Comma Press has been publishing Palestinian short stories since 2008. Comma’s connection to Palestinian literature deepened however in 2014 when, shortly after bringing out the anthology, The Book of Gaza, all the writers we’d worked with on that book were subjected to 51 days of carpet bombing of civilian targets (June through August, 2014). My personal correspondence with writers featured in that book during the war led to one of them, the editor Atef Abu Saif, starting to write daily diaries, some of which we managed to get into outlets like the New York Times (these were later compiled in The Drone Eats with Me). As the founder of the press my personal connection with Gaza deepened infinitely when I met, married and started a family with the Gazan translator Basma Ghalayini, who went on to edit our best selling Palestinian book to date, Palestine + 100.
So when, as a family, we visited Gaza in August 2022, it was not only so that our two young kids could visit their grandparents (meeting their grandad for the first time) and many cousins and other relatives, it was also to shake hands with writers I’d known for years and to get to know the writing scene in person. I was given incredibly privileged access to what I would come to know as one of the most vibrant literary scenes on the planet.
For a whole month, I was taken to two or three literary events a day—a packed itinerary that ranged from novel launches, to poetry nights, to discussions of texts old and new, including heated discussions about religious censorship, abstract conversations about literary theory—only pausing for three days when the city was being indiscriminately bombed by Israel. Among the many writers I met during this month was the brilliant Nahil Mohana. An award-winning satirist, novelist and playwright, she struck me as someone who didn’t bend to any trend or school of thought, who published successfully independent of the many “scenes” that made up Gazan literary life. She wasn’t at the center of any particular crowd, but her work was appreciated way beyond the confines of any of these crowds. Her play Lipstick had been successfully staged at the Royal Court in London, but as with so many authors with whom I’ve worked, her potentially once-in-a-lifetime dream of seeing her work staged in a world-renowned theatre were dashed when the British Home Office refused her a visitor’s visa.
When the genocide started in October, we had numerous members of the family trapped in Gaza (including Basma’s brother, sister, parents, and two half-brothers), and I wasn’t initially able to contact all of the writers I’d met. When we finally got through to Nahil she replied with the same wry sense of humor about her predicament she had shown when I met her. Shortly afterwards we lost all contact with her for over a month, and someone contacted me on Facebook asking me if we’d heard anything from her. The latest they knew was that her building was surrounded by tanks and was being fired upon. We flooded her with messages but were told to expect the worst.
When our friend Dr. Refaat Alareer was targeted and killed for a single tweet in early December, we feared the worst for Nahil also. Then, in December, she suddenly replied. It was a rare moment of hope. She was alive. But how? Nahil promised to explain in the form of these diaries, which were kindly translated by Ayah Najadat and her brilliant team at Respond Crisis Translation.
–Ra Page
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November 2023: I can’t find my house on the map.
On the first day of November, I stopped writing my diary of this despicable war. Not because I was bored and desperate for it to end, nor because I was unable to preserve my memories amid all the trauma, but simply because my phone broke. I had been writing my diaries on the notepad app of my phone, when it went the way of so many things in this war—patience, hope, dreams for the future—and broke.
I am still in Gaza and haven’t yet been moved to the south, as thousands of other Gazans have been. My daughter, Habiba, and I left our place near the Al-Karamah Towers, in North Gaza City, and moved to Al Nasr Street, closer to the city centre. This was a joint decision made by the whole family, given the lack of relatives we could stay with in the south. We continue to bear the consequences of this decision, but often take pride in making it, especially when we hear about the difficult conditions of those in Rafah and elsewhere: the scarcity of basic resources, being crammed with dozens of others into a single apartment, or sometimes a garage.
Staying in Gaza means experiencing a land invasion, not to mention a complete severing of all communications and internet access. It also means changing your place of residence multiple times—three, maybe four, times in the space of a month. It means cleaning four or five different houses of rubble and preparing them for a new family to move in, taping their windows with nylon, adapting to a new space. It means paying fifteen shekels for a single can of beans. It means seeing corpses lying in the street—and dogs, cats and other animals growing fat on them.
On November 3rd, it was the last call for Gazans to leave their places and head south. Those neighbors that still remained, packed up and headed towards Wadi Gaza, to walk along a route that is bombed every day, having been given strict instructions on how much luggage to take with them. The house we are staying in suddenly became filled with all the neighbors’ belongings, precious things that they couldn’t take with them and left with us to look after. As it turned out, this became a blessing rather than a burden as the war progressed, as we needed all of it, once the blockade began and the land invasion was announced. Luckily, my neighbor, Shaima, and I are the same size, and likewise my twelve-year-old daughter is the same size of her middle daughter. So when we didn’t have electricity or water to wash our own clothes, we could borrow theirs.
Staying in the Nasr Neighborhood
The great exodus to the south continued for another four days, not only down the Salah El-Din road, but by additional, more circuitous routes, like the beach road and others. Soon everyone in the neighborhood had left except us and one other family. Al-Nasr Street, once a bustling thoroughfare, thronging with people till the early hours, was now a ghost town. Danger approached every day as our fears grew. I hadn’t realized until then how much having neighbors nearby made the prospect of dying more bearable; dying with friends around you would be a mercy compared to dying on your own, with no one to witness it, or even know it happened. This is the neighborhood I grew up in, the place where I spent my childhood. Now my daughter, who has grown up in the Al-Karamah neighborhood, in North Gaza City, is suddenly finding herself playing with the children of my childhood neighbors. The irony of it! I had assumed the stages of life had rolled on, never to be returned to. But here it is, folding back on itself, repeating.
The indiscriminate bombing of shops had already begun and my middle brother Nizar’s cosmetics warehouse was among them. It was completely destroyed. The warehouse contained two floors’ worth of merchandise (perfumes, hair and skin care products, etc), plus a showroom. It also had its own generator, which was full of fuel at the time; this exploded causing the warehouse to burn for several hours. The warehouse was close to the apartment we’d just moved to. From our window we could see the thick black smoke rising and darkening the sky. My brother had intended to accommodate us in the warehouse in the coming days, as it had a sturdy basement. I didn’t know whether to be grateful for being given another lease of life or to mourn the annihilation of a life’s work, as it went up in flames in front of my brother’s eyes.
The following day—November 10th—we decided to move for the second time, as the tanks along Al-Nasr Street were simply too close. We no longer had the luxury of succumbing to depression, or wallowing in the misery of what had already happened to us. In times of war, there is no time for crying, you must only think quickly about how to survive the next moment. As a family, we continued to refuse to be displaced to the south, so we relocated to my cousin Mahmoud’s house in the middle of Al-Rimal neighborhood, which is only about 300 meters from the house we were staying in.
That night, we learned that a tank had parked in front of the house we had just left. The only family that remained in the neighborhood was surrounded and had to be evacuated through the back door, by the Red Cross, holding their breath the whole time they ran. In such moments, the slightest breath, a cough or a sneeze, or even an accidental passing of wind can cost you your life. If you have a crying child with you, you’re as good as dead. Such is the reality of war. And so, a new life was written for us, a second time.
We now made up a group of about thirty people. We divided into two groups: women and children stayed in a residential apartment, whereas men and teenage boys occupied the guest hall of the tower block. The building had solar power, which made many household tasks easier; we could charge our phones, watch our favorite movies, and follow the news on Al-Jazeera hourly. What a joy it was—but our brief respite was short-lived. One week later, the tanks punched through and entered our street.
Tank Salutes
I have heard of the word “tank” all my life, since I was a kid I suppose, but I had only seen one on TV or in epic movies about the World Wars. Today, on 20th November, I saw it through the window. It was approaching, and the closer it got, the more gigantic it became. Its insidious gun swiveling left and right ready to shoot any time. I was witnessing something terrifying for the first time in my life. I screamed for the others to come and see it with me, and when they arrived, they pulled back the curtains. That was the moment the same tank chose to launch three shells towards our window. The first shell landed somewhere just below us but didn’t seem to explode when it impacted. We rushed back into the apartment. The second shell did explode, but further off, and all the glass of windows flew into the house. By the time we had got to our hiding places in the inner room, a third shell was launched. Again it exploded—but further down the street. I think if it hadn’t been for the luck of the first shell not exploding, we would not be here right now.
Many of us were injured. We all suffered temporary deafness and I could see Aunt Latifa had a cut to her forehead. But it seemed I bore the brunt of the injuries. Two of my teeth were broken, my upper lip was burst and I had a deep cut on the side of my nose. I bled profusely and everyone started screaming, thinking, at the sight of my blood-soaked clothes, that I was done for. I had been granted a new life, it seemed, for the third time.
After its three, random shells, the tank trundled down the street and turned onto another. We went down stairs and huddled together in the guest suite of the building, staying there until we were saved by the declaration of a truce two days later. The announcement stated that the tanks would not withdraw. The moment the truce started, we left my cousin Mahmoud’s place in Rimal and went back to Al-Nasr Street, where we were first displaced to, in our old family home.
A Temporary Truce
The family house comprises two buildings with a wide space between them. Each building has four apartments, and is usually inhabited by six families. Everyone has now left, except for two families, including ours. A few have been lucky enough to travel abroad with the help of their children residing in Europe. But most have been displaced to the homes of relatives and in-laws in the south.
The truce only lasted seven days. We spent most of them cleaning up the two buildings, clearing away rubble—masonry, debris, chunks of concrete, crumbled cement, shattered glass. We patched up the houses and covered the empty window frames with nylon as the winter was almost upon us. On one day of the truce, we were even lucky enough to sneak north to check on our house in the Al-Karamah neighborhood. We had to navigate through winding back-streets and alleys to get there, as a tank had stationed itself at the main entrance to the neighborhood. As the main market in Rimal had been completely bombed, we scoured the stalls we passed on the way north for whatever food we could fine—this included Sahaba Market, Balad Market and the “Thieves Market,” where the produce on sale has clearly been stolen from other bombed and abandoned shops. When I finally stood in front of my house, in Al-Karamah, a strange reverence overwhelmed me. Tears gathered up in my eyes until they fell under their own weight. I prostrated myself on the pavement before it, chanting words of supplication and gratitude to God, realizing His glory only now. I loaded what belongings I could fit into the car and then sat silently in my room, gazing at its walls for over a quarter of an hour. Then I gathered up my last load and left: my old mobile phone and some nail clippers as my nails had started to break seeing as I hadn’t eaten eggs since October 7th.
As I waited for the others, I had a few moments to walk down our old street, and take in the spectacle: cars laying overturned, on their backs, all along the sidewalk as a result of the bombings. Why doesn’t Hollywood come and shoot its films here?, I found myself thinking. Instead of spending vast sums of money, constructing sets and buying wrecked cars? The streets of the Al-Karamah neighborhood are all primed and ready; there’s nothing here they couldn’t dream up.
Back on the first day of the truce, my third brother Munther was walking down the street, in Al Nasr neighborhood, when a young man heard his footsteps from inside his house. The young man came out, surprised to see anyone still in Gaza, and asked him “Who are you? Where have you come from? Why are you outside?” My brother told him about the agreed truce and that people were moving in the streets more normally now. The young man was shocked, admitting that they hadn’t heard the news for two weeks and knew nothing about the truce. He explained that after their father had left the house, none of them had dared to go out because their father never made it back. My brother, being a doctor who had treated many of the injured at the hospital himself, asked for a description of the young man’s father, hoping he might remember him. The young man described his father in detail and added that he was wearing a brown tracksuit and slippers the day he disappeared. My brother confessed he didn’t remember anyone matching this description, and carried on walking down the street.
About fifty meters down the street, however, he spotted a brown tracksuit. It was the body of the young man’s father, lying in the street.
*
When my brother returned home that day, after his inspection, he told us that he had also seen an entire family in the remains of their home, trapped under rubble, having each bled to death, because the ambulance couldn’t reach them. Among them was a mother with her small dead child still in her arms.
I scoffed at my “oh so brave” cousin telling him I had seen bodies in the street too, as if to challenge his courage. But he told me he had seen pelvic bones, ribs, and a whole thoracic cage lying in the trash. I joked that the bones of cats, dogs, and horses did not scare me, but he mocked my mockery, adding, “These bones belonged to people, not animals.”
The danger continued to intensify, the aerial and artillery bombardment never stopping. As a result, we made the decision to stay all together in one building, thinking that would be safer. When my typically pessimistic brother Nizar first claimed we’d soon be kneading and baking our own bread at home, thanks to bakery closures, we laughed sarcastically at him. Now, bread kneading has become a daily routine for us. We knead and bake using firewood, which we also burn to heat water for bathing. We are only allowed to shower once a week and anyone who dares to defy these rules is deprived of showering for a further week. There are now four families squeezed into the house, a total of 20 people. The eldest, my father Khader and my uncle Ibrahim, are distributed between two bedrooms and a living room. But my uncle got annoyed when people accused him of being the loudest snorer at night. and announced his intent to return to his place, in the other building, come the morning, which he did. The following night, the wall of the room he had been sleeping in was hit by artillery fire from a tank stationed at the roundabout just a hundred meters away. When he came to us the next day, he was pale-faced and joked, “Snoring has health benefits.”
The tank remained at the roundabout for three full weeks, bringing about the imposition of a few more house rules: No lights at night, no talking loudly, no listening to the radio, no stepping out the front door after 5pm. Luckily, none of our residents are young children; otherwise, we would have been bombed on the first night. The constant question is, do those inside the tanks know of our existence, the way we know of theirs? Are they watching us, the way we are watching them?
We Have Been Granted a New Life for the Fourth Time
On December 11th, at 7am, the building adjacent to ours was bombed. We woke up to the sound of it; but couldn’t see anything, as dust and ash filled the air. Each of us ran to check on our loved ones. After ten minutes of screaming and panicking, we were reassured that we had all survived without even a scratch. It marked the fourth time we had been granted a new spate of life. Shrapnel had hit the solar panels and water barrels on the roof, leaving us without water or electricity, and part of the building had been destroyed. We moved to the ground floor and took up residence in the apartment my uncle had left empty, when he emigrated ten years ago. We stayed there, determined not to repeat our mistakes, for a further three weeks, until the tanks eventually pulled back, having completely destroyed the square where they’d been stationed.
Back in Rafah, my sister Nidaa, who’d been displaced there since the beginning of the war, found herself having a difficult conversation over the phone with a volunteer delivering food parcels in the north. She insisted there were still people in the old family house. The volunteer swore to her, in all seriousness, that it was impossible for anyone to still be there: “It is a square of ghosts,” he said to her. “The whole neighborhood is completely empty. The tanks have destroyed everything.” My sister insisted he was wrong and told him we were still there and hadn’t moved, emphasizing how resilient we were. How could he know how much strength it took to stay there? But the volunteer remained unconvinced and returned with the food parcels, after informing her that we had been targeted in the recent round of bombing, and that we had been injured and transported to Al-Shifa Medical Centre. My sister fainted upon receiving the news, being the more sensitive of my sisters. When she came round, she texted my older sister Nihaya, currently in America to convey the news.
Upon receiving the text, Nihaya also fainted. Evidently, she ranks as the second sensitive person in the family. She had just returned from performing Umrah, in order to be closer to Allah, where she recited a Dua’a (player) for us to find an imminent relief. In truth, we needed a miracle.
For ten days the rumor of our martyrdom spread further and further afield, without us knowing about it, until, by pure chance, a trace of mobile signal was discovered on the top floor of our building. This discovery was indeed monumental. I called my first sister, who, as I mentioned, had fainted upon hearing the news of our martyrdom. Upon hearing my voice over the phone—the voice of an apparently dead person—she once again lost consciousness.
New Year’s Eve
“I wish I could stretch my back.”
“I wish I could go to a proper toilet.”
“I wish I could sleep without the mosquitos.”
“I wish I could satisfy my hunger.”
These were our wishes on New Year’s Eve. We had spent the whole night in an abandoned house. Meals were meager, medicine was non-existent, drinkable water had been scarce since our block was first besieged by tanks. When they finally withdrew on the evening of December 21st, a spate of burglaries spread like a virus across the city. We started being woken every morning by the sound of someone calling for help, they were being burgled. My brothers, Mohammed, Nizar, and Munther and my cousin Mustafa started taking turns, patrolling the neighborhood and guarding its houses every night. Our neighbors are in the south, unable to return now that the Strip has been split in two, so their houses, being empty, are the most exposed to burglary. On the morning of New Year’s Day, we were informed that our house in Al-Karamah had been partially burned, along with most of the houses in the neighborhood, due to the strong presence of resistance fighters there, the concentration of tanks, and the ongoing clashes.
With the beginning of the new year, we moved into our fourth house—this time my uncle Akram’s place—to resume the job of cleaning, clearing away rubble, sweeping up shattered glass and making the place liveable. My God, how many houses I have cleaned during this war! I have become highly proficient at it. So quick. Please remind me to start a cleaning company when the war is over—I’’ll need reminding as my memory is starting to leak like the old tap in my uncle’s abandoned house.
*
“They keep talking about humanitarian aid that hasn’t been allowed to arrive: things like flour, sugar, rice, milk, and medicines. Can we add some other necessities to this list, like hope, patience, and resilience?”
This was today’s post on my Facebook page—January 17—a post I made merely to reassure friends that I am still alive. So many had heard the rumor. An unexplained internet signal had been discovered in the grounds of the American International School, in which dozens of families were still taking refuge. Each family occupied a classroom and wrote their name on its wall. The signal appeared after a two-and-a-half-month internet outage. The hourly rate for access to it was five shekels, and the calculations soon added up. But for me, this was the second greatest discovery of the year—after that of the mobile signal on the upper floor.
The Basatat Market
In Gaza these days, you can’t buy anything for less than five shekels. The starting price is always five shekels. This is what I noticed while strolling through the street market that spans from Al-Shifa Street to the university square. When I saw this market for the first time, I was amazed by the resilience of everyone in it, their determination to rise back up and continue striving. I thought to myself that if the Israeli soldiers could see what I see, strolling among these stalls, rather than seeing it through the crosshairs of a tank or plane, I swear they would convert to Islam in droves. They would say: “Bombs—we dropped them. Ground invasion—we entered. Displacements—we enforced them. Famine—we brought it here. Yet here you still are, displaying your wares: legumes, clothes, air fresheners, sanitary pads, scented tissues, razors, spices, sweets, yeast, knives, spoons… stall after stall, all along the sidewalks, or what’s left of the sidewalks. And still the women come and negotiate prices with sellers, as if there were no war. This war has cost us a fortune,” the Israeli soldiers would say. “It’s cost us our reputation around the world, forever. Yet here you are, coming to haggle over the price of a winter shirt. Damn you all to hell!” Only, they would say it in Hebrew.
One man was selling cigarettes: “A single cigarette for six shekels,” he said, “or two for fifteen.” When I objected, pointing out that half of the fifteen is not six—clearly my mind is still working, somehow—he suggested I roll my own. I told him grumpily that I wasn’t good at rolling my own and that I was merely trying to be straight with him. Mockingly, he replied, “There are plenty of buyers, you are almost wasting my time, taking up space in front of my stall, arguing. If you don’t like it, madam, you can leave. Our prices are fixed.” I thought to myself, “Oh, fixed prices, eh? And I’m the one wasting his time?” It seems now really is their time, not ours. There’s no solace for us, the intellectuals.
100 Days of War
Today marks a hundred days of solitude—with no apology to the great Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One hundred days of war; one hundred days of being scattered and torn apart; one hundred days of loss; one hundred days of suffering; one hundred days of repeated displacement; one hundred days without reliable internet or means of communicating. For a hundred days, we have been washing our clothes by hand, cooking our food over firewood, kneading dough as my grandmother did in the 1970s. We have gone back decades. My eldest brother Nazir is in Khan Younis, my middle sister Nidaa is in Rafah, my youngest sister Nagham has traveled to Turkey, and we are here in Gaza. After more than a hundred days of constant bombardment, I want to tell you that we, the people of Gaza, have set records in:
Collecting the Largest Number of Unexploded Bullets—of all shapes and sizes—for Use as Souvenirs.
The Most Developed Vocabulary for Describing of Different Bombs and Other Noises of War, such as:
“Bouf” (aerial bombing)
“Tsoooo” (naval bombing)
“Dddof” (artillery shelling)
“Lululululu” (night illumination flares accompanied by the smell of gas)
“Trak trak trak” (the sound of a quadcopter drone)
“Chik chik chik” (the sound of a tank as it moves)
“Fooof fooof” (the sound of the bulldozer)
“Duf duf tik tik” (the sound of clashes)
“D-duf d-duf” (the sound of a racing heartbeat when scared)
“Duf duf duf duf” (the sound of a fire belt—carpet bombing of a restricted area)
“……..” (the sound of a rumbling, hungry stomach)
“Wssssss” (the sound of feet running quickly during a bombing, not knowing where to go)
“Waaaaaaaaaaa” (women screaming during a bombing)
“Waah” (men screaming during a bombing)
“Ah” (touching cold water)
“Yuck” (drinking salty water)
*Despite our proficiency in distinguishing all these sounds, after a while, we have begun to lose our hearing. We have started to ask those calling us from outside, during the rare times we had a signal, to repeat what they said over and over, not because the signal was weak but due to our own deafness. They would say something, and we would repeatedly ask, “What? What? What?”
Consuming canned foods, especially baked beans and kidney beans (despite the consequences of eating so many beans!).
Queuing as a daily ritual: queues for the toilet, queues for filling a plate for lunch, queues for fetching water, queues for the shower, and queues for charging mobile phones.
Climbing up onto windowsills, like a Gazan Spider-Man, trying to get a mobile or internet signal.
Going to bed early as there is so little else to do—no internet, no electricity, no TV.
Conserving mobile battery; a charge lasts four days because the only thing it’s actually used for is games and as a flashlight to go to the toilet at night.
Growing facial hair—beards and mustaches, for men; eyebrows and mustaches for women—due to the lack of barbers.
Using nylon and plastic sheeting in windows, once all the glass has been blown out
Using vegetable oil for everything—not just cooking, but in cars in the absence of diesel and gasoline.
Paying extortionate amounts for simple things—a donkey cart (al-karah) ride, in the absence of any other transportation, is now twenty shekels.
Living with garbage; it fills the streets as the municipality hasn’t been operating since the truce.
Seeing the cleanliness of the sea from a distance—no one has entered or contributed to its pollution for four months.
Mosquito bites.
Cat sizes: street cats have been feeding on garbage and corpses have become impossibly fat.
The longest duration of internet and communication service outages since they were invented.
A Letter to My Daughter
Today, I wrote a letter to my daughter, and this is what I said:
My dearest daughter Habiba,
I apologize for bringing you here. I apologize for not relocating to a country that respects human dignity. I turned down several offers of fellowships for artists and writers from institutions abroad. I honestly believed we were safe; I did not know that safety had to be bought or planned for. I thought it was a given right. I apologize for your displaced childhood, for the hours of boredom, and for your constant scrolling through your phone, remembering and mourning the beautiful moments of the past. I apologize for the fact that displaced families have taken shelter in your school, messed up your classroom, and played on the swings you used to enjoy with your friends. I apologize for what you had to see… your bedroom burning, your toys scattered, your clothes stolen. You should be somewhere else, spending the best days of your life, thinking about your future, hanging out with your friends in amusement parks, malls, and parks. I apologize because you are in the wrong place in the world, and it is my fault. My little daughter, they talk about deals, and I tell them, to hell with all your trivial deals. The only deal I want now is safety.
On your last birthday, I got you a big map of the Gaza Strip, but now I can’t find our house on it. Maybe we will redraw it together in another place and time.
I folded the letter and hid it among my belongings, not daring to give it to her.
January 23, 2023. Translated by Translated by Respond Crisis Translation.
