Friday 27 October
4am It was another hard night. I, my sister and the two cats were not able to sleep. Manara, the abandoned cat we took in, was sleeping peacefully. I don’t think the words “tired” or “exhausted” would describe her state. The word that came to mind is one I heard in an old Arabic song, it could be translated into “crushed by exhaustion”. It is weird how the cat found safety among people who are in dire need of safe haven; she came to us while we are away from our home, the place we belong to.
A few nights ago we started a new tradition, since it seems the situation is going to last for a long time. The guys of the house started playing cards, joined by their cousin. Most of the time I will let them play and I will just watch while reading a book or writing my diaries.
The cousin is in the last year of high school, the “definitive year” according to us because this year’s marks determine which faculty you can join. While playing, the cousin started talking about how the students studied for one month only before the situation started; he worries about what will happen to him and the thousands of students. There are many challenges. The clearest one is that people who lost their homes are staying in the schools. Where will they go? They have no homes left.
Also, can the students, who are traumatised and most probably have lost someone close, be able to learn? And what about the teachers, the heroes who do not only teach but also build students’ characters? Do they have enough energy to do their noble work? Studying is your way to a better future. I doubt our students see any future after what has happened.
10am My sister took the cats, including Manara, to the vet. He agreed to open his clinic for half an hour.
The road was not safe, but my sister was ready to take the risk – “It is for the cats!” The drivers, who used to make lots of money, stopped working when the fuel ran out. Ahmad went to the street and started asking the neighbours, and finally he found one. He was a wonderful man who did not charge her a lot.
My sister told me that the vet’s hands were shaking after a miserable night. He wanted to give one of the cats a pill. In these situations, the cats resist, so my sister and the vet were supposed to hold her together to give her the pill. The doctor stopped after the second try and asked her to crush it and put it in the food. “He wanted to cry,” my sister told me. Manara has a lot of inflammation in the mouth and stomach. He gave her an antibiotic shot and said she still needed to take two more, but he was not planning to open the clinic again. “Figure it out,” he told my sister.
Noon On my way to get some basic needs, I witnessed a new way of getting water. People were using a pulley. They would fill a big tank of water in the street and then fill buckets of water and take them up to the roof using a pulley. It would take hours, but they were doing it gladly.
After a long search, we were able to find an additional small battery to buy. We connected it to a small device into which you put the mobile charger cord to charge it. It can charge one mobile at a time and takes several hours. I discuss with my sister, almost daily, how evacuating is like preparing for a new house – you need to buy a lot of things and everything is expensive.
Today I dropped my mobile for the hundredth time since the beginning of this week. I picked it up and talked to it. “Listen,”I said. “I don’t have the luxury of losing you. I cannot even replace you even if I have money. You are my only connection with this world during these horrible moments. So you need to promise me that you will stick with me at least till we get out of this. Deal?”
3pm The grandmother paid us a visit. It is weird how in these situations, where death is behind every door, people are so traumatised that they speak of sad and happy events at the same time. She started by telling us about a woman she knows who has four sons. They all travelled outside to work and send her money so that she could build the family dream building for them to come back and settle down in.
“The whole building is gone. All their hard work for years was gone, just like this. The mother was devastated.”
After that story, she shared some of the wedding traditions of the family. Groom’s mother nights are celebration nights, with up to seven people attending. Every day the women wear something different. Every day there will be a certain type of food: pastries, chicken dishes, western cuisine, etc. During these celebrations, the women would sing and dance till late in the night.
The guys also have festive times. One activity is called the arghul event. The arghul is a flute. The arghul player starts singing and the guys dance and create the rhythm for him. This can take hours. For the dehia dance, the guys stand in two opposite lines and dance to the same rhythm while clapping their hands. After the party, they eat a traditional dish called Sumaqia.
5pm I wondered, while sitting with the guys playing cards, if one day I would go out into the streets and instead of seeing evacuated people wearing torn clothes and looking for food and medicine, I would attend a wedding and see men dancing to the arghul and dehia, while women were in their own party, wearing embroidered dresses, singing and dancing.
6.30pm I checked my phone and noticed that the signal bars of both SIMs were marked with an X. I heard people outside the room talking about the loss of the signal. I thought of the worst-case scenario: have the communication companies stopped working in Gaza? Some people, including my sister, were sceptical about this, but an hour later, after checking the radio, it was verified. All communication channels stopped working; we don’t have access to the internet, not even via the data. We cannot receive any messages and we cannot make any phone calls.
We were not afraid; we were terrified.
We never thought the situation could get worse. We have already been living in continuous fear and facing death every second. Now there is more – we are blindfolded.
This means we cannot know what is going around us, we cannot check on our loved ones in other areas in the Gaza Strip, we have no access to any emotional support of any kind, and scariest of all, if anything happens to us, no one will know.
If the past three weeks were scary, the coming ones would be brutally insane …
Saturday 28 October
6am I am sure that no one in the Gaza Strip slept at all. Since all the communications were cut, we were terrified to death. The waiting for something bad to happen while everybody is completely clueless was horrifying. We just heard the sounds of airstrikes without knowing where they were.
I thought of every possible downside to what had happened. For instance, our friends and family members who live abroad and who are trying to contact us via internet or through international calls suddenly find themselves unable to reach us.
What if someone gets injured and needs an ambulance to go to the hospital, which cannot even provide medical support? There are no phones to call. You will simply wait for a miracle to happen.
What is going on? Someone tell us something – anything.
8am After discussions, all night long, we reached the only idea that will calm us down. We simply cannot control anything. We need to take it one day, and night, at a time. We are disconnected from the whole world. We are clueless, let’s hope for something good to happen, and pray nothing bad does.
We all knew that us reaching this “belief” was our way of numbing the feeling of fear and terror, but for once we all chose to lie to ourselves, because without this, we will go crazy.
9am Manara the cat needs another shot of the medicine. The vet that helped us on Friday said he cannot help any more. There are no phones. Ahmad went into the street and started asking all the neighbours about any nearby vet. After an hour he told us about a man who “gives injections to animals, but he is not a vet, he is an animal lover”. The man has already evacuated with his family, but he visits his house every three or four days to put out food for the pigeons. Ahmad asked every neighbour to ask him to visit us so that he can give the cat the injection.
Noon My sister and Ahmad went the pharmacy to get Manara an antibiotic, for human babies, to give it to the cat as a precautionary move. They also went to bring some food. After they left, there was no connection between us – if something bad happened to them, we wouldn’t even know about it.
An hour passed, and I was at home, worried sick. I could hear the continuous airstrikes and hits not knowing where they were happening. I could not even send an SMS to check on my sister. There was nothing I could do.
I started praying, I recalled all the prayers I knew. The cats were lying in the room, on separate couches. Then I decided to listen to music. I turned on a song I like and raised the volume up, not caring about what others outside would think, and sang along:
Maybe he forgot, because of all the pictures he deleted and the denial he is living in …
Maybe he forgot that on his forehead, his whole story is written …
They arrived an hour later. Ahmad told me that within two days there will not be anything left in the shops. Many items have already disappeared from the aisles.
1.30pm My sister pulled an orange out of the bag. She told me she wanted some fruits and had been able to get four oranges and four apples. The orange looked damaged, and my sister, who wouldn’t have touched it in the past, was cleaning and eating it quietly.
I looked at her and said: “It seems the whole situation is gonna last for a long time. We need to be patient.” My sister replied: “I have no patience left.”
2.30pm Even though I am sure there is no connection at all with the outer world, or even the local one, I couldn’t stop checking my mobile every five minutes to check the signal. I even tried sending messages on WhatsApp and SMS messages, but they never went through.
The only way of knowing what is going on is through the radio or the TV. Only a few people, with solar power and TVs, are able to watch the news. People walk to other streets just to hear if there are any new updates.
Ahmad’s brother told us he saw a man screaming in the street. Some family members of his did not evacuate, and on the news he heard that the area they were in had been heavily targeted. He did not know if they were still alive or dead; he just wanted answers, whether good or bad. People were trying to calm him down, but it did not work. “He went crazy,” Ahmad’s brother said.
10pm To kill time, I played cards with the guys. They were talking about how, in over 20 days, they haven’t earned any money. Another reason to be worried. I was almost absent-minded the whole time. I won the game!
11pm If we die, when will people even notice we are gone? Will we be buried under rubble alive? Or die immediately?
Will anyone tell the world that I had many dreams? And that I wanted to visit Italy and Morocco one day? Will anyone tell my story? Or will I be “a guy who died”?
