Dias e noites em Gaza

Assistindo TV naquele primeiro dia, esperávamos o rugido dos aviões e o estrondo das explosões. Não tivemos que esperar muito.

Muhammad al-Zaqzouq, traduzido e com introdução de Katharine Halls

The New York Review

Crianças em Khan Younis usando luz de velas durante uma queda de energia, Gaza, 20 de outubro de 2023
Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua/Getty Images

Na primavera passada, recebi um e-mail da romancista palestina Adania Shibli perguntando se eu tinha tempo para traduzir um trabalho de uma colega de Gaza que estava escrevendo um livro sobre a guerra. "Um livro?", pensei. Eu tinha lido muita poesia e relatos em forma de diário, mas como alguém em Gaza poderia naquele momento encontrar tempo, energia e recursos materiais para escrever um livro estava além da minha compreensão.

Muhammad al-Zaqzouq era um escritor consagrado antes deste projeto, autor de uma premiada coleção de poesias, Betrayed by the Soothsayers, contos e resenhas regulares de livros e filmes e artigos de opinião para revistas e jornais. Ele também era responsável por administrar uma extensa rede de bibliotecas comunitárias no Tamer Institute for Community Education, uma organização palestina que trabalha com crianças, jovens e cuidadores em toda a Palestina para promover a leitura, fornecer ambientes seguros e acolhedores para o aprendizado e encorajar a autoexpressão por meio das artes. Muhammad, em outras palavras, acreditava no poder transformador da literatura.

O título do seu projeto de livro diz isso, embora ainda não tenhamos decidido uma tradução satisfatória. Eu escrevo, declara, Não para me tornar um monstro. Ou: Para resistir à selvageria. Ou, mais longo: Para que eu não sucumba a uma depravação animalesca. A decisão de Muhammad de escrever é uma recusa da premissa deste genocídio.

À medida que traduzi mais da obra de Muhammad, passei a apreciar a força desse impulso mais claramente. Escrever, ele nos conta em seus e-mails, o conecta ao mundo. Seu trabalho em andamento é um relato íntimo de sua experiência na tentativa de Israel de aniquilar Gaza, narrando não apenas suas lutas diárias para sobreviver, mas também a transformação de seus laços familiares, suas amizades e seu relacionamento consigo mesmo. Ele trabalha em seu manuscrito diligentemente, enviando cada novo lote de escritos para Adania, que o edita e depois o passa para mim para traduzir. Ainda não consigo entender como Muhammad consegue fazer tudo isso enquanto vive em uma tenda com acesso irregular à eletricidade e aparentemente passa a maior parte de suas horas acordado em filas por pão, água e outros itens essenciais.

Desde que o genocídio começou, Muhammad e sua família tiveram que se mudar sete vezes e perderam muitos amigos e parentes. Escrevendo em 21 de janeiro, ele me disse que sentiu uma "alegria cautelosa" pelo fato de o derramamento de sangue ter parado por enquanto. Mas o cessar-fogo, acrescentou, também precipitou subitamente um “acerto de contas intensificado com tudo o que tem acontecido nos últimos 470 dias”. O excerto abaixo dá uma ideia da magnitude desse acerto de contas. — Katharine Halls

1

For the first month of the war my family sheltered together in the house where I was born. It was a humble home in the Khan Younis refugee camp, with a flat asbestos-sheet roof, where my parents lived with my two sisters. I had grown up there, in the camp’s streets and alleyways, and visits always brought back memories of adolescence, its blossom of new experiences. My three brothers and I had long wanted to rebuild the house with several stories, one for each of us, but the municipality refused: the house, they said, was slated to be removed to make way for a new north-south artery. We wrangled with them for years, then eventually gave up and bought flats of our own elsewhere. With that my mother had to abandon her dream that all her children would live together in a traditional family home.

The morning of October 7, 2023, I woke up at 6:30 AM to the ear-splitting sound of rockets. My wife, Ula, and I lived with our children, Baraa, Jawad, and Basel, in a flat in the Hamad City housing development, in the northwest of Khan Younis. Soon we heard the news from neighbors: there was a surprise, large-scale attack underway on the Israeli settlements and military positions adjacent to the Gaza Strip. On the phone, my older brother—whose household had miraculously survived Israeli bombing during the war of 2021—insisted we couldn’t stay where we were. So we called a cab to the family house in the Khan Younis camp. By the time we got there, all my brothers had already arrived.

Our fear set in before any Israeli response, but it was well founded. We could imagine what the impending war—because war, inevitably, was on its way—would look like. Watching TV that first day, we awaited the roar of planes and the rumble of explosions. We didn’t have to wait long: by that night Israel was bombarding Khan Younis, like everywhere else in the Gaza Strip, virtually without interruption. There were more than five distinct explosions per hour, the closer the louder. Soon newscasters were announcing the mounting death toll. Report after report told of whole families wiped out. Those early reports were startling and cruel; later, as we became accustomed to hearing them, they were reduced to mere details, drops in an ocean of pain.

Preparing for bed that evening, we divided ourselves up: one room for each of the four brothers and their respective families. We were afraid to be sheltering under an asbestos roof; for some reason it was an article of faith that concrete roofs withstood bombardment better, even though concrete apartment blocks regularly crumbled under Israeli air strikes like biscuits. My father joked that if we were bombed and the asbestos panels caved in, at least they wouldn’t kill us: “You can’t say the same of reinforced concrete!”

That night we tried to sleep, Ula and the kids on the bed and I on the floor. The children dozed off quickly, exhausted after a day of adrenaline, and Ula wasn’t far behind them, but the whine of low-flying reconnaissance craft and the intermittent roar of bombers kept me on edge. Soon after I finally dropped off, a deafening blast woke everybody in the house, this time coming from inside the camp. In the morning we learned that the strike had killed a whole family; a mother and children had been pulled from the rubble in pieces. Their funeral passed our house on its way to the cemetery. It set the pattern for the days that followed: enormous explosions at night, funerals during the day.

*

The house was crammed. Usually it was a comfort to gather as a family, like we did on holidays, but now life together was getting more stressful by the day. Minor upsets turned into heated exchanges. Our material circumstances were steadily worsening. The municipal water supply, which in ordinary times came on for several hours a day, only reached us twice a week. Electricity, which prior to the war switched on and off every eight hours, was cut off altogether. Unlike some of our neighbors, we didn’t have extra barrels to store water; the ones we had held enough for two or three days at the most. For the rest of the week there was no water to use in the bathroom or kitchen. A trip to the toilet required careful planning—you had to check there was at least a pitcher of water set aside, as well as toilet paper—and I generally tried to limit myself to going once a day.

In the second week of the war we started filling up jerrycans at the adjacent UNRWA school, where thousands of people from Gaza City, the North, and the area east of Khan Younis had taken refuge, whether on their own initiative or after the Israeli army issued an evacuation order on October 13. Before my younger brother, Hasan, and I made our first trip to the makeshift shelter, I’d found myself resenting the people staying there: they were safe, I thought, from Israeli bombardment; they had electricity and lighting at night; and they were all together in one place, which I assumed would make them feel less afraid. Then I saw inside.

People filled every corner of the building. Those who hadn’t found a place in the classrooms and hallways had pitched their tents in the yards, the shaded areas, and even around the packed toilets, where we were heading to fill up our jerrycans. The smell alone—an unbearable stench—assaulted you before you even reached the door. Inside, desperate men, women, and the elderly jostled for space. The floor was filthy. At one point a portly older woman came in slowly and effortfully, rapped hard on the cubicle door, and barked at the elderly man inside to hurry up. Soon her firm and forthright manner gave way to desperate pleading. I wanted to run home, but Hasan convinced me to keep filling the cans while he ferried them back to the house to decant the water. It took an hour.

Palestinos deslocados se abrigam temporariamente em uma escola administrada pela UNRWA em Khan Younis, Gaza, 16 de outubro de 2023
Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images 

The night always seemed more brutal than the day. There were more raids then, and in the silence the bombs sounded louder and felt bigger. I tried to go to bed early and get up early, leave the house as quickly as possible, and sit on our front step or in the grocer’s across the street. Sitting outside meant being in the heart of the war. It meant listening to people’s stories, to millions upon millions of details, each of which tore out your heart. The suffering was boundless. Questions raised threateningly at existence itself could not be answered; bitter resentments spurted out and piled up.

To check in on friends we looked through the Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups where people posted updates about the situation in their respective areas. We called each other when we could. When I had Internet access I’d hesitate before opening any of my social media accounts: during the 2014 war, every time I opened Facebook I’d learn that another friend had died.

One night news arrived that more than five hundred people had been massacred at the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, which had been sheltering huge numbers of displaced men, women, and children. Whole families had been wiped out. I sat with my father in front of the TV watching the footage. A man was gathering up pieces of bodies, screaming, “These are my children in these plastic bags!”

When I checked the next morning, it was as I had feared: the first of my friends had been killed. I’d met Mohammed Sami Qaraiqa—or just Mohammed Sami, as he liked us to call him—through my work at the Tamer Institute. A lively, intelligent, charming young man and an artist through and through, he worked on all sorts of initiatives at the institute, including on a team that supported young artists. I’d asked him to be a part of Transit, the digital comics platform for which I’d obtained funding from the AM Qattan Foundation in late 2022, and we often chatted about the stories we’d gotten from writers. In the evening we’d continue work on the project at Bouquet, a popular café on the seafront.

Before the war we published a short comic of Mohammed’s online called “Don’t Worry,” about the constant power cuts across the Strip. It circulated widely. Recently he’d told me that he was about to finish some other stories, including one about the map of Palestine and the national anthem in which a singing child turned into a star. Now it seemed that Mohammed—who had always looked beyond Gaza’s immeasurable suffering and the walls that imprisoned it—had himself become a shining star. The news of his death filled me with a dumb, rigid grief. I remained speechless, in a faded, twilight state, as if I’d suddenly dropped into a deep hole where no outstretched hand or rope could reach me.

2.

In preparation for the ground invasion in the following days, the Israeli army again instructed residents of Gaza and the North to move south of Wadi Gaza. Now we were in a new chapter of the war, which would bring about successive waves of displacement. In the first wave tens of thousands of people came from those two areas; we saw them streaming through Khan Younis along Camp Street. The jeeps and cars of employees of UNRWA and other international agencies and NGOs, like the Red Cross and Médécins sans frontières—who are usually informed in advance through special channels, so they can evacuate danger zones early—were followed by ordinary people in pickup trucks, buses, and all makes and sizes of cars.

It was a painful scene. Whole families had abandoned their neighborhoods, villages, and camps in the north with whatever they’d managed to bundle into vehicles: blankets, mattresses, jerrycans, cooking utensils. They were heading for schools-turned-shelters that were already full of people displaced from east of Khan Younis City. Soon the roads were blocked with people looking for places to stay. The luckier ones had relatives or friends in Khan Younis; the rest either had to brave the overcrowding in the schools or rent apartments for inflated sums. Some even rented shops and warehouses to sleep in.

Among the new arrivals were Hasan’s in-laws. The whole family came to stay: the father, the mother, three sons, and another of their married daughters and her two children. I’d always felt an affinity with them: Abu Haytham was a kindhearted, sincere, and principled man in his fifties; Imm Haytham was considerate, charming, and always lovely company. But when they arrived in an overstuffed taxi after a relatively short journey, having spent some time sheltering in Al-Quds Hospital in Tall al-Hawa, they looked awkward and sad. We all did our best to allay their embarrassment and self-consciousness. Our home was their home, we told them.

I was glad to have them there. Hosting another family was a way of sharing our fear and lightening its load. We’d sit down together in the evenings to listen to the news. We watched together as massive Israeli raids battered Rimal, in the heart of Gaza City, with a force unlike anything we’d ever seen. The bombing was so intense and so loud we thought the smoke and dust would explode out of the TV screen. Bombers pounded the university campuses, ‘Umar al-Mukhtar Street, the Abu Mazen roundabout, and the al-Jawazat area, turning buildings to ash. Each wave of attacks caused so much destruction and killed so many people that we thought it must be the last.

The day after the annihilation of Rimal, Imm Haytham heard that a relative of hers had been martyred while returning to his flat there to collect a few things that had gotten left behind. When the bombardment began he was trapped inside. His father contacted the civil defense service, but they couldn’t even enter the area. For three days he tried to reach his son, until the civil defense finally called to say they had seen a body in the flat, under a wall that had fallen in—though they couldn’t get to it. Although the initial injury may not have been fatal, they said, his son had most likely bled to death and therefore had to be considered dead.

For weeks the father refused to accept his son had died before he could say goodbye. Touching a lost loved one’s face, walking in their funeral procession, scattering a handful of sand on their grave: these rituals help us make our peace with death. For the father, the son was missing; he’d gone to the flat on an errand and might yet return.

*

By now the population of Khan Younis was many times greater than usual, and the humanitarian crisis was worsening. We would take turns standing in line at the bakery at the end of our street: my father would join the queue after dawn prayers and stay there till 10:00 AM, then my brother would take his place and stay until two, then my other brother would relieve him and wait until five, when we finally got some three kilos of bread, enough for one meal. There was a separate, hours-long queue to fill up a few liters of drinking water, and yet another for water we could use in the kitchen and bathroom—endless hours of waiting and jostling, shouting and arguing.

People seemed more aggressive. They were already frightened, but the crisis had injected anger and jitteriness into the atmosphere. The most trivial verbal disagreement easily turned into a brawl. Standing in lines of miserable people, we witnessed yelling, fists flying, blood drawn, even bones broken.

Moradores de Khan Younis fazendo fila para pão, 15 de outubro de 2023
Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu/Getty Images

If our days consisted of running in circles and waiting in endless queues, our nights were full of the sounds of bombs and sirens, the smells of explosives, the sights of worried faces and trembling hands. One night, after Ula and the kids were already asleep, I heard a panicked commotion out in the street: feet thundering, people shouting and gasping. I jumped out of bed and made my way outside with my elder brother. Whole families were running, mothers carrying children and fathers carrying belongings, all panting and muttering incomprehensibly. When I stopped a man to ask what was happening, he told me the Israeli army had called one of the residents of the Nimsawi neighborhood and told them to evacuate immediately because the area was about to be bombed.

Nimsawi was hardly 150 meters from the family house. In the 1990s, after returning to Gaza in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority built a dozen or so apartment blocks there, along with a number of other residential developments. I have vivid memories of going there with the other local kids to play in the green, tree-shaded areas between the buildings. Back then it seemed so different from the refugee camp, so much more attractive and orderly than the narrow alleyways and tin- and asbestos-roofed houses where we lived. During the second intifada the neighborhood was hit hard, pummeled from Israeli positions just a kilometer or so away. One Israeli assault destroyed two entire blocks.

My brother and I hurried back inside. The uproar had woken up Ula. I told her we needed to get moving and take the kids to my maternal aunt’s house relatively close by, which had a cement roof. Just then my six-year-old, Baraa, woke up. I cannot describe the look in his eyes. He was overwhelmed by fear and I could only attempt to reassure him, but it was useless: he knew well what was going on, better than any child should. I didn’t have time to calm him down anyway—I just took him by the hand, picked up our five-year-old, Jawad, with my other arm, and dashed out of the house. Ula was behind me with our youngest, Basel. All of us made a run for it.

At my aunt’s house we gathered in the living room. There were more than fifty of us: my entire close family, my aunt and grandmother, who lived together, and Abu Haytham’s family. Every time a plane went by overhead we all froze and stared at one another uncomprehendingly. An hour went by and no attack came. Those who were standing up began to get tired. The room seemed impossibly tiny for so many people. Another hour went by; nothing happened. We were all sleepy, but for a long time nobody was prepared to return to the family house. My father went home after three hours, then my brothers and I followed. Our wives and children stayed at my aunt’s house, certain that they would be safer there if the bombers finally came.

3.

The threat to Nimsawi was a warning. My older brother and I started to wonder whether we were any safer in Khan Younis Camp than back in Hamad City. It was comforting to be together, but the water crisis in the camp had reached its worst, and it was growing impossible to get by with so many of us in the house. I found myself longing to return to our flat.

One day I made up my mind. The Internet had just been restored after a long outage, and I was sitting with my father, my brothers, and Abu Haytham catching up on the news when we heard a deafening explosion above our heads. We leapt up and rushed outside, where we saw a young man running barefoot down the middle of the street with one hand clasped to his neck, which was dripping with blood. People were standing on both sides of the street, speechless and grim. In the young man’s eyes there was a strange mixture of all-possessing fear, intense pain, and embarrassment at the stares of the onlookers.

The rocket, we learned, had been fired by a reconnaissance plane and landed just a hundred meters from our house, injuring pedestrians. It caused a flurry of anxiety and confusion. Why were the Israelis sending a reconnaissance craft to bomb an empty patch of ground? We were still speculating when the planes returned the next afternoon. I was standing outside the front door waiting for someone to open it when a missile suddenly exploded with such force I thought it was right above my head. The sign of my brother’s stationery shop—his bid to escape unemployment—came clattering to the ground. Inside, everyone was crying hysterically: the explosion had whipped the roof panels into the air and sent them crashing back into place, showering dust and pieces of cement and asbestos. The entire house smelled of explosives. We rushed to my aunt’s, the children screaming. This was the first time we had experienced a bombing so close by.

Once we’d begun to recover from the shock, I told my brothers and my father that it was too dangerous for us all to stay where we were. Three of us brothers each had a flat in Hamad City, and I proposed dividing ourselves up between them, but my father and grandmother refused. Finally I decided to strike out alone and take my family back to our flat. Ula and I packed our bags, my mother pulled together three kilos of flour and some tinned food, and I called a taxi. In the ten minutes the driver took to show up I started to have second thoughts, which I pushed aside. When we got into the car, my family gathered around us as if they were bidding farewell to a loved one who was leaving for a distant country. I willed them to come with us, but the taxi pulled away.

 

As consequências de um ataque aéreo israelense em Khan Younis, 16 de outubro de 2023
Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu/Getty Images

The roads that led back to Hamad City were lined on both sides by bombed-out houses and piles of rubble and debris. When we eventually arrived, our neighbors who’d stayed put were sitting outside under the awning. I tried to ignore their gloating smirks as I unloaded our bags. The relief as we stepped across the threshold was overwhelming. Ula let out a long, weary sigh of nostalgia. Our home felt warm and safe. When we hurried into the bathroom and turned on the taps, the water gushed out, powerful and hot.

Ula took the children, who hadn’t had a hot shower for days, straight into the bathroom to wash. I went downstairs to the grocer’s to buy tea, sage, biscuits, cigarettes, and tubs of cheese. When I got back to the flat, I found the children freshly bathed and relaxed. For a few moments it felt like we’d woken up from a nightmare.

And yet as the night fell I was surprised by a powerful sense of foreboding. I tried to distract myself by flicking through my phone and talking to the kids, but the misgivings only intruded more forcefully. I turned to Ula.

“I want to go back to the camp,” I said. “To my parents’.”

She thought I was joking. When she realized I was serious, she was stunned.

“But why? Things are better here. Let’s stay. Please.”

I tried to order my thoughts. I told her I’d realized that we didn’t have a power source to keep the lights on at night, that the battery would last half an hour at most, that we’d be stuck in the dark, that our phones would be dead, and that the sound of the bombing would drive us out of our minds with fear. Ula didn’t want to countenance any of it, but finally she agreed, disappointed and glum, to go back. We hadn’t even been home three hours.

I ordered another taxi for double the price I’d just paid: moving around at night was riskier. As we waited I wished I’d never left the family house. I was dwarfed by my fear, feeling smaller and more alone with every minute that went by. When the taxi arrived a neighbor asked where we were going. I told him I’d left something important behind at my parents’ and couldn’t leave my wife and the kids alone to go back for it. He was clearly unconvinced, but I didn’t care. Planes roared overhead and ours was the only car on the empty road—an easy target. Every moment felt like a brush with death.

At last we made it. The family was amazed to see us. One by one, everybody began to laugh. “I knew you’d be back!” my older brother said. “There’s nothing worse than being alone when you’re afraid. Much better to die in company!” I tried to look braver than I felt. “It would have been too dark at the flat,” I told them. “We’ll go back again once I change the battery.” No one was fooled. Back in our room, our bodies collapsed from the stress. We did our best to ignore the explosions and soon fell into a deep sleep.

*

Another day came, another night. We wished the night would never arrive, that the days would roll over into one another without interruption, not because they were quieter or the bombing less fierce but because at least in the daytime we could move around and busy ourselves with our routines. At night there was nothing to distract us.

I was getting ready for bed when a massive explosion, close by, again sent the roof flying into the air and back, covering us in dust and fragments of cement. I ran to the terrified children, took Baraa’s hand, and pulled him close. His heart was pounding so hard and his breathing was so intense that it felt like an electric current was surging through him. I thought the terror might stop his heart. I snatched him up, planning to make a run for my aunt’s house, and launched myself toward the door, followed by Ula, Jawad, Basel, and my brothers and their families.

When we reached my aunt’s we found a crowd of people there. Civil defense officers were ordering her to evacuate the house and leave the area. Still carrying Baraa, I ran down the street toward our cousins’ house, around 150 meters from ours. When I got there I realized I was wearing only one shoe.

I couldn’t see Ula and the kids behind me. When I went back to look for them, the crowds and the civil defense men wouldn’t let me past, so I retraced my steps to our cousins’ place. Now I saw that Ula, Jawad, Basel, and everyone else had got there before me—I had missed them in the dark. The house was bursting at the seams. More than ten households’ worth of relatives and neighbors had evacuated and come here for shelter.

Relieved that Ula and the kids were safe, I pulled myself together and asked some of the men standing outside what was going on. Apparently a reconnaissance plane had dropped a missile directly on the house of one of our relatives. It was the building immediately opposite ours, and home to the grocer’s where I sat each morning. Reconnaissance missiles make more noise than they do direct damage; when this one hit, the people inside didn’t realize their house had been targeted until they went outside to ask around. They were terrified: everyone knows that when a reconnaissance craft targets a house, bombers soon follow to reduce it to rubble.

An hour went by and we waited for the next strike, but nothing happened. Our nerves relaxed ever so slightly. The house was packed with families from all the neighboring homes. We went inside. Everybody was stunned and afraid, but soon fatigue took over and we divided ourselves up for bed, the women and children in one flat and the men in another. There were over twenty men, and none of us could get to sleep.

For a while we fell silent, then the conversation picked up again and we started reminiscing about our homes. “Thirty years I worked to be able to build that house,” said one of my father’s relatives. “It was the whole family’s dream. I can’t bear the thought it might be destroyed. If we come out of this war safe and sound, and the house is still okay, I’ll slaughter a sheep and hand it out to the poor to give thanks to the Lord.”

It was a terrible night. We kept the radio on, soon hearing reports that Israeli planes had bombed a café in the center of Khan Younis that was being used as a makeshift refuge, killing over thirty people. The sound of bombing would barely stop for a few minutes before resuming even louder and more heavily. It continued until nearly dawn. I pretended to be asleep, but I was trapped in a whirlwind of thoughts. Who would have believed that this was how I’d be spending my nights? Next to me were relatives I was used to seeing for a few hours at family gatherings, before we each returned home. Now we were lying side-by-side under one roof, brought together by our fear for ourselves, our homes, and our children’s futures.

Around six in the morning my father and brothers woke up, followed by our other relatives and neighbors. My father and brothers decided we should go back to check on the house as soon as the sun rose. When I ventured outside, I was assaulted by the sight of a donkey sprawled dead on the ground, killed by a piece of shrapnel from the bombing. Shock and fear erupted within me. The donkey, I knew, belonged to one of the families taking shelter in the nearby school. Seeing its blood-covered body, I felt more clearly and sharply than ever that death was imminent, that any one of us could have met the same fate. It was the third week of the war.

Muhammad al-Zaqzouq é um escritor, editor e pesquisador de Khan Younis, Gaza. Sua coleção de poesia Betrayed by the Soothsayers recebeu o Prêmio Al Khalili de Poesia de 2018. (Fevereiro de 2025)

Katharine Halls é uma tradutora premiada de árabe para inglês e um terço da teneleven, uma agência de literatura árabe contemporânea. (Fevereiro de 2025)