On 10 January 2024, 35-year-old Dorgham Abusalim woke up to a flurry of messages: more than 40 missed phone calls and endless Facebook notifications.
Abusalim had slept in later than usual, a sluggish 9.00am instead of his usual 6.30am start. Since 7 October, when Israel launched a catastrophic war on Gaza following Hamas’s attack that killed 1,200 people, his job offered him more flexible start times as a means of support. Abusalim was born in Gaza and lived there until he was 16. He has been based in Washington DC since 2015, but much of his family is still in Palestine.
That Wednesday, as Abusalim rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, one particular notification caught his attention. It was a Facebook message from a former classmate in Gaza. It said, “my deepest condolences for your loved ones,” Abusalim recalled. Up until that point, four months into the war, none of his relatives had died. And his parents, who remained behind, had managed to stay alive. But, reading the Facebook message, Abusalim says he was struck with immediate confirmation: “It happened. Someone is gone.”
He attempted to call his parents, but was unable to get through; Israel’s attacks in Gaza have caused chronic communication blackouts. He tried other family members, anyone with information on who was gone and what had happened. An update from his brother came within the hour: their father, Sameer, the 80-year-old patriarch of the family, had died. Israel’s restriction of aid had created a critical shortage of medicine, which Sameer needed to manage illnesses, including diabetes, hypertension and stomach ulcers, Abusalim said.
“Dad had passed away in my sleep.”
The grief of losing a loved one is a nonlinear journey through complicated pain, but Abusalim’s grief is multiplied by Israel’s war, a “genocide”, as he and a growing number of experts call it. Since 7 October, more than 42,000 Palestinian people have been killed. At least 96,000 have been injured, with more than 22,500 people sustaining “life-changing injuries”, including amputations and traumatic brain injuries, according to the United Nations.
Abusalim spoke plainly about the war that killed his father and so many of his neighbors and friends, and the airstrikes that have flattened his home town of Deir al Balah, a quaint, farming town in the Gaza Strip. He sometimes tilted towards dry humor as he recounted the past year. At other moments, he spoke with shock and frustration, expressing genuine alarm about how the war continues a year later with no end in sight.
“When I think of October 7 this year,” Abusalim said, sighing deeply, “I’m just trying to wrap my head around how it is still happening.”
‘This stuff breaks people’
Abusalim is not a “crier”, he said. He hasn’t joined a traditional grief group or sought out counseling. He’s had spurts of “cathartic” journaling, but his preferred way of processing grief has been action.
“Part of my grieving has been my big mouth and loud advocacy,” he said. Abusalim speaks on educational panels and to reporters about the war. He’s lobbied congressional staff to push for a ceasefire resolution. “I’m doing the best that I can,” he said, “or the least that I can, by talking about what’s going on.”
Abusalim and other Palestinians in the Washington metropolitian area have also testified to DC’s local council, sharing their personal experiences. And if there’s a protest happening, they’ll go together.
His friendships with other local Palestinians and Arabs pre-date the war, he said, but have gotten stronger over the past year. “It’s reassuring, reinforcing and helpful that we’re not alone in this,” he said. “It’s a reminder that there is a lot of work ahead, and that’s precisely why our lives have to keep going.”
Abusalim’s family is at once a bedrock of support and a reminder of the ongoing anguish in Gaza. When he speaks to relatives in Palestine, he tries to take their minds off the war around them. But many are preoccupied, as the country contends with mass starvation. “My 50-year-old cousin, a grown man, was crying [on the phone] because he can’t provide food and he’s hungry,” Abusalim said. “This stuff breaks people. It’s really quite evil that it’s happening by design.”
Every morning, Abusalim FaceTimes with his mother Mudallala, as she was able to evacuate from Gaza to Cairo via the Rafah crossing after her husband’s death. “A nightmare trip”, Mudallala, who is blind, told her son. They catch up while he eats a breakfast of halloumi cheese with thyme and olive oil or hummus and eggs with sumac – Palestinian cuisine that serves as a “little reminder of home” for Abusalim.
“For the past year,” he said, “our calls have revolved around all the news and the developments and what’s going on.” On Monday, they spoke about Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, which they likened to Israel’s invasion of the country in the 1980s. They both are avid viewers of Al Jazeera for updates, piecing together information across a seven-hour time difference.
Oftentimes, they’ll talk about Sameer. “You bring up dad, she’ll cry.”
‘He was older than the state of Israel’
Only eight people attended the burial of Sameer Abusalim, mostly complete strangers and Mudallala. Members of the extended family could not travel, Abusalim said, fearing that they would be bombed on the journey over.
“It was all done very, very quickly,” Abusalim said of the funeral, which happened only hours after Sameer’s death, as opposed to typical Islamic memorial services which take place over multiple days. “Dad deserved a whole lot more than that,” Abusalim said. “We have Israel to thank for messing this up for us.”
A pillar of his community, Sameer was known for helping squash disputes between neighbors and sponsoring local schools. He was fiercely protective of his family and “very in love” with his wife, Abusalim said. “Oh God, they were so cheesy together,” he said, recalling how Sameer once wrote Mudallala a four-page love letter. The note is one of only two possessions Abusalim has from his father; the other is a simple, gold ring.
Born in 1943 (“He was older than the state of Israel,” Abusalim said), Sameer worked as a farmer, growing sprawling rows of olive and orange trees on the family’s land. Later in life, he suffered a series of strokes, leaving him partially paralyzed and reliant on a wheelchair. Well before 7 October, Sameer’s family had to navigate his health conditions as they took shelter from Israeli bombardments. In 2014, the last time that Abusalim was in Gaza, the family house was hit with a “roof knock” bomb, a warning missile launched by the Israeli military before a larger strike. Abusalim had minutes to transport his father, mother, two sisters and nephew to safety.
“I’m in the driver’s seat,” Abusalim recalled, “and I just freeze for a minute thinking, ‘If we’re seen fleeing, are they gonna hit the car?’”
On 26 December 2023, Abusalim’s family home was bombed again. An airstrike had completely destroyed the doors and windows, this time making the home uninhabitable. The family escaped to a nearby aunt’s house with minor injuries. But Sameer, who had been wounded with shards of glass, wasn’t healing well.
Less than three weeks later, he was gone.
“What haunts me is the fact that I may never be able to visit his grave and pay my respects,” Abusalim said, voicing concern that Israel may attempt to permanently occupy Gaza. “There isn’t a day that goes by without me thinking of [his death]. He passed away, paralyzed, a displaced man. The indignity of not dying in your own home, at that age, is just something that pisses me off.”
‘You go back, but what’s next?’
The third of September would have been Sameer’s 81st birthday. “My sister in Egypt had prepared a cake with a photo of him printed on it,” Abusalim said. “My family does cheesy things.”
After his father died, Abusalim traveled to Canada for an informal celebration of Sameer’s life with his siblings. He later traveled to Egypt for a month to be with Mudallala, who now lives with her daughter. “She’s very, very eager to go back home,” Abusalim said. “[But] our question to Mom has been, ‘You go back, but what’s next?’ There is no life there.”
Abusalim also wants to return, nostalgic for the “the old Gaza, before the days of genocide reduced [it] to rubble”. But within that hope is the reality that the “old Gaza” was still a site of violence because of Israel, he said.
“It wasn’t normal that we only had eight hours of electricity. It wasn’t normal that we were not allowed an airport or a seaport or freedom of movement. It wasn’t normal that our resources were controlled by others,” he said, calling it the “sick strategy of Israeli occupation”.
But even with his disdain and frustration, he was firm in the knowledge that his people are strong.
“If there is anything I know about us Palestinians, [it] is that we’re quite stubborn. We’re going to keep at it until our rights and dignity and sovereignty and independence are achieved.”
