I spent a total of four years in Gaza, six months of which were during the ongoing war. I have never felt so helpless in the face of the massive war machine that pushes a new bullet into its weapon as soon as it fires the previous one, while having a seemingly unlimited supply of ammunition.
In September, I spoke with a matriarch who ran a shelter for displaced people in Khan Younis. I asked her what hope she had about the prospect of peace. She pointed to a little girl holding her mother’s hand and sucking her thumb. “Her father was killed when their house was bombed five days ago and they were unable to recover his body from the rubble because the area is under constant shelling,” she said. “What hope?”
In hopeless Gaza, sleep is one of the most precious commodities. In January, we ran to the window to watch the plume of smoke painting the sky after a particularly loud and close impact. But over time they have become so commonplace that hardly anyone bothers to look again.
On an average night in my neighborhood in Deir el-Balah, the bombardment began at night, just as people were preparing to sleep. We heard the whistle of a rocket and then a loud explosion that shook the windows. The explosion would wake up the local dogs, donkeys, babies, and any other people who dared sleep, setting off a chain reaction of barking, crying, and other excited noises. More bombs would follow, followed by various types of gunfire, until everything calmed down for a short time. The call to prayer at dawn usually triggered another series of attacks.
The apocalyptic scenes everyone sees on television are even more frightening in person. I often delete photos and videos from my phone because the camera doesn’t do justice to how grotesque the surroundings appear to the naked eye.
In person, the images are accompanied by a series of sounds. This includes the now-daily ritual of people fighting for bread in nearby bakeries, while food supplies are running low, trade in goods has almost completely stopped and humanitarian aid entry continues to be cripplingly restricted. Just last week, a woman and two girls suffocated after being trampled outside a bakery when a fight broke out because there was not enough bread for everyone.
My dear friend Khaled, who runs community kitchens throughout Gaza, feared that soon there would be no food at all and his kitchens would have to close. I struggled to find anything helpful to say to him given the reality around us and cried every time we spoke as I too lost hope. “Don’t cry, Olga,” he always said. “Be strong, like us.” Indeed, the strength of the Palestinians is unparalleled.
In November, the Famine Review Committee, an ad hoc panel of international technical experts that reviews classifications of potential famine identified by the United Nations and other actors, released a report that raised renewed alarm about the threat of famine, particularly in the beleaguered north from Gaza. Things have only gotten worse since then. Several times I saw people scooping up dirty flour that had spilled on the street after several bags of flour fell from a relief truck.
Prioritizing the most vulnerable in Gaza is a hopeless task because there is almost no help. When 100 percent of a population of approximately 2.3 million people are in need, do you choose to help a pregnant woman, a survivor of domestic violence, or someone who is homeless and disabled? Are you looking for all of these risks in a single person? The agony of these decisions will keep us awake long after our work in Gaza ends.
In the months we spent in Gaza, my colleagues and I experienced so much pain, tragedy and death that we have no words to express the horror. We picked up bodies from the side of the road – some still warm and bleeding profusely, others with rigor mortis, half eaten by dogs.
Some of these bodies were young boys. Boys killed senselessly, some of them dying slowly, bleeding to death, scared and alone while their mothers agonized over why their sons hadn’t come home that night. For the rest of the world, they were just another number in the grim statistics of people killed in Gaza so far – now more than 45,500, according to the Ministry of Health.
In the rare moments of calm and between the chaos of constant crisis, I think about everything around me and ask myself, “What hope?”
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
