Khan Younes, Gaza – An dear companion does not have to be human to be deeply missed when lost.
Sometimes it’s a phone – a faithful witness to your joys and sorrows, your moments of sweetness and the darkest chapters of pain.
In the harshness of life in the biggest outdoor prison in the world, it becomes more than a device. It is an extension of yourself; Your portal to the world, your way of reaching dear beings scattered through prison or outside.
Through its objective, you sometimes capture joy and beauty, but more often than not, it only captures rockets that fall or the rubble of houses covering the corpses of their residents.
But what do you have left when this faithful companion is disappeared by genocidal chaos?
My phone succumbed to his injuries
My phone died of his injuries.
I cannot believe that I describe it this way, with the same sentence that I use during the report on thousands of my employees killed after being denied urgent medical treatment, simply punished for having survived Israeli bombs.
But in his own way, my phone endured its share of this prolonged Israeli cruelty, the power of power of power, corrosion by dust and sand, suffocation in overheated tents and the constant torment of a bad connection.
He tried to hold on, but everyone has an endurance limit. He fell on the day we left our damaged house for our 14th trip in the middle of chaotic crowds stamped.
In one way or another, he survived the heavy blow, but he only lasted 70 days after his screen cracks, his body was bogged down, until his injuries spread too far to wear.
And then he became dark for good.
Curiously, I felt consoled. Not because it was not painful, but because I was not alone. I saw the same thing to happen to others: friends, parents who watch their phones slowly perish, just like the people they loved.
Strangely, we find comfort in these small shared losses. Our loved ones have perished, and our well-being breaks, and yet we expect our phones to do it. The real miracle is that they lasted so long.
Smartphone dependence is launched as a fashionable word. But in Gaza, if you are lucky to have one more one, it is not an addiction, it is survival.
It is an escape. A small brilliant gate to which you hang on. This helps you to slip briefly into the past, scrolling through memories, looking at the faces of expensive beings which are now names on tombs or names that you still whisper in hope.
The emotionless memory of your phone has their beautiful smiles. It connects you to people you cannot reach, voices that you cannot hear otherwise. This dulls the pain not by healing it, but by distracting you.
Like hunger, you cannot satisfy, so you scroll through attractive food coins, making fun of your emptiness.
You look at foreigners to family dinners while your table is buried under rubble. You wonder, how do they dare to publish such scenes, knowing that children are hungry to death a few kilometers? And yet, you continue to scroll, because for a moment is a brutal soothing sedative.
“Are you alive?
When you are someone who reports the current genocide daily to the world, finding a new companion becomes an inevitable must. However, the quest is disastrous in Gaza.
You might think that it is impossible to find one here, where life has become ruins and even bread is rare, but surprisingly, there are many options, even the last high -end brands that have found their way through the blockade.
But it’s Gaza, where a bag of flour costs $ 700, so the cost of a phone is at a completely different level.
Even the lowest phones of makeshift stores sell more than it costs to build the store itself, inflated by genocidal conditions.
And it doesn’t stop there. You should pay in cash, in a place where almost nothing is free except the air you breathe.
An iPhone can cost $ 1,000 elsewhere, but here it costs $ 4,200.
You therefore turn to cheaper options, hoping for something more affordable, but the calculations remain the same.
But it is not me – because anyway, by spending such unthinkable amounts, you solidify the very reality that your kidnappers are trying to impose and do it with your own money.
You realize that you feed on their design. We already drain everything in our pockets just for flour during this genocidal seat, and we don’t know how long it will last.
So, you hang on to what you have, to avoid paying your soul in a GHF center for the deadly “help” that you will never get.
For a while now, I have felt paralyzed, a particularly familiar helplessness during the total communication breakdown of two weeks of June imposed by Israel – during which my phone finally died in total silence.
When the kidnapper cuts yet another life buoy, it is more than simply unable to check the dear beings. This means that ambulances cannot be called. This means that a injured person could die in the dark, unknown.
It is as if someone was there, cruelly deciding when you are authorized to contact the world or to be contacted, to receive the now typical: “Are you alive?”
There is a cruel irony in Israel issuing online expulsion orders even if it cuts the networks that people in Gaza need to receive them. You only discover when you see thousands of people flooding in the streets, the earth trembling Israeli attacks under their feet.
The hand that controls your digital life buoy is the same that which has blocked and colonizing your land for years.
And you realize, with certainty, that if they could block the air you breathe, they would not hesitate.
So you get up
There are still times when, instinctively, I hold my hand to call someone or check something – but my hand does not touch anything.
My companion left. I remain without phone, powerless under blocking, both digital and physical.
And then, you start to compare your channels to the abundance that your captors appreciate, genocidant with full access to each technological privilege, each luxury.
On the other hand, you are hunted with the most advanced weapons in the world, under a vigilant eye and the silent complicity of the technology giants whose tools support your erasure.
Although they use satellites and guided missiles by precision, you just want to tell the world that you are still there.
How vital your lost companion was. It was not just a phone. It was your sword, your shield, your witness.
And faced with this tyranny, the discount is something that you cannot afford. So you get up.
You whisper: “Rest in power, my companion”, because we refuse to be slaughtered in silence.
We will continue to tell our truth, even if we only have a piece of paper and a drop of ink.