“Wake up, we’re going,” whispered René, a French archeologist, to our surgeon. The whisper woke me up too. This was it: the call we had been waiting for. All of us would soon be up, ready to head to the Rafah checkpoint.
That was in the early hours of November 1, 2023. We were about to escape the forty-by-ten-kilometres trap that the war had turned Gaza into, relieved for ourselves and anxious for those we were leaving behind. One month after Hamas’s biggest attack on Israel, the closest thing Palestinians had to a sovereign territory was disappearing, air strikes annihilating the physical space that once existed.
