Status Updates From Don't Look Left: A Diary of...

I try to phone my friend Philippe who is staying with his family in the church in the old city, to wish him a Merry Christmas. But there is no signal in Gaza City, as always. Baba Noel will not visit Gaza this year, I think. He wouldn't risk it. He's be shot in the head the moment he landed his sleigh.

Gaza has been abandoned. Nobody cares. Every day we hear of scores of massacres being committed on the ground, in which civilians are killed and no one even reports them. ... When the journalists headed south, they left the city unwatched, unmonitored, for the most trigger-happy genocidal young Israeli soldiers to do their worst.

How long is this sustainable? There are many who say the end of the year will mark the end of the war. ...people here are ready to believe anything that might lift their spirits and give them some hope. By Christmas, some are saying, or by New Year's Eve, Israel will ceasefire. Some refer to the forthcoming American elections as a reason for believing this - Biden will need to shore up his base.

Hope in Biden! Ugh!

In Rafah... ...once it was the route through which people from Africa reached Asia. The little road that crosses at the border used to be called 'Asia Street', a dirty path that was the only route between two continents. And to think, there was even a railway line that passed through here, taking passengers from Cairo to Jerusalem, until 1948, of course.

Ceasefire
No one is naive enough to think about a permanent peace, of course. For Gazans, war is like the weather, we live through it continually. We have no say in it; it just comes and goes, from the day we're born. Most Gazans have never left the Strip; they don't know what life feels like where war is not the norm; they don't know what freedom is either. They know they want it, but they've never really tasted it.

To his son as they move south--

"I tried to introduce a bit of its history, and talked about the massacre the Israeli army committed in 1956 here, in which part of our family who used to live in the refugee camp, were killed. Israeli soldiers went door-to-door through the camp, supposedly in search of fedayeen [militants], shooting over 250 Palestinians in the process. They did the same in Rafah."

Tregua no significa que termine la guerra. Solo significa que las cosas quedan pospuestas, inciertas, en suspenso. Como palestinos, conocemos bien ese estado. La vida bajo la ocupación es como una ejecución aplazada. Nunca se sabe cuánto va a durar el aplazamiento. Pero somos humanos, necesitamos un momento para respirar, para hacer luto, para hacer un inventario mental de la situación, para recordar.

Con cada nuevo día, el campo parece más silencioso, más vacío. Me pregunto cómo se recordará todo esto cuando termine. También me pregunto si alguna vez terminará. No quiero acordarme de esta guerra y, desde luego, no quiero aceptar la «nueva vida» que espera a los gazatíes cuando termine la guerra. Quiero que todo se omita, se borre y que los borrados vuelvan.

Esta mañana me desperté desesperado por que algo cambie. Es desesperante esperar que una guerra termine. ¿Y si nunca termina? No terminó en una semana. Quizá no termine después de un mes, o un año. Nosotros, el objeto de la guerra, no tenemos voz en su desarrollo.

'Don't look.' Strewn around randomly, along both sides of the road, are scores and scores of dead bodies. Rotting. Melting, it seems, into the ground. The smell is horrendous. A hand reaches out towards us from the window of a burnt-out car, as if asking for something - from me, specifically. Headless bodies here. Severed heads there. Limbs and precious body parts just thrown away and left to fester. 'Don't look,'

"For a week now, hospitals have been 'legitimate targets' turned into war zones, battle grounds, and the international community has just whistled to itself. Soldiers are accusing patients of hiding weapons of mass destruction, and have been re-opening wounds to see what they're hiding in there."

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