Tel Aviv Tribune Net correspondents
Gaza – “I am not a writer, I am just a person who is provoked by reality, so I write sarcastically because we should not take this world seriously.” This is how Ahmed Murtaja, a young man in his twenties, looks at the bloody and destructive Israeli aggression that Gaza is being subjected to, for the third month in a row, which is met with “situations Faint from everyone, east and west, in this universe.
Ahmed tells Tel Aviv Tribune Net that the events taking place around him provoke him to do something, as the feeling of helplessness in the face of everything that is happening is deadly and painful, even if it does not bleed blood, like killing by the lava of fire pouring over this small geographical spot by air, land and sea.
Ahmed and his family escaped death from being bombed several times, as a result of Israeli air strikes that destroyed their home and wiped out entire residential blocks from the face of the earth in the Al-Shujaiya neighborhood, east of Gaza City, and pursued them in several places of displacement to which they sought refuge within the city, and each time the minutes were crucial to escaping certain death.
Race with death
Ahmed (28 years old) studied psychology at the Islamic University of Gaza. He has not yet married and lives with his family in the Shujaiya neighborhood, whose name appeared in the war news as one of the neighborhoods in the Strip most exposed to bombing and destruction, and where the occupation army – according to its leaders’ admission – faced a fierce confrontation from the resistance. Palestinian.
As a result of one of the violent raids on this neighborhood, Ahmed found himself under the rubble and miraculously survived. He says, “We survived again, maybe the third or fourth, I don’t know, but we are still breathing, and every time we were one step ahead of death.”
As the Shujaiya neighborhood was subjected to raids and fire belts involving air fighters and artillery, the young man and his family were displaced several times, and each time they were pursued by the lava of the fire, and they preceded the collapse of the buildings in which they resided by leaving shortly, until they settled in a United Nations headquarters in the west of the city.
More than 100,000 displaced people are present in this headquarters and its surroundings, according to what Ahmed estimated. He does not feel safe even with the blue flag flying over the UN headquarters, which has been empty of its administration and employees since their displacement from Gaza City and the north to the south of the Strip on October 13 last.
Regarding the reason for this feeling, Murtaja cites the five minutes that separated him from death, when rockets and shells rained down on a school belonging to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), housing thousands of displaced people. He explains, “We left the school in a hurry, and before 5 minutes had passed, the building we were in collapsed.” We take refuge in it due to direct Israeli targeting.”
“Insanity party”
All of these events motivated him to write and document war diaries, but they did not diminish his sarcastic style. He added, “This is my life before the war. I look at things around me with sarcasm, for life is not worth more than that.”
He cites the novel “The Banishment Party” by the international novelist Milan Kundera, in which he says, “We should not take this world seriously.”
Ahmed wonders, “Is what is happening to us real?!”