A friend sent me a cartoon this week. It showed two elderly gentlemen sitting in comfortable chairs. One says to the other: “Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.” “Yes,” agrees the other gentleman, “and those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”
In the case of the heartbreaking devastation in my home town of Khan Younis, this seems like an especially cruel joke. Witnessing this genocide unfolding, I find myself failing to find much to laugh at.
My brother-in-law, Abu Issam, 88, and his wife, Um Issam, 84, are originally from Swafeer. The village no longer exists. It was obliterated, with more than 500 Palestinian towns and villages, in the 1948 Nakba, the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and lands after the creation of Israel.
Fleeing the destruction in Swafeer in 1948, Abu Issam sought refuge in the nearby village of Hamama. When Hamama also came under attack, the family continued their journey to the Palestinian town of al-Sdud (present-day Isdud), then to al-Majdal (present-day Ashkelon), then to Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip, finally ending up in Khan Younis refugee camp.
Back then, Abu Issam was about to become a teenager. Today he walks with a stick, slowly, stopping for rest, then slowly again. And yet his future remains as uncertain today as it was in 1948.
Already very densely populated, Khan Younis had become a sanctuary for those fleeing bombing in the north of Gaza – only for the offensive to follow them there. In late October, Abu Issam, Um Issam, their daughters Sana and Najwa, and the family of their eldest son, Abdallah, including his wife, Shifa, and five children, were forced to flee after their block of the camp was bombed, killing many people. The family walked about two miles through the rubble to their son Omar’s new apartment in Hamad City (named for the Qatari emir who helped fund the town), seeking safety.
Omar, an engineer who worked for 15 years in the United Arab Emirates, bought the apartment last year, carefully furnishing it to make it feel like home. On 2 December, the new city was hit by massive airstrikes, destroying dozens of residential tower blocks, homes to hundreds of families. Omar’s years of hard work were reduced to rubble. The family survived the attack, but Abu Issam and Um Issam were on the move once again.
At a certain point, unable to walk, Abu Issam sat with his family on the edge of town. They were in shock as they tried to understand how and why Omar’s life had been reduced to dust and rubble. Shifa, a cancer patient, had now gone two months without her medications.
This time they all sought shelter in Khan Younis city, in the home of one of Abu Issam’s granddaughters, Aisha – a 27-year-old lawyer who married in 2021 and ought to be enjoying her new life as the mother of a young baby. She offered her grandfather and the family her own bedroom to sleep in.
The next night, Israel bombed the neighbourhood. Aisha’s home was not directly hit but it was left uninhabitable. Aisha and her husband’s family gathered some essentials and headed to Rafah refugee camp to join other relatives. Abu Issam decided to return to the home in Khan Younis camp, which he had fled in October, near his nephew’s house. On the journey, Um Issam went into a diabetic coma. Getting her to safety was an additional struggle.
The next day, 8 December, Abu Issam’s nephew’s home was hit directly, and his nephew’s son Mahmoud, daughter-in-law and their baby were all killed. Abu Issam sat with his seven grandchildren while the neighbours pulled the bodies from the rubble. He offered the al-Janazah prayer (the one Muslims offer for the deceased) in the street, because there was no nearby mosque left to go to. All had been levelled to the ground.
After the burials, Abu Issam decided to seek shelter at the UN school adjacent to Nasser hospital, wanting to be close to any health facility in case his wife’s situation deteriorated. Already exceeding its capacity, the UN school initially could not take them, but moved by Um Issam’s tears, age and pleas, the school eventually agreed to take in the elderly couple.
There are tens of thousands of people like Abu Issam and Um Issam, moving from place to place, already on their fifth or sixth displacement, facing starvation in appalling conditions – with few washrooms, minimal food and water rationed to sips to sustain life, hearing the ceaseless cries of hunger from children. In the absence of water and bathing facilities, many have not been able to shower for six weeks, exacerbating the spread of diseases.
At 88, Abu Issam has walked the Nakba twice. And each time the international community, led by western governments, has stood by in full complicity. Palestinians will never forget, and will never forgive.
Ghada Ageel, a third-generation Palestinian refugee, worked as a translator for the Guardian in Gaza from 2000 to 2006. She is visiting professor at the department of political science at the University of Alberta
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