longer available, and his respiratory problems have become chronic. It doesn’t help that the only fuel available for cooking is wood scavenged from the ruins, which has often been treated with toxic chemicals. There have been times when he has resorted to using fabric. Some Gazans have even been known to try burning plastic, producing really dangerous fumes.
“We haven’t eaten good food for months,” he says. “Imagine that. We don’t eat any meat, eggs, or good proteins, only canned foods that contain carcinogenic preservatives. It’s dangerous and all of this will hurt us in the future.”
Sometimes, he explains, people resort to eating leaves from trees. Food is incredibly expensive. It’s dangerous to go to aid drops where, on multiple occasions, people have been shot. The alternative is buying food in the markets, which is only possible with donated funds, and banks and other agencies still take commissions out of those. When it is possible to get food, it can’t easily be rationed over days, because the only way to protect it from insects and rats is with pillows, blankets or cardboard.
Every day involves an exhausting search for water. Sometimes this is delivered for free, but if not, it too costs a lot of money. Water from pipes and burns is polluted and unsafe. “We have reached a stage where we drink seawater after refining it to reduce the salt in it,” he says. The UN has warned that it is getting difficult to sustain the desalination plants due to a shortage of fuel for generators.
“We get sick and we die”
The only electricity in Ahmad’s area comes from small, inefficient solar panels. He reveals that some hospitals – basically the ruins of hospital buildings where medical staff are still doing their best to keep working – small generators have been rigged up to provide power to respirators. Other Gazans have reported that the hospitals now have few drugs and that emergency surgery often has to be carried out without anaesthetic.
Ahmad’s parents both have longstanding health problems. His mother is diabetic. “She lost a large part of her sight due to not receiving treatment since the beginning of the war, as the price of an Avastin injection to treat the retina was $1,200,” he explains. “It is a long story and a great suffering. Every day she suffers from this and constantly loses her sight. She has high blood pressure, and my father also has high blood pressure. The medicine [to treat this] is very scarce and is not available most of the time. My mother needs a lot of money for treatment abroad when the crossings open. We get sick and die unless we have some financial assistance to go out and get treatment abroad.”
For a while after the war began, some people were managing to escape Gaza by bribing border guards or getting help from smugglers, but now even those desperate routes have been closed off. “No one can get out,” he says. “We’re surrounded now.”
Life on the streets of Gaza
These days, the temperature averages 35°C in July, and it’s not unusual for it to get over 40°C, which can be fatal to people in poor health who don’t have much to drink and have no proper shelter. Though it doesn’t get as cold as Scotland in winter, it still gets cold enough to kill, and many people have lost their warm clothes after being forced to flee multiple times.
“We live in the streets. Only some fabrics and nylon cover us,” Ahmad says. “They blew up most of the houses. The worst thing is the blood-sucking mosquitoes. Our blood is scarce, yet they take it and transmit diseases.”
Then he explains about the dogs.
Most Gazans are Muslim, and dogs are traditionally seen as unclean animals in Islam, but Gaza was always quite relaxed in that regard. Some people kept them as pets – only to become separated when the war broke out.
“They are lost,” Ahmad says, after assuring me that they’re not dangerous. “They are skeletons. They never have food. They eat the corpses of those they bomb in dangerous areas.”
Many Gazans say that the thing they find most distressing is seeing people who have been shot or caught up in explosions lying in the street, crying out for help, with nobody able to reach them for fear of being killed themselves. Ahmad’s father came close to death after a serious injury, and he’s surprised to still be here himself.
“I have been exposed to death many times,” he says. “A rocket exploded next to me when I was displaced in Al Mawasi months ago. God saved me miraculously. I took shelter behind a wall.”
At this point the interview comes to a close, as he is no longer able to go on, too distressed by memories of what, after all this, he refers to as “more serious stories.” It’s too painful to think about. “Blood and dismembered bodies.”
It’s a mystery to him that people don’t understand what it means to live somewhere that has been under assault for so long. “Two years of hell and there are those who think it’s not genocide?” he asks, despairing.
Along with physical illness, mental illness is a major problem for the surviving Gazans, and some experts think that the worst of that won’t hit until the immediate crisis is over. Can Ahmad imagine being able to live a normal life after this experience?
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he says, “but I hope we forget.”
If you would like to help Ahmad and his family, you can donate to his fundraiser, which covers day to day expenses and will cover his mother’s medical care.
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