We are at the final act. Every message from Gaza tells us this. They are preparing to run. They call it evacuation, but it will be a massacre. Everyone writes me the same thing: we are tired, exhausted, we are waiting for a signal, we know that at any moment we will have to move. Not out of Gaza, but within it. The south will be pushed north and the north south. As people flee, drones and quadcopters shoot. People are scattered, families are lost, some forever.
KHOLOUD HAS DISAPPEARED for six days. She wanted to reach the area where her mother is taking refuge. During one of the evacuations, they fled in opposite directions. Huge families that used to live close to each other are now each in a different place, where they rarely stay long. It seems like the game of goose: move forward two spaces, stay still for a turn, and then go back to the starting point. Is Kholoud alive or dead? And if she is alive, does she scream in vain under the rubble of a destroyed building, in a new crater carved by bombs in the ground, or has she ended up in an Israeli prison?
It's hard to say what a family in Gaza wishes for under these circumstances. Dying may be better than surviving. Those who come out of Israeli prisons have bruises and scars that never heal, the dazed look of someone who has lost their way: it's difficult to believe in human goodness when you experience its cruelest side.
Months ago, Aymad also disappeared without a trace. After weeks of searching, the family declared him dead. He was not on the hospital lists, nor on the lists of bodies found in the rubble, and there was no notification of his capture. Instead, after almost a year, he reappeared, thin, tired, with skin marked by the signs of torture. They had thrown him back into Gaza like a ghost in the jungle, where finding loved ones in such conditions – unrecognizable to him and unrecognizable the place where he had lived – was not easy.
Everyone says they feel disoriented. Some return to the area where they were born and cannot say where the entrance to their home was, where the store was where they bought bread every morning for a lifetime. There are no more streets, the outlines of buildings have also disappeared, which until a few months ago could still be sensed.
In February, Hani sent me a video in which, with his feet on a stone amidst steel bars sticking out from all sides, he pointed his phone screen at images that resembled his disorientation. At times, he captured piles of stones and blocks of concrete trying to reconstruct the geography of his neighborhood. Here was the building where Ahmed's family lived, here the chicken coop, here in front the sidewalk I walked to go to school. Or maybe not, another quick strip of a panorama all the same, rubble, just rubble. Today, of those traces of the past, only sand remains.
HANI'S UNCLE TOOhe was swallowed by the evacuations of Gaza. He left in search of food and did not return. The children and their mother waited for him for more than a year, fearing to leave the area they were in because, if he had gone to look for them, he would not have found them. Then, much later, a woman who had recently lost her husband, killed in an attack, tracked them down.
She told Hani's aunt that while cleaning his corpse, as she emptied the pockets of his pants, she found the identification card of a man that her husband had buried months earlier. He had found him dead on the side of a road. She told her that she had wrapped him in a shroud, dug a grave, and covered the body with the intention of finding his family to give them the sad news. But then they had fled, one tragedy added to another, and that man had not been able to fulfill what he had promised. She found herself, the wife, burying her husband and announcing the death of that other man to the widow and her orphans. As if burying two at once: two husbands, two fathers.
Since October 7, these stories have been repeating and the pace simply accelerates. Many of these brutal procedures were already happening before then. Administrative detention, for example, without any notification to families and with the practice of brutal torture even on children, women, the elderly, and the sick. There have been about a hundred deaths in Israeli prisons since October 7 due to the torture suffered.
WOULD BEenough to understand one small thing: that the crime of genocide has nothing to do with the number of victims, but with the intent. The intent, declared with shocking transparency by Netanyahu's government and many Israelis even before October 7, was the alarm bell that could have prevented this massacre.
The crime of genocide is precisely outlined, studied in all its phases, precisely to prevent its fulfillment. Instead, once again we have come to feed on the images that we morbidly watch, accustomed to a press that thrives on the spectacularization of pain, to understand that they were serious. Too late.