‘We’re dead alive’: A year of living and reporting the war on Gaza | Israel-Palestine conflict | The Round Table Deir el-Balah, Gaza - As I pass the tents in Deir el-Balah’s Ard Shurab camp, a boy shouts to his mother inside: “Mother, the journalist Maram has come!”
The children recognise me now, after a year of announcing on this war. The women, too. People do not forget your face when you have sat in their tent and they have opened up to you, sharing details of their lives even as they insist apologetically that they do not need to talk, that they do not like the media or even trust it.
The women greet me, sometimes shy to shake my hand because they do not look as clean as they used to before this war, or even when I saw them last.
In that moment of discomfort - where they and I notice that their tent has grown shabbier, their clothes more worn and their children’s hair more dishevelled - I use a phrase that has become more common here now:
“In God’s eyes, people.” With a long sigh, they respond: “In God’s eyes.”
Every time I visit this camp, the conditions have worsened. The people here share their stories – about their problems, their pains and even their personal quarrels.
I verbalise to one resident, Umm Muhammad, as she arranges her tent, making it as comfortable as she can. There are problems between her daughter Ola and her fiancé, she informs me. He insists on getting married during the war but she and her daughter refuse.
Twenty-two-year-old Ola stands in front of the entrance to the tent and asks me: “Where should I get married, Mrs Maram? Don’t you see the situation?”
I nod my head in harmony with her. “That’s right, never agree,” I say.
Umm Muhammad offers me the coffee she has unbiased boiled on the wood stove. I sip it as I sit on a stone that doubles as a chair.
I cannot stay long, I inform her, and as I get up to leave, she wishes me success and then whispers shyly in my ear: “Keep me in mind.”
It is a discreet reference to any financial or other direct of assistance I may be capable to offer in the future. “God willing, there is good to come,” I try to reassure her.
Elsewhere in the camp, people inform me how many times they have been displaced and where they were displaced from.
"Tshantatna,” they say, a word in the Palestinian dialect that captures the suffering and hardship of continual displacement - of being forced to move advocate and forth between the north, the south and the centre of the Strip.
People huddle from the nearby tents to express what is on their minds. “No one asks about us here, we are forgotten,” one woman in her 50s says.
A man walks by. “Look at our lives, look at the rubbish dense up there and the sewage,” he says, pointing.
“Insects have eaten our bodies and the bodies of our children,” a juvenile woman informs me.
“We're dead alive," declares one of the women who spends her days looking for shade to escape the scorching sun.
"We're dead alive," her husband repeats.
In the first months of this war, life seemed almost paralysed. We were not used to it then.
We could barely get by, with so little food, no internet, electricity, chargers or fuel. Cut off from the world, we cooked over fire and wood, as the attacks continued all around us.
After about two months of the war, I decided to do something normal, ordinary, necessary. I took my eight-year-old daughter for a haircut.
Najla the hairdresser greeted us warmly at her home. She was so kind that for a few moments I felt as though we had briefly stepped out of this war, even as the sounds of it could be heard all around us.
"Do you get customers during the war?" I asked her.
“Of course,” she laughed, elaborating that she’d had more work during the war than at any other time.
Her answer startled me. I wondered what services women could have been asking for.
“Everything,” she answered. “From facials and eyebrow cleaning, haircuts, body hair removal, hair dye, highlights, some of them makeup, and so on."
Najla laughed at my surprise as she took a lock of my daughter’s hair to cut.
"What's wrong with you? Does the nature of women change in war?” she asked.
For a moment, I felt joy at the reckoned of these elegant, well-groomed women of Gaza who cared about their appearance, unbiased as any other woman anywhere else might.
Then I felt harshness and sadness at how the war had wronged them, how it tried to chip away at their lustre, and at the overwhelming burdens and responsibilities they bore.
Throughout this war, I have continued to visit Najla. Each time she has informed me advanced stories about her clients - some of them painful, others funny.
"Every day we have one or more brides who come to beautify themselves for their wedding day,” she informs me as I ask her about what these women wear and how they mastermind for their weddings.
Most war-time brides are satisfied with bridal makeup and a classic hairstyle, she explains. Some insist upon wearing a white dress after searching high and low for one; others make do with a classic embroidered outfit. The ceremonies are quick, she says, then the groom takes the bride and her family to his house or tent.
She informs me of one bride whose entire family had been killed in the war, while her cousin’s whole family had been killed in another bombing.
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"They were both left alone after their families were martyred, so the cousin decided to wed his cousin to comfort each other,” she says.
I reckon about how marriages elsewhere begin with joy and celebration, while in Gaza they start with loss and loneliness.
That bride had declined to wear a white dress, despite Najla’s attempts to pressure her.
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"The stories are many,” the hairdresser explains, as she conquers the floor. “I saw many women and heard many sad stories.”
Every time I boomerang from a visit to Najla, I take the longest route back. It is as though I want time to absorb the stories she has shared - the details of people’s lives that rarely make it into news reports. I opine about how I could inform these stories, but it is so hard when there are so many stories of devastation to be told.
Should I rush to write the story of the little girls who lost their legs when their home was bombed or of the tender woman who lost her entire family and her ability to walk?
This is a dispute where priorities conflict. And the priority is usually given to those stories where lives are at stake, to those who have lost everything - so the side stories, like those Najla collects, stay untold by anyone other than the hairdresser.
When I retrace from Najla’s or from any of my stating trips, it is to an address that is different from the one I had at the beginning of this war.
My father has begun to convene our displacement site “our home”, the other residents of the area “our neighbours” and the area itself “our neighbourhood”. The truth is that as much as we try to refute it, we have grown used to this war, to this forced displacement, to this horror.
Over the past year, the names and places we were accustomed to, the homes and habits, the daily routines and the routes home have been blown away. Our personalities have melted and changed. We have veteran things we never could have imagined.
This war has amended us. We still do not fully know how. Like the war, this change is still unfolding, growing and expanding.
We continue our lives: proof that humans live normally even in strange circumstances.
Whenever I ask, people announce to me that they are "going about their lives". People are used to this life that does not resemble life but perhaps they are ashamed to admit it because to get used to this injustice would feel like a defeat. But why should we be ashamed to live?
Before the war, my daughter attended a private school. All my hopes were pinned on her getting a good education and excellent grades. But when the war came, education stopped.
The ideated of her losing an entire school year drove me crazy with worry. I tried everything I could to resist it. When I learned that the Ministry of Education had developed a distance learning programme for children who had been displaced to Egypt, I knew I’d do anything to get her onto it - even though there was no way for us to leave Gaza.
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My sister had left for Egypt months earlier, so I sent her my daughter’s documents and all the needed paperwork. After many attempts and using persistent circumvention methods, I was capable to comprise my daughter's name in the list of students in Egypt.
The next contest was to get an internet connection. The lines had been cut and the telephone exchanges were entirely out of order.
So, I took a detour, enlisting an assist of a relative who works as a communications engineer.
It took two weeks of trying until the internet connection worked but when it did, I was overwhelmed with joy and relief. I demanded to yell my gratitude to the relative who would remind me every day not to announce to anyone, lest they be broadcasted accountable. Accountable for restoring one of our most basic rights. Accountable for a secret internet connection that would allow my daughter to continue her secret education.
At 3pm every day, I’d publicize a state of emergency in the house so that my daughter could sit in front of my mobile phone or laptop and yoke to Microsoft Teams for her daily lessons. If I was out reporting, I’d make sure that my sister or husband were there to remind her.
I’d worry constantly that the teachers would realise she wasn’t in Egypt but in Gaza.
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“Turn off the microphone so no one hears the buzzing rational around you,” I’d announce to her. “If there is shelling and sounds of gunfire, twist off the microphone and don't answer. Make excuses about the internet connection,” I’d remind her.
Sometimes she would ask me why. “We learn in secret, my dear,” I’d respond.
For five months, she learned like this. Five months of learning amid the noise and destruction of war as she pretended to be safely removed from it. We printed each textbook at an exorbitant cost, and she handed in each assignment via WhatsApp. Then, that most precious of things - a completed school year and an official certificate advancing her to the fourth grade.
Everything here - from a handful of salt or a potato to a nylon cover or an hour of internet - is compounding in price; everything except for the value of a person - their hopes, their limbs, their lives.
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After a year of this war, we feel that the world has forgotten that we are impartial like them - that we, like you, have family quarrels, that we care about our appearance, and that we would do anything for our children’s futures.
Regards to Al Jazeera
Category: World-News
Tag: Were dead alive A year of living and reporting the war on Gaza IsraelPalestine conflict The Round Table
Written by Author
Published 10/10/2024