|
Filed by Tareq Hajjaj
How can a person recover from the horror of what he saw? How can he
live an everyday life after everything that happened to him and all this
displacement, destruction, killing, and death? How can a normal person
witness all these massacres and see how a person becomes a pile of body
parts? Some of them are on the ground, and the remains of “Unknown No.
15” are written next to them. These scenes continue to play out, every
day, for months. Can a person ever heal?
An ordinary person who follows the course of the war on television
and on social media may experience great sadness as a result of what he
sees. But experiencing the massacre and genocide first hand, researching
its details, seeing its victims, listening to their stories and their
helpless words, then writing their stories, word after word, feeling
after feeling – is something else entirely. The writer listens to these
stories over and over again, each one reminding him of his own personal
experience, to the point that he becomes weak and has no choice but to
break down in tears.
Not a single story that I have published from October until now has
been devoid of every single one of these emotions. There is not a single
story devoid of its owners’ crying. Every family I went to meet in
Gaza, the family was sitting in front of me with tears streaming down
their face during a conversation. They could not stop, and in every
story, I was in front of these people. Despite my persistent attempts to
control my tears, I always failed and found myself crying with them and
quickly trying to focus again and maintain my role as a journalist.
Working in the journalistic field during this genocide has never been
more complicated than it has been in my entire life. For example, I had
to go to meet children who had lost all of their families, and all that
remained of them was the child whom I was going to meet.
When I went to meet these children, I always felt that asking my
questions might be like walking in a minefield. A word or question could
make this child lose his senses, burst into tears, or scream. They had
lost all of their family.But I always tried to carry sweets and toys
with me, talk to them, meet them, and seek help from the people who care
for them and take care of them inside the hospitals.
When I went anywhere in the southern Gaza Strip, I would see many
buildings whose destroyed walls bore the writing: “the people from this
family that were bombed are still under the rubble.” They remained under
the rubble for weeks and months without anyone being able to get them
out.
How can a person recover from the sight of the trained dog that
attacked an older woman in her home in Jabalia and bit her arm while she
was screaming? Every Palestinian who saw this older woman felt she was
his mother or grandmother. We are the ones documenting all this. When
will we recover from all this sadness that we observe and document, and
all this injustice that happens to our family and friends without being
able to stop it? How will we forgive ourselves for having witnessed all
of this and for it to continue to occur in our lives?
This war has brought sadness to all the families of the Gaza Strip
without exception. Every family in the Gaza Strip has lost a lot, not to
mention the home that almost all the families of the Gaza Strip have
lost. Sadness looms over the hearts of the Palestinians in Gaza. It is
slowly killing them and turning them into people who are losing hope
little by little.
|
