When news spread on May 6 that Hamas had accepted a truce proposal, celebrations broke out across Gaza. People took to the streets clapping, believing that the war – the seven months of hell – was over. I was skeptical, but I too had tears in my eyes at the thought that the horror might be over.
It soon became clear that only one party had agreed to the deal. The other was determined to continue its brutal massacres of Palestinians. Israel continued its invasion of Rafah, where more than a million people from the northern and central Gaza Strip had sought refuge, believing Israeli assurances that it was a “safe zone.”
On May 7, the Israeli army seized the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, the only way out for the Palestinians who were able to find the means to evacuate and the wounded and sick who managed to obtain Israeli authorization. to leave. It was also the main access point for what little humanitarian aid Israel allowed into the Gaza Strip.
My family and I were trying to find a way to leave Gaza. The news dashed the little hope we had of leaving. We really have nowhere to go now, when we risk dying from bombing, starvation or disease.
Israel presents its evacuation orders to the rest of the world as a concern for Palestinian civilians. But Israel knows that pushing people from one place to another every few weeks is a form of torture.
More than half a million Palestinians have fled Rafah, the United Nations reports. Families who have already been displaced several times have had to pack up their belongings again and find themselves in limbo.
Contrary to what it claims in Western media, Israel has not made any arrangements for the evacuation. People fleeing must pay for private cars or animal-drawn carts to move them. Those who don’t have money try to walk. Some are too poor or have sick or elderly family members and cannot make the trip.
The half-million people who have left Rafah have had to stay with relatives – if they are lucky – or set up tents wherever they can find space. No food, water or other basic necessities are provided to them. Above all, there is no guarantee of security. Just a day ago, a family who had just fled Rafah was killed when the Israeli army bombed a house in Nuseirat camp.
The displacement of such large numbers of people places immense pressure on the communities in which they settle. Fights broke out in queues for water and bread. The price of basic foodstuffs has skyrocketed. These constant forced expulsions are tearing apart the social fabric of Palestinian society.
Life on the move is something no child or adult should experience. People are crowded into rooms or tents, sometimes more than a dozen. There are no toilets, showers or adequate sanitation facilities. There is no privacy or personal space.
Diseases, once eradicated, are now widespread. People get hepatitis and stomach viruses regularly.
As temperatures soar, heat stroke takes its toll, including babies and children.
Israel’s constant forced expulsions of already displaced Palestinians also shatter what little semblance of normalcy parents try to establish for their children.
A month ago, I visited one of the camps in Rafah. There, I met Nesreen Ayoub, who had been forced to flee her home in Gaza City with her family.
Having lost so much, she found some comfort in her daughter, Tasneem, who attended classes at a makeshift school and returned to their tent with a glimmer of joy, a rare commodity in desperate times.
Teachers and college graduates volunteered to teach the children, hoping to lift their spirits amid despair. I also met Samia al-Khor, an Arabic teacher, who had also fled the north. Her desire to return to the familiar rhythm of the classroom had pushed her to gather children eager to learn and teach them the Arabic language on a piece of rubble that she had transformed into a blackboard.
The camp was one of the first areas of Rafah that Israel ordered to evacuate. Makeshift classrooms were dismantled, the joy of learning – denied.
Palestinians must be deprived of even the slightest moment of happiness. This is Israeli thinking. Do you remember the Israeli media’s outrage at scenes of Palestinian children trying to cool off in the sea amid stifling heat? There must be no respite for the Palestinians. They must be condemned to eternal suffering.
As Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa recently reminded us in an essay, Holocaust survivor and Israeli intellectual Israel Shahak was one of the first to see a reflection of Nazism in Israel. In a 1983 essay, he wrote that he noticed the Israeli trend toward what he called “Nazification” as early as 1968, a year after the Israeli army occupied the West Bank and Gaza.
“It is now common to assert that many of the horrors committed by Hitler could have been avoided if the intentions and early practices of the Nazis had been recognized for what they were. The same goes for Israeli Nazism. This can still be stopped if seen for what it is,” Shahak wrote.
For four decades his warning went unheeded. And we have reached the point where Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, unfazed by global outrage.
Gaza is “hell on earth,” as the UN has said. The sound of drones and fighter jets, the roar of bombardments and shelling, the smell of rotting bodies and sewage, the sight of razed neighborhoods, the convulsions of hunger and thirst, the agony of the loss of loved ones reigns supreme in this small tongue of land.
The dominant emotions are not those of resilience but those of anxiety, despair and terror. The myth of Palestinian endurance crumbles in the face of the unimaginable suffering inflicted on Palestinians by Israel.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.