“Obeida is dead. He was 18”

His name was Obeida. He was 18. He was the eldest son of my wife Sabah’s sister. She had six children, three sons and three daughters.

Obeida is dead. He was killed in these Hunger Games¹ that Israel is making us play in the real world.

In Gaza, the game consists of asking young people to fetch humanitarian aid, with the risk of being killed if they go too far to the right or to the left, in a space the limits of which only the occupant knows.

Obeida was forced to play that game because neither he nor his family had eaten anything in three days. Obeida’s family are from Shaja’iyya, a district in eastern Gaza City. Like most of its inhabitants, they had moved several times, winding up in a tent in a Gaza City school yard. Obeida went almost every day to try his luck at the distribution centre organised by a US company in the “Netzarim corridor”, that buffer zone six or seven kilometres wide, south of Gaza City, which splits the Gaza strip in half. Each time, he hoped to bring back a bag of flour or a food parcel for his family.

He asked his mother to forgive him for trying his luck

On that particular day, his eldest sister Bara, who had got married a month or two earlier, came to visit her family in their tent. He said to her: “Today, they say there are chickpeas in the packages. I’m going to try to grab some to make you some qdama”. That’s what we call baked or fried chick peas. He wanted to give them to his sister who was very fond of them. It was the only gift he could give her on her first visit after her marriage. Traditionally, a visit like this is the occasion for a feast; there are lots of guests, big meals are cooked, the young bride is presented with her favourite dishes. Of course that’s impossible today in Gaza. Celebrations are reduced to almost nothing. Bara was married hurriedly, in a school classroom where hundreds of displaced people had found shelter.

But Obeida was keen to make his qdama, as a symbolic act. And to get a bag of flour, to bake bread for the bride’s return. On the evening of June 10^th he went to the distribution centre of that Israeli-US company. He never came back. He was one of dozens of people killed there. A shell fired from a tank exploded next to him, he was hit in the head by a piece of shrapnel.

He was still conscious as they took him to the hospital. All along the way, a paramedic said, he wanted them to ask his mother to forgive him. He knew he was going to die, and he wanted his mother to forgive him for trying his luck.

Unfortunately, Gaza hospitals are lacking in everything and they couldn’t save him, like so many other young people. His only crime was wanting to feed his family. Obeida had his whole life in front of him. He wanted to go to college, in the Gaza tradition, where education is prized above all. An Israeli tank gunner decided otherwise.

“Why won’t you give me any bread ?”

Sharif, one of my neighbours, was killed two days later for the same reason. His story is typical of the descent into poverty of his neighbourhood, inhabited by the middle and upper middle classes of Gaza. Sharif was 35, married with three children, two boys and a girl, aged between three and twelve. He lived in a “family building”, a five-storey structure next to my tower block, which housed, as is frequent in Gaza, several households from the same family. The building had been bombed at the beginning of the war, because of the many solar panels on the rooftop, which supplied the building and the nearby convenience stores. They were high-priority targets for Israel, since they were determined to destroy all our sources of electricity.

The top two floors of the building were destroyed and Sharif’s cousins who lived there had to move into tents in front of the building. Sharif and his family stayed in the building, as their apartment was still more or less habitable. After the death of his father some ten years earlier, he had taken on the responsibilities of head of the family when still young. He ran a company which repaired air conditioners and fridges. But for the last couple of years, no electricity means that no AC or fridges are working, so there was no business for him. And Sharif had spent all his savings. One evening, his three-year-old son told his mother he was hungry. He wanted some bread. And he was angry with his mother: “Why won’t you give me any bread?”

It was hearing this that Sharif decided to go with a cousin to that place which he knew was a trap, that centre “for the distribution of humanitarian aid”, that “Hunger Games” zone where the Israelis watch people rush to get something to eat and kill them in cold blood. Sharif and his cousin used a method quite common in Gaza: they left in the evening and lay down on the sand to sleep so as to be among the first served when the doors opened. During the night, they were targeted by a tank. Sharif was hit in the head and died instantly. His cousin was severely injured and is still in hospital. Sharif left a wife and three kids. His only crime was wanting to give his children something to eat.

The whole world is watching

We are living a genocide, that word many refuse to use, considering it to be the property of one people only. I can certify that we are experiencing a gazacide, palestinocide, a special Palestinian genocide, with killing and butchering methods never seen before, bombings around the clock, night and day. An unprecedented military arsenal which kills people in their homes, in their tents, in schools and hospitals, in the streets. Forced displacements from one neighbourhood to another, from north to south, from west to east, from east to west, from west to south.... Starve people, destroy the health system, let the seriously ill and wounded die slowly without treatment.

Just like in the series Hunger Games, the whole world is watching. Except that this time it’s for real. We’re dying here, physically, psychologically and morally. The children are malnourished, in the streets, in tents or under tarps. We drink dirty water, we have no clothes, no hygiene products. We have nothing left to eat, no more money. People who still have money in their bank account in Ramallah have to go through the money-changers to get cash - war profiteers who now take a 50 % cut. The Israelis have destroyed the schools and universities to make us a population of paupers, humiliated and ignorant, barbarians, animals scrambling after packages of food.

But we’re human beings. Obeida and Sharif “chose” to risk their lives because their children were starving, like hundreds of other people in every walk of Gazan life. Men and women, entrepreneurs, doctors, architects, engineers. All human beings like the rest of us, who have the worst feeling a mother or a father can have the day we hear our children say “I’m hungry” and we can’t give them anything to eat.

No one can understand that suffering if they haven’t experienced it themselves. When your son hasn’t eaten for three days and begs you for just a crust of bread which you can’t give him, you want the earth to open up and swallow you, as we say here, you want to stop existing. So people go to “those zones”, where they know they’re going to be killed by the shells from the tanks, by the quad drones, by the snipers. They know it, and they go anyway. Because in any case, they’re dead. Killed by the Israeli army or dead from being unable to feed their children; dead for being a family man or woman.

The people of Gaza are living death. We smell death. We hear death. We touch death. We breathe death. Death is everywhere. Yet we are trying to survive, at least just to stay alive because we want to give our children some life. At the same time, we are in search of death, because we know that in those zones where they distribute humanitarian aid, we are going to be shot, bombed, killed. And yet we try. Life has become a mixture of death and life. Life because we’re still breathing, but death because it is all around us. We’re experiencing an “israelimination” by every means possible: military, mediatic, psychological.

I often hear journalists say: “There are no words to describe what is going on here.” And yet it’s their job to describe things in words. And those words exist. They mustn’t be afraid to use them. They have to name this genocide. The Israelis are destroying a people, its homes, its hospitals, its universities, its schools, its agriculture, its archaeological history, its infrastructures. And its human beings. It’s a Gazacide, a Palestinocide. Their intention is crystal clear: deport and/or exterminate us. Weaken us to such a degree that we will accept exile. But we are still here.

It is true that we are sometimes at a loss for words. I don’t know how to describe the pain I feel watching a child starve, or a relative or a neighbour starve and not be able to help them. I don’t know how to express the powerlessness, the paralyzing sensation that comes over me faced with the impossibility of doing anything at all in response to this collective punishment, this non-life in death. People risk their lives anyway. They are dead. We have seen shots of wounded people being taken to hospital, clutching in their arms a bag of flour stained with their blood, because that bag is three or four days of life for their children. Bread has become our main staple. At least it gives the impression of being full.

The flour massacres go on. The “aid distribution centres” remain open. And the Israelis go on shooting those who go near them when they feel like it. They kill between ten and twenty people every day. Since this morning, 16 June, 38 have died by a centre in Rafah. According to our Health Ministry, there have been 300 killed and 2,600 wounded near these centres²

So in these circumstances the war Israel unleashed against Iran was not something the Gazans were bothered about. Like most people here, I only heard the news on 14 June, after two days of complete disruption of all telecommunications. The only thing people talk about, night and day, is the distribution centres. “Are they open or closed today? Is the aid getting through?” People don’t even ask any more if there’s going to be a truce, if the war is going to stop.

Everything I’m telling you here, you can’t really understand. You’ve never known what it’s like not to be able to give life to a child. You can’t really understand those shots of tens of thousands of people rushing to “act” in these Hunger Games where the strongest win out in the stampede but may lose the game in the end, i.e. lose their lives.

It’s the worst way to kill and humiliate. The worst way to exterminate.

Translated from French by Noël Burch.