A few weeks ago, through an acquaintance, I got the contact of Husam, a Palestinian living in Gaza. I had been trying for days to find someone who could tell me first-hand what is happening there. As soon as I received the whatsapp With the number, I wrote another to Husam, whom I didn’t know at all and of whom I only knew his name and that he spoke Spanish. It was like throwing a message in a bottle into the sea. I sent it on Friday, June 14 at 11:45, from a Madrid in spring. The reply arrived, from a Gaza at war, at half past four in the afternoon of that same day. It was like receiving back another message in a bottle.
We soon ruled out talking on the phone: the fragility of the internet in Gaza made a normal conversation impossible. We agreed on another way of communicating, a modern variant of the old letters sent between people who live far away: I would send him written questions on WhatsApp and he would respond, when he could, by text or audio. I wanted him to tell me about his life. He – I was to discover soon – needed to tell me about it.
MY LIFE BEFORE FROM THIS
The first few days I learned that Husam is 54 years old, that he is married, who is the father of five childrenwho studied Business in Madrid and that is why he speaks such sweet Spanish, who worked in banks, who ran his own clothing import company and whose wife, Suhaila, aged 42, also worked in her own business preparing meals and desserts; that his eldest son, Ghazy, aged 24, had graduated last yearthat her second son, Hazem, 22, was studying business administration in his third year; that her third daughter, Hala, 18, her only daughter, had just started university in October to study information technology; that her two youngest sons, Mohamed, 14, and Youssef, 12, were in school; that they were all alive, plus Husam’s motherin the Al Shati refugee camp in Gaza City. And that their daily life was not very different from that of any parent. Mine, for example.
All this was shattered on October 7, when Hamas, in a surprise terrorist attack, killed nearly 1,200 people and kidnapped another 250. Husam, who prefers that his last name not be used for security reasons, remembers it well. That morning when everything changedHe wrote it down for me in one of the messages that arrived periodically and in which, message by message, he told me about his entire life.
More than nine months after October 7, this family full of university students and with two companies of their own sleeping in a tent in Deir al Balah refugee campnext to the beach and the sea where Husam and his children bathe every morning to ward off the blues, escape the heat and prevent skin diseases. They have been forced to change location seven times since they left their home in Gaza City. They have nothing except for the pots they cook in, the kettle they prepare breakfast in, their mobile phones, the clothes they wear and four other things, including the small radio on which Husam listens to news of the war around him.
THE FLIGHT
At first, Husam and his family disobeyed the ultimatum given by the Israeli army for the entire population of northern Gaza to move en masse to the south. They ignored the leaflets dropped by Israeli planes ordering them to leave. Nor did they pay attention to the messages and audios that, also sent by Israel, arrived on their mobile phones with the same instruction. They held out for a month. The increasingly suffocating proximity of the bombings and the imminent ground invasion by the Israeli army forced the family to move to a friend’s house, still in Gaza City, near the Al Shifa hospital. But a bomb that fell very close to the friend’s house two days later He convinced Husam that he should leave his cityHe did it on foot, together with his 79-year-old mother, his wife and his five children.
Since then everything It has been a continuous movement, shaken by war. From Gaza to Nuseirat, from Nuseirat to Rafah, from Rafah to Khan Yunis, from Khan Yunis to the courtyard of Al Aqsa University, from Al Aqsa University back to Rafah and from Rafah to the beach of Deir al Balah. Always back and forth, setting out before the soldiers arrived or when the bombs exploded so close that they were surprised they had not died.
They have lived in the homes of friends, acquaintances, cousins, in apartments with prices skyrocketing due to inflation and war, and finally, in the tent they bought weeks ago for 700 dollars. [643 euros]. For nine months, death in the form of a bomb or gunshot has always followed them, in a macabre variation of the cat and mouse game. On June 8, the eldest son, Ghazy, was in the Nuseirat refugee camp when the Israeli army launched a military operation to rescue four hostages kidnapped by Hamas. Hundreds of soldiers took part. The attack focused on two buildings. There was shelling from the sea and from land. The Israeli army freed the hostages, but 274 Palestinians were killed in the skirmish. Ghazy was almost one of them. He hid behind a car with some friends while he convinced himself that these were the last moments of his life. He recorded an audio from there that he still has.
One day it came to me A video of an explosion recorded in Khan Yunis The message was sent by a friend of Husam’s son on April 20, accompanied by the phrase: “A small scene of what we have experienced.” On the day the bomb exploded, Husam’s family was in Rafah, far away. But when asked if they have witnessed similar bombings, Husam simply replied: “Yes, many times.”
And another day He warned me in a message that history repeats itself: his parents, too, fled with nothing as children in 1948, along with their families and hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians, forced to leave their villages by the Israeli army, in what is known as the Nakba, or disaster, in Arabic. The families of Husam’s father and mother left the towns of Jaffa and Hatta, respectively, and took refuge in Gaza. His mother was three years old at the time and his father was about 10, just two years older than Youssef, Husam’s youngest son, is now. He tells me the stories of his escape and explains that his father told him similar stories. Husam’s grandparents had land and businesses that they lost when they left. The parents emigrated to Kuwait, where they managed to overcome poverty, prosper and provide Husam with an education that, again, has lost everythingin a kind of cursed loop that repeats itself from generation to generation.
THE LIFE IT IS THIS
To connect to the internet and incidentally answer my questions, Husam has been going every day to a cafe in Deir al Balah where there is signal. Not always, not all the time. When there is a signal, of course, and dead phones regain connection and receive messages, Husam always experiences the same feeling of fear and suffocation: he fears that new messages will bring news of new deaths of friends, neighbours or relatives.
Life in Deir al Balah has been reduced to a minimumto the essentials, to mere survival. It consists, most days, in looking for water, in making fire with chips and firewoodpreparing food and going to the Deir al Balah market in search of something for the next day. Food is very expensive. A kilo of tomatoes and a kilo of potatoes cost 10 euros in total. In January, it was even more expensive: a 25-kilo sack of flour cost 250 euros; and a bag of rice, 25 euros, the same as a bag of sugar. Husam also says that a pack of cigarettes costs 500 dollars and that only thieves who steal from flats or schools or steal international aid can buy them. These food aids that come through the ports or by land are not enough for everyone. And sometimes they have to pay for them because of corruption, according to Husam. Those sent by parachute fall where they fall and you have to be lucky to get any. Husam has never seen any of this aid. The family has almost exhausted the savings they kept in their current account buying bad and expensive food, most of the time tinned food. They have not eaten meat or fish for two months. There are days when they have only eaten bread and cheese. To buy groceries, Husam travels to the market with his children on a cart pulled by a harried donkey. The journey costs him the same as a taxi. I asked him to send me videos. In one you can see him and his eldest son on the wagon. On the other, Deir al Balah market exits.
The eldest son is desperate to emigrate, the wife dreams of setting up her own business in Spain, the daughter Hala regrets not having been able to experience university, the exhausted mother lives with another older brother in a nearby apartment and spends the day crying and praying, and little Youssef often remembers a professor of his, recently killed in a bombing, and suffers nightmares when he sleeps because he dreams of bombs. The whole family is desperate, exhausted and hopeless, as Husam describes, who sometimes tells his children what his life was like as a young man in Spain, how he went to the cinema or partying at night and how much he liked horchata. He does not do this to compare one life with another, he specifies, because that would be very cruel to his children and to himself, but to tell a distant and somewhat exotic story. All day long they hear Israeli reconnaissance planes flying by and their oppressive buzz terrifies them because they fear that at any moment they could drop a bomb that would blow them up. They don’t expect much from the future. They get up very early and go to bed with the sun, after having eaten the tomatoes or cheese or the canned food of each day. And it would seem that there is nothing else. But it is a lie, because sometimes, the carefree life of before, the same as always, strangely sneaks in among all this misfortune, like when they watched the Champions League final with many other occupants of the field and Everyone celebrated with shouts of joy the goals of Real Madrid’s victory.
Credits
Format: Brenda Valverde Rubio
Design: Fernando Hernandez
Development: Carlos Munoz and Alejandro Gallardo
Video editing and graphics: Julia Jimenez Torres
Knowing what’s happening outside means understanding what’s going to happen inside, so don’t miss anything.
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