Ten months into our genocide, Palestinians in Gaza reflect on the destruction of their lives with a profound question: will we ever be ready to face all this loss? As for me, I am one of the fortunate few who have managed to escape genocide, leaving behind family, a destroyed world, and a lifetime of memories. With the privilege of distance from genocide, I ask myself: who am I after all this loss, all this grief?
One-hundred eighty-six thousand Palestinians in Gaza are estimated to have died — killed directly or indirectly, since Oct. 7, 2023 — as a result of Israel’s relentless war, which imposes starvation, prevents the arrival of lifesaving medical aid, targets and demolishes medical facilities, sewage treatment facilities, and drinking water stations. The immeasurable destruction wrought on every aspect of life in Gaza has also led to the accumulation of thousands of tons of garbage, rendering water toxic, and reviving epidemics thought to have vanished.
The death toll in Gaza amounts to 8% of its population, which is equivalent to 27 million U.S. citizens, 5 million and 400,000 UK citizens, and 6 million and 600,000 German citizens. In the ninth month of Israel’s war of extermination on Gaza, 150,000 housing units were completely destroyed, 200,000 housing units were partially destroyed, and 80,000 housing units were rendered uninhabitable. In less than a year, Israel dropped more than 80,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip, and its deliberate targeting of Gaza’s health sector led to 32 hospitals and 64 health centers going entirely out of service, with an additional 161 health institutions being damaged. But Israel did not stop at annihilating Gaza’s lifesaving infrastructure; ten months into its war, Israel has destroyed 114 schools and universities, with the partial destruction of 326 more; it has destroyed 609 mosques, partially destroyed 211, and destroyed three churches.
Taking note of the sheer size of the losses in numbers is important. But it is essential not to dwell on these figures, which relegate Palestinians and their lives to quantifiable data. We must understand that there is a story behind every individual killed, maimed, traumatized, and starved. Every hospital and medical center saved and lost lives; every school and mosque nurtured minds and served as a home away from home. Human life and emotion are profound; suffering and loss cannot be described in numbers.
With my privileged distance from unrelenting death and destruction, I am consumed by the qualitative impact of our televised genocide. As I watch health officials on the news and in social media posts record and report casualties and tangible injuries in the aftermath of colossal bombardments, I think of the untold psychological toll associated with each. How can this be known? How do we measure beyond the quantitative, statistical data? How do we access and interpret the internal, subjective human experience of surviving repeated massacres and displacement, forced starvation, thirst, and disease under daily aerial bombardment for ten months in a 25-mile-long besieged enclave home to two million people?
On the 189th day of the war, my wife, our son, and I were displaced to Rafah after fleeing our home in Gaza City in October, and after spending three months in al-Maghazi with our extended family (I wrote about it here). Finally in Rafah, I went to buy some basic things we would need in our new refuge. On the street, I saw a boy standing alone by the sidewalk. I stopped to check on him and asked him how he was doing. We chatted a bit and I asked him how he spent his time. He said, “The most I did this year was wait, carry bags, and stay outside ready to escape.” He was nine years old.
A few days later, I was having coffee with some friends in one of the tent cafes set up along the beach. We shared school memories and could hear others’ conversations around us through the thin fabric of the tent. A group of teenagers sat in the next tent over. I listened in silence for a moment to their conversation. One said, “My only concern used to be to reach higher levels in my life, to show off in front of my friends, and try to flirt with a girl I like. Today, I’m just looking for a space and time to pee, and I dream of taking a normal shower after more than 200 days.”
On another day, while conducting a field survey with an international humanitarian organization I was working with, I met a mother with three children. She told me, “I used to visit my parents every weekend and notice the look of love on their faces as they watched my children. My parents are dead today, and I miss them very much. I have a great sense of responsibility toward my children, and to tell them about my parents and how much they loved them. I fear that they will experience this pain one day.”
A little while later on the same day, I met a father with five children in another tent. “I regret that I had children,” he said. “I wanted them to be the improved version of me. But here we are displaced in a tent.” He pointed to one of his children. “I see Hamada playing among the tents, and I feel heavy because of what his life has become. He is no longer the child who wants to buy notebooks and colored pencils, who constantly cries until I buy him the backpack he wants. He doesn’t know what is next and what the future holds for him. And neither do I.”
Every person in Gaza who continues to survive the genocide has lost. They did not only lose their homes, friends, or families; some of them lost a foot or a hand or both; some also lost their eyes or their ability to hear, and others’ faces and bodies were burned. Still, others lost a combination of these, whether during this war alone or as a result of surviving successive wars on Gaza. One of the most difficult things that this genocide has birthed is the term WCNSF: Wounded Child, No Surviving Family. How ugly this term is, and how devastating that many children will be made aware of it.
Despite everyone in Gaza experiencing extreme loss and agony, what people in Gaza will tell you is that their grief is postponed and that they must continue to live, overcoming every aspect of suffering. Despite surviving 80,000 tons of explosives dropped from the sky, Palestinians in Gaza continue on.
Palestinians in Gaza are not only human beings who have surpassed their primal animal instinct; they are not merely looking for prosperity, or trying to overcome greed and desire. Rather, to survive, Palestinians in Gaza cling to life like no other; they exaggerate their own humanity like no other; and they alone speak of what comes after as though they were earthly gods. Despite this, there are limits to their resilience, to their sumud.
Loss is the father who greeted me in Rafah with an unmistakable smile despite losing his children and wife, among whom he lived for more than a decade experiencing an intermingling of all the emotions associated with parenthood, partnership, and family. This father lifted stones searching for the remains of his children and wife from under the rubble of their destroyed home. As he extracted a thigh bone, he desperately tried to create an image in his mind that was not this, an image that was in fact larger than imagination. He convinced himself that what was in his hands was just a bone as he completed his mission to bury his family. Burying them was his only hope from God, from nature, and the universe as a whole. When a body was extracted from the rubble of the same building where his family was reduced to parts, he congratulated the family of the deceased and said, “How lucky you are to have found the body whole!”
Loss is to have created a home for yourself, a haven where you can gather with your loved ones and live in an earthly paradise of memories and dreams, to be forced to flee it, and then, to only be able to experience it again from afar through images and videos of its destruction. But this kind of loss goes deeper still. Like many in Gaza, we were forced to leave this haven of ours in haste. We took what we could, but it wasn’t much. Fortunately, we had a car; most can only take whatever they can carry on their backs and in their hands; the trails of displacement are mostly walked in Gaza. For the many who are left with nothing and lost loved ones while fleeing fires, loss is longing for material belongings that remind them of those they lost, of their scents. The impossibility of grieving, of mourning with these soothing objects that bring lost loved ones closer — this is loss.
Time heals as one forgets, but in Gaza, Palestinians are keen to strengthen their memories so as not to forget. Who among us has forgotten what happened in 1948? Who among us has forgotten 2008/2009, 2012, 2014, or 2021? Memory is our heritage and our highest form of resistance.
Even those who remained in their homes in Gaza City and Northern Gaza inevitably lost. They might feel the joy of victory as they manage to still survive genocide in their destroyed homes against all odds, a sure sign of their enduring sumud. But in Israel’s war, genocide of human beings is also genocide of stone. Nothing remains where they survive. And what does it mean to survive if those who remain are deprived of food, water, and medicine? What does it mean to survive if those whose sumud has kept them alive must watch their children, siblings, parents, and loved ones disintegrate to pieces of charred flesh or wither from enforced hunger and preventable disease?
For Palestinians “surviving” in Northern Gaza, an internal state of strife, of cognitive dissonance, sets in, and thoughts of displacing to the south take over. But then, daily news of the conditions in the south returns, and staying put in the north — starving, thirsty, and sick, dodging rockets and bullets while transcending nine months of unimaginable loss and grief — seems more appealing than displacement; at least in the north, they are still in their homes, their havens.
Understanding loss is beyond explanation, so much like the expansive pain of Gazans. Palestinians in Gaza repeat a saying whenever a new massacre occurs, “Who dies survives, who survives dies,” a saying that has both internal and external implications. Internally, it signifies that those who die no longer have to wait in line for water or food; they no longer experience the terror of carpet bombs and targeted killings; their suffering ends. The external implication is that this world is not worth living in, that the centrality of humankind in the universe is nothing more than an illusion, and that law and justice are relative and not absolute. No amount of international legal condemnations of Israel’s genocidal war, whether by states or international courts, has led to justice, let alone a ceasefire. Even morality is relative, never absolute. What good is humankind? The dead are the real survivors of all these illusions.
Nietzsche said, "To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” If finding meaning in suffering raises humans to superior levels, then Palestinians in Gaza have not only risen, they have transcended the human condition, and the limits of body and mind. Questions of coping, overcoming, and recovering the “day after” the war reduce Gazans to mere humans; they fail to understand who and what Palestinians there have become. Palestinians in Gaza are freed from humankind. They are freed from humans’ intellectual prisons, from herd mentality, whether religious, political, or otherwise ideological.
Yet, as this transcendence deepens with every day the carnage goes unstopped, their awareness transforms into a simple redirection toward the past, toward a time when they lived without all this. Sumud as a national contract loses meaning; it is a myth in this war, an illusion like humanity, for this war is not like others before it. This war is a war of extermination, and the only natural consequence of surviving this is the hope for a hero to stop it, to stop the killing.
