15 July 2024
Akram Surani
That’s not right, that’s absolutely not right! What is happening? What is this silence!? Until when? How can this be accepted? Even slaughterhouses take vacations! They stop from time to time, on weekends, on holy days, what the hell is happening?
Getting used to it!? Has it become normal to see children cut in pieces? Women killed, cities destroyed, men bombed? 2.3 million people hungry?
I am unable to continue writing about this hell, there is no point anymore.
I see posts from friends from Gaza and I feel that all that I am writing is cheap, is nothing, it doesn’t express anything. I have decided that now, at least for now, to share posts of friends from Gaza.
This is from Akram Sourani, a writer from Gaza:
“Huge numbers of martyrs, body parts in the trees – as the media reporter said. What is left of my mind can barely follow and bear the news. My heart is with my son Khaled, diagnosed with hepatitis. The name of this disease was enough to spread panic at home among my whole family, but with this judgment day which has started in Gaza, it became a little thing. After war nothing scares us. We injected the needed medication through Khaled’s veins inside the tent; he refused to go to the hospital, and it seemed that he was right, the hospital is exhausting. But we need a large bed, as large as the size of our tent!
We began Khaled’s treatment protocol according to the doctors’ advice, Google’s advice, and the advice of those who have had the disease before him. The most important of which is to eat honey and dates and juice. There were those who disagreed about watermelon juice, although it is no big deal deal to disagree about watermelon juice because, anyway, there are no watermelons in Gaza.
Symptoms of frustration, lethargy, and loss of appetite began to appear in Khaled after he heard the news of the martyrdom of professor Wahiba, the English language teacher at the Rosary Sisters School. Professor Wahiba had different tastes for all her students, colleagues and everyone who knew her. The last thing she wrote on her private page on Facebook was, “I wish I had a plate of salad.” Her greatest wish before her death in Gaza was a tomato, a cucumber and a hot green pepper!
Khaled is sad and weak although his condition is stable. In the coming days he will improve. It is a matter of time. In Gaza, this is how people get sick, and this is how they get well. They get sick from being patient; it kills them sometimes and cures them at other times. Amani also seems to have begun to suffer from the same symptoms. The hepatitis epidemic is devastating Gaza, just like the terrifying bombing.
Friends of ours, including Amani’s colleagues at Al-Aqsa University, were martyred in the Al-Mawasi massacre. The bodies flew from place to place, scattered, fell, and only quarters or halves of them remained.
One friend, Rami Al-Madhoun, a colleague who was mourned by his male and female colleagues at Al-Aqsa University, was ambitious, loved life, and was an example of toil, patience, and the endurance of suffering.
He lost his family, his children, his university, and his simple barn in which he toiled until the explosion that turned the earth and buried people alive under the sand and under the tents. We always used to say metaphorically, ‘we are buried alive…’ but never did we imagine that they would actually bury us alive.
Loss is pain, and sadness clouds our hearts from all directions. The future is behind us, and our ambitions and dreams are in the past.
We feel pity for ourselves. We are no longer worried about anything except running out of our ability to withstand all this oppression. We die in different forms and from different instruments! We die from the toxic smoke of the firewood and plastic, from the smell of shit, the garbage and sewage surrounding us. We die from the high prices of food and basic needs. We die from the bombing and destruction. We die from the rampage of thugs. We die from cholera, from strange skin rashes, mosquitos, from itching and allergies, from all National Geographic insects that we don’t yet recognize.
Colic almost never leaves us, as if we are eating sandwiches of abdominal pain and diarrhoea.
In the midst of all this mud, my children ask, ‘Dad! Why is this happening to us?’
In the sky there are intense flights of war planes and drones, sounds of explosions, and news about renewing the truce negotiations.”
Akram Sourani: Gaza, Palestine; Khan Younis, Rafah, Mawasi, Deir Elbalah, tents and unknown areas….
Note: Akram’s son is 11 years old.