Diary from Gaza 70

“If there’s a ceasefire, what’s the first thing you’ll do?”

Rami Abu Jamous is keeping a diary for Orient XXI. The founder of Gaza Press, an agency which helped and interpreted for western correspondents, he was obliged by the Israeli army to leave his Gaza City apartment with his wife Sabah, her children, and their two and a half year-old son, Walid, in October 2023. Having taken refuge since then in Rafah, they are now trapped in that destitute and overcrowded enclave like so many other families. For this diary of his, he has received two awards, the Prix Bayeux for war correspondents in the printed press category, and the Prix Ouest-France. This space has been dedicated to him in the French section of the site since 28 February 2024.

The image depicts a close interaction between an adult woman and a child. The woman is gently kissing the child on the forehead, while the child looks directly at the camera with a serious expression. There are hands visible in the foreground, suggesting that others are present nearby. The overall atmosphere conveys a sense of warmth and tenderness despite the child's intense gaze. The setting appears to be intimate, possibly capturing a moment of care and connection in a challenging situation.
Deir El-Balah, January 14, 2025. Palestinians mourn the death of their loved ones, including children, killed in an Israeli air strike on their shelter in Deir El-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip. AFP

Tuesday 14 January 2025

For a fortnight now, Gazans have been convinced that a cease-fire is in the wind and that it’s going to happen before Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20 January. Everybody is getting ready for it and everybody is happy because they think that this time their hopes won’t be dashed. Everyone is talking about it, my friends, my neighbours, people at the market.... and of course in the makeshift public transports, those livestock trailers drawn by an old jalopy. Generally, when I climb into one of these, I just listen to the conversations around me without joining in. I want to take the pulse of Gaza. This time I asked a question. The same one I put to all the people I meet these days: “If there’s a cease-fire, what’s the first thing you’ll do?” The answers broke my heart.

“I haven’t seen my dad in a year and a half.”

Ahmed, a friend of mine, answered: “The first thing I’ll do, is go and see my dad.” Ahmed is with us, in the southern part of the Gaza strip. His family lived in Gaza City. At the start of the war, at the insistence of the Israeli occupation army, he left for the south with all his family. Except for his father, who absolutely refused to obey. He stayed in the north, in the camp at Jabaliya. The Israeli army has split the Gaza strip in half. They prevent our going from north to south.

I haven’t seen my dad for a year and a half. I hope he’ll still be alive when the cease-fire allows us to go North. Bombs are falling up there around the clock. Every minute I’m afraid I’ll hear my dad has been killed and that he rests in peace.

In the livestock trailer, someone else says:

I haven’t had any news from my cousin. In her last message she said “We’re okay, thank God.” That was nearly a month and a half ago. She’s with her husband and their four kids. They lived in Saftawi [a suburb of Gaza City]. When the bombings got worse, they got out and settled in Tall Zaatar [the camp for refugees from Jabaliya] in a building that belonged to one of their friends. The Israeli army surrounded the camp and since then we’ve no news. Are they still alive? Has the building been destroyed? Were they arrested by the Israelis?

The man checked with three hospitals in the north, al-Awda, Kamal Adwan and the Indonesian hospital, when they were still functioning. Nothing. They hadn’t received any dead or wounded with his cousin’s family name. He is all the more worried as some people told him they saw satellite views of the house where his cousin had taken shelter and that it had been destroyed. So my fellow traveller doesn’t know whether his cousin is alive or buried under the ruins with her husband and children.

“All I want is to give my brother a decent burial”

Another passenger in the livestock trailer said the first thing he would do would be to go and get his brother’s body. He was killed by a quadricopter, those little armed drones that can pop up anywhere at any moment. The drone shot and killed his brother a couple of weeks ago right in the middle of the highway between the camp at Jabaliya and Gaza City.

People could see he was dead but nobody dared go out to fetch his body, it was too dangerous. I just want to find his body and give him a decent burial. I hope the dogs haven’t eaten him up. And I hope he’s still got his clothes on so I can recognise him.

There were tears in the man’s eyes.

Another answered my question like this:

If there is a ceasefire, I hope I can get my mother out of Gaza for a medical evacuation. She has cancer and the only specialised hospital providing chemotherapy, the one they call the Turkish hospital, near Gaza City, was bombed by the Israelis. It hasn’t functioned since the second month of the war. We’re running out of time. She has to be treated somewhere else.

This is also the case with Sabah’s nephew Youssef, a boy who was severely wounded in a bombing. He’s out of hospital but he’s not in good health. The hospital put in a request for an evacuation. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), between 20,000 and 40,000 people in Gaza are between life and death. They urgently need to be treated abroad. Many of them are waiting for an operation. They’re not hospitalised, there’s no room for them in the few that are still functioning, they are in tents or under tarps in very difficult circumstances.

Another passenger said to me:

Me, I’d like to see if our house is still standing. It’s in the north, at Beit Hanoun. I’ve been told it was destroyed. I worked for 25 years in Israel in order to build that six-storey house, for my children and me. It’s on a big plot of land with a vegetable garden and a fruit orchard. I’ve no news at all, nobody can go there.

“We will plant our tents on the ruins of our houses”

I’m struck by the fact that all these people dream of plunging back into the nightmare. Their dream consists of seeing whether their cousin is dead or alive, of burying the corpse of a brother left lying in the middle of a highway, of seeing if a house has been levelled by bombs. Tens of thousands of people want to find their loved ones buried under the rubble, give them a proper burial if anything is left of them. Or check whether a brother has been kidnapped by the Israelis and find out if he’s still alive. Because since the first day of the war, the Israeli have stopped providing news of the men they capture. They used to inform the Red Cross of the arrests they made in the West Bank and Gaza. Now there are thousands of people who have disappeared and we don’t know if they’ve been arrested, or where they are, or if they’re still alive.

Many Gazans want to go back north, just to find out what’s happened to their relatives. But there’s a nightmare waiting for them; because anyone who has disappeared is either dead or in an Israeli prison.

The Israelis who lived in what they called the “Gaza envelope”, in other words the kibbutzim built near the enclave, will find their houses, their schools, their kindergartens, their parks still there, and a normal life. As for us, we’ll pitch our tents on the ruins of our houses. We won’t find any schools, kindergartens, or parks. There’ll be no infrastructure left intact. There’ll be no medical system. The Israelis who live near the Lebanese border and who were evacuated, will also go home after the ceasefire is concluded with Hezbollah. Thousands of Gazans won’t be able to go home because Israel talks of creating a buffer zone, a no-man’s-land at least a kilometre wide inside the Gaza strip.

As for the rest of the Gazans, if Israel allows them to go home during the first or second phase of the cease-fire, they too will be living a nightmare. They won’t find anything at all. Almost every place in the Gaza strip has been completely flattened, from Rafah in the south to Jabaliya in the north. There has been an earthquake here. An “Israelquake” that has destroyed everything.

After the ceasefire, it won’t be a return to life, it will be another war. We are so psychologically stricken that even knowing a nightmare awaits us, we want it. It would take a psychiatrist to explain how we have come to this. After the ceasefire, we will not be living a real life. The war machine will have stopped, but there will still be the blockade, reconstruction will take several years, the threat of famine will still be there because it just won’t be possible to deliver all the necessary foodstuffs at once. Since almost nobody has the money to buy food, we will be entirely dependent on humanitarian aid. An aid which will still be controlled by Israel. We dream of a nightmare created by the Israelis.

Translated by Noël Burch…