Rami Abou Jamous writes his diary for Orient XXI. This founder of GazaPress, an office which provided assistance and translation to Western journalists, had to leave his apartment in Gaza City with his wife and his two-and-a-half-year-old son Walid. He now shares a two-bedroom apartment with another family. He recounts his daily life and that of the Gazans of Rafah, stuck in this poverty-stricken and overpopulated enclave. This space is dedicated to him.

Rami Abou Jamous

Sunday March 31, 2024.

Today I have some bad news to announce. My wife Sabah's father died. He left to rest in peace because he did not resist the living conditions since his forced displacement in Rafah. His name was Souleimane, he was 76 years old. He was born in 1948, the year of the Nakba. And he died in the year of the second Nakba, which is underway.

His life is a summary of the contemporary history of Gaza. It experienced Egyptian then Israeli domination, the first intifada in 1987, the arrival of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Yasser Arafat in 1994 after the Oslo Accords, the second Intifada in 2000, the seizure of power by Hamas in 2007, the various offensives of the Israeli army and finally the exodus towards the south of the strip, following which he survived in a tent.

Already in 2014...

My father-in-law was a successful construction entrepreneur from Gaza. He was there before the arrival of the Nakba refugees whose descendants make up the majority of Gaza's inhabitants today. He had nineteen children. The oldest is 49 years old, the youngest 13 years old. I liked talking with him, he was a man of great wisdom.

With his family, they had been among the first to flee to the south, because his house was in Chadjaya, a neighborhood close to the border with Israel, which is always the first targeted when the Israelis attack. But they had learned the consequences of the 2014 offensive. My father-in-law had then lost his brother, his wife, their two children and a granddaughter. Their house had been completely destroyed. It was a family building, as is often the case in Gaza. Each of his children had their own apartment, where they lived with their family. Souleimane lived on the ground floor with his youngest children and his unmarried daughters.

This time, they left as soon as the Israeli offensive began. First towards the city of Gaza, in dispersed order. Some took refuge in Al-Shifa hospital, others in schools, or with relatives or friends. Until the day the Israeli army attacked schools, Al-Shifa hospital and this entire neighborhood. They had to flee again towards Nusseirat, in the center of the Strip. Then, once again, when Nusseirat was attacked, leave under bombs towards Rafah. It was in January. My father-in-law and his family arrived at 1 a.m. along the coastal road at the Al-Alam roundabout at the western entrance to Rafah. That night, it rained heavily.

“Finding a tent in Rafah is a miracle”

They stayed in the street, in the rain, until morning. We were already in Rafah, but we didn't even know that they had left Nusseirat. Communications were cut, we couldn't call them. We wondered if they had stayed there, if they had been bombed, if they were still alive... And then the next morning, we found them. The children of Souleimane started to buy a few pieces of wood and plastic to make tarpaulins and settle in, because finding a tent in Rafah is a miracle. I tried several times to find them a tent or two because there were so many of them – around thirty people – they needed at least four or five tents. I tried every means, I asked my contacts, my friends, the NGOs I knew. In vain unfortunately. They remained under the tarpaulins, which multiplied over time.

The place they were in became overcrowded. All the refugees from the north, from Nusseirat or even from Khan Younès, the nearest town, came to settle there. Souleimane and his people dug a small well next to the tarpaulins to make a toilet, so as not to have to travel hundreds of meters, or even kilometers, to go to the toilets of mosques or schools. This is how the displaced people of Rafah live. They used the D system in which we Palestinians excel. We are a people who always adapt, very quickly. Unfortunately, this is not an asset. Because always adapting, even in the worst situations, also means accepting evil without realizing it. We don't rebel, we adapt straight away.

“Now I understand very well the humiliation of becoming a refugee”

I went to see them several times a week, and I spoke with my father-in-law.

The first thing he said to me was:

Rami, I was born in 1948, I grew up seeing refugees arrive. They came from Haifa, Jaffa, Ashdod. When I was five or six years old, I asked myself: why did these people leave their homes? Why didn't they stay to face the enemy? Today I understood why.

Because at 76 years old, a man who was not afraid of death, who knew he was going to die soon, was afraid not for himself, but for his children and his grandchildren. He had made the decision to leave to protect them, because he had seen how this army had begun to massacre mercilessly, without distinguishing between the elderly, young boys, babies, women. It was just blind revenge for what happened. And then they took advantage of this revenge to move us all. The 1948 scenario was repeating itself, he thought.

He also told me:

Now I understand very well the humiliation of becoming a refugee, of living in a tent. I fear that these tents will in turn turn into refugee camps, as happened in Gaza or elsewhere.

My father-in-law told me that when he was a child, he saw people arriving with the key to their house in hand. “Now I too have the key to my house in my hand. But I know that I’m not going to go back there either.” Because he knew very well that, if he returned to Chadjaya, he was not going to find his home. Two days later, he learned that his building had been destroyed.

“This time, we will not rebuild it”

He had built this house for his children, after having worked all his life as a contractor. We Palestinians have a very strong family spirit. In our tradition, the dream of every Palestinian parent is to give their children a home and enable them to study.

My father-in-law's house was the second building he built for his family. The first was destroyed for the first time during the Israeli offensive in 2014. He rebuilt it with what was called “reconstruction money”, paid by several donor countries, including Qatar. In October 2023, when the Israeli attack began, the new house was not yet finished, with the fifth floor still to be built. He told me: “I lost my house for the second time, but I believe that this time, we will not rebuild it.”

It was the investment of a lifetime. Souleimane began working very early, at the age of sixteen, first in Israel. He then went to Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia and even Malta. After having built this family building, he bought plots of agricultural land, the surface of which was approximately 35 dunams (nearly 35,000 square meters), still in this same district of Chadjaya. He told me: “I had dreamed of it all my life”.

But the realized dream did not last very long. In 2005, this land fell within the “buffer zone” that Israel established along the wall between the Gaza Strip and Israeli territory, east of Chadjaya. Since then, my father-in-law could no longer access it. He told me that these thirty dunams were full of fruit trees, that there was “everything you can imagine” there. Every time I went to visit him, I recognized him less and less. Souleimane was a strong personality, he had a strong character, he remained solid even in the most difficult living conditions. But there, I saw someone who was gradually giving in to poverty and despair. His son Mahmoud, 21, was due to get married on November 3. Everything was ready, the wedding hall, the apartment where the couple was going to live, the whole family was rejoicing. But the war started, and my father-in-law's hope of seeing his son married was gone.

“I can no longer bear to see my children humiliated”

I looked at this old man who was losing the will to live. With each visit, I found him more and more pessimistic. His health was deteriorating, but he did not want to go to the hospital. He said to me: “Rami, I know very well what it is like in hospitals. There are 36,000 patients. Our health system was already not great, but with the war it got worse. If I go to the hospital, it’s going to end badly.” The last time I saw him was four days ago. I saw in his eyes the sadness of having to live like this. And for the first time, this strong-willed man admitted:

Rami, I can't take it anymore. I can't stand this misery anymore, I can't stand this life anymore. I can no longer bear to see my children humiliated, sleeping in the streets, in tents, under tarpaulins. I can not stand it anymore.

Something shone in his eyes, not quite tears, but it was the first time I had seen him like that. That's when I understood that it was the fall of an eagle who, after having managed to fly through the hardest periods of his life, was descending towards the earth, because he no longer had the strength. . We were supposed to visit him on Friday, but his children told us that an ambulance had just taken him to the hospital. I understood that if he had accepted this, it was because he was really at the end. Half an hour later, his son announced to us that he had gone to rest in peace.

The ritual to honor the dead no longer exists.

So this is life under humiliation. The humiliation of being kicked out of your home, the humiliation under bombs, of being killed like in video games by someone in front of a screen who presses a button, who doesn't even need to confront , nor even look at those he kills. The humiliation of waiting in line to find food. My father-in-law told me: “All my life, I have only counted on myself. And today, we have spent all our savings and, for the first time in our lives, we are asking for humanitarian aid to feed ourselves.”

We went to pick him up from the hospital but they told us that we had to bury him immediately, because there was no more room in the morgues. He died at the European Hospital, which is at the other end of Rafah, to the east, while he had taken shelter to the west, towards the sea. There was no longer any means of transport to bring him back. Usually, when someone dies, there is a whole ritual to bury them with dignity: we wash them, we take them home, so that the family and neighbors can say goodbye. Then we take him to the cemetery and bury him with his name on the grave, and we pray with everyone who is there.

But all that no longer exists.

I made the decision, with Sabah, to go to the hospital, so that she could see him one last time. There wasn't even an ambulance. We put the body in a minibus that someone lent us to take it to a makeshift cemetery right next to the European Hospital, because the main cemetery in Khan Yunis was desecrated by Israeli troops. There were six people attending the funeral.

We counted the graves next to hers to be able to find her, because none of them have names. We put him in a plastic bag – which is not usually done – in case we could one day come get him and bury him with dignity in Gaza. Thousands of people have experienced these kinds of horrible moments.

Humiliation follows us to the grave. We cannot even receive condolences with dignity. Usually, we put hundreds of chairs under a mourning tent, and everyone comes. There, we placed two or three chairs, people came to greet us and left straight away. Souleiman was just one name among the million and a half displaced people piling up in Rafah. One more man who left this life to no longer suffer humiliation.

When he told me “I can’t take it anymore”, he added: “There is no more justice in this life, we must seek justice”. I didn't quite understand then. But now I understand that he wanted to seek justice in the afterlife. I hope he rests in peace now, along with the more than 30,000 people who were killed.

Souleiman was not killed by the bombs, but he died because of the bombs. He lost hope and went to seek justice.

Illustration: Painting by Syrian artist Raed Yousef Qatanani.

https://www.legrandsoir.info/journal-de-bord-de-gaza-13.html