6th of November 2023
You can hear planes and drones flying overhead all the time now. You try to ignore them, but it’s almost impossible. We feel like we all have a target painted on our backs.
A classmate of mum has been killed along with her four children. I remember meeting her once, she seemed nice. Mum says she was a very generous person who was always smiling even though she suffered from some sort of mysterious auto-immune disease and had terrible pain in her joints and a nasty rash on her arms and legs. Well, she won’t be feeling any more pain now. I overheard mother saying to father that they found her with the torso of her youngest son in her arms. Her head had been crushed by debris. Her husband survived and now helps to free other victims trapped under the rubble, even though one of his hands is missing three fingers.
My sister and I know this could happen to us any day. Our cousin who is staying with us is proud of her father’s decision. Our uncle has sent his five children to every corner of Gaza to stay with friends and family. This takes away the risk that they all die in one attack. That’s why our cousin is now with us. I wouldn’t want to be without mum and dad and my sister right now.
11th of November 2023
Some countries are celebrating the end of World War I today. Especially the UK seems to make a big deal out of it. Anyway, while it’s a holiday in some western countries we are being bombed. Our small city is overflowing with refugees from the north. We have food, mum and dad prepared really well and uncle gave us a lot of food, because we took in one of his daughters. We don’t have running water and that is the worst. It’s an inconvenient time of the month for me to go without proper bathing. I will spare the reader the details.
14th of November 2023
Me, my sister and our cousin went on chat roulette to try and talk to Israeli kids. We found some, but they made fun of us and stuffed their mouths with popcorn, potato chips and ice cream and stuff. They blamed us for October 7th and said this is what we deserve because we voted for Hamas. We said we would ask God to forgive them for their actions. They said God was punishing us for beheading babies. They know we didn’t behead any babies and they just wanted to hurt us.
We talked to some adult Israelis as well, but that was even worse. They told us what they wished would happen to us. It was very sexual in nature. We got this treatment both from adult men and adult women.
We found one Israeli lady who wanted to talk to us for real, but her Hebrew was bad, she didn’t speak much English and of course no Arabic. She was a Jew from Chile who had moved to Israel. She seemed nice, but it was too complicated to really talk. We all wondered why she even tried talking on chat roulette.
I really want to learn Spanish. And it’s not only because I have impure thoughts featuring Enrique Iglesias. It’s a beautiful language.
16th of November
Yesterday was really bad. No water, no electricity and internet only sporadically. Israelis mocking us on Instagram. Always suggesting we are in paradise over here, because they are the most moral army in the world.
On our block a two year old girl died because of dehydration. She had diarrhea and there was nothing to help her. Without the blockade she would still be alive. The girl died at night and we could hear the mother wailing till noon the next day. Nobody slept. 19th of November I promised myself to write a diary entry every day, but we all check the news constantly and scroll social media and write with relatives and friends.
We’re glad more people than we expected are asking for this to stop and protests have erupted! But we know this will have no effect. Father says it’s the only the powerless who are protesting. The ones in power will stand with Israel no matter what. So we will all just die then?
I wish I could make it clear to the world how similar we are.
Hey world, am your sister, I binge-watched the series Virgin River last week. I feel like I could be dropped in an American town like the one in Virgin River and blend right in. But no, am Palestinian and I want to drink the blood of Jews and need a bullet in my head to cure me of my wicked ideas.
By the way, Virgin River is extremely annoying at times. There are many scenes where one character tries to persuade another character to take much more care of their health, but the character with the illness stubbornly refuses to be helped.
Here it’s the opposite, we need help, but Israelis are blocking the aid trucks.
20th of November 2023
We’ve been under intense bombardment. What I fear the most is to be the only one to survive. Where would I go?
Today is not a good day. My cousin finally broke down and was inconsolable. She wants to be with her mum. Mother had told me that time would come. I gave her a box of Turkish delight I had been hiding for a moment like this one, but it brought her little comfort.
She said the weirdest thing. She thinks that whenever she has an optimistic thought the universe will laugh at her and prove her wrong by having something bad happen to her. She thinks we are sinner from a past life sent to be born and suffer in Gaza.
Luckily we’re not a very religious family, because in some household thoughts like that are blasphemy or heresy, am not sure what the difference is and am too tired to google it. You get the point.
I am already in bed. We can still hear explosions, but they are so common it’s almost like a thunderstorm.
My cousin now puts a note under her pillow reading: you didn’t die. She is afraid of dying but waking up in a simulation. I told her it makes no sense, because in a simulation her note to herself could also simply re-appear under her pillow. She said it comforts her, so I let it slide.
23rd of November
Mum and dad say this is already way worse than Israel’s invasion in 2014. They say it feels like the final solution. My sister sang ‘it’s the final countdown’, but nobody laughed, except for my cousin who had to laugh like it was the funniest thing ever.
I remember something from 2014, but not much. My mum lost an aunt that time. That aunt’s husband visited with a son. I remember mum crying. I also remember seeing a tank. I thought it was a gigantic turtle, but an evil turtle.
Father is certain this will go on for months. He says the younger members of Hamas organized the raid on Israel. He’s read somewhere that some of the top guys had no prior knowledge of it and were just as surprised as Israel. Well, IF they were surprised, because mum thinks they let it happen to have an excuse to squeeze all of us to death.
For the first time I heard mum and dad discuss moving to the south. I hope they won’t do that. I want to die at home, if it must be, surrounded by all the things dear to me. There are no armed Hamas people here or any other armed group, so if I die here at home, the world will see the occupiers killed me, because they felt like killing me.
My cousin feels better today. She did a make up tutorial on Instagram and she got over 200 likes and now she’s ecstatic and thinks she is going to be an influencer and buy a house in Miami.
I said: ‘And maybe you can have Netanyahu’s son as your neighbour and organize pool parties together’.
She said I was just envious. And it’s kinda true, maybe, but I still think she can be so ridiculous. And she used my make-up for the video and me and my sister helped her record and created a glamorous background for her with mirrors and stuff. But of course she didn’t even tag us.
Ugh.
Look what am ranting about while so many of us are dying. I will try to write more stuff that could be useful for historians or documentary makers and stuff. But am not in any battle, so yeah, maybe am just being a silly girl.
Could be hormones, I don’t know.
Sorry, one more thing, my sister said we could die before we were ever kissed and of course my cousin had to say this was not true for her. We asked who had kissed her and she claimed it was Hassan, behind the abandoned fish shop. Yeah right, Hassan is 21 and has a girlfriend who studies medicine.
I think my cousin could be a narcissist. But one of those vulnerable types. I saw some Israeli psychologist do a video on it. Vadikin or Vadkin or Vaknin or something like that.
He says he is a narcissist himself, so I was like, wow, so amazing he can admit that. In front of a camera! Something else than the billionth make-up tutorial!!
I do love my cousin.
I couldn’t fall asleep without adding that.
27th of November
A week now feels like a year if you count how many things happen in only seven days. And yet with so much happening a week feels like it’s only a day. I couldn’t bring myself to write until now.
I am writing on top of the washing machine. Only place to have any privacy. Our apartment is now overcrowded. Mum and dad have taken in two families. Both families have seven kids between them. All the girls are in our bedroom, the bedroom of me and my sister and my cousin. We’ve pushed our three single beds together to form one big one. Seven girls now sleep like spoons. We call ourselves the seven little dwarfs. If there was no war going on and if we had enough food it could feel like a crazy holiday.
All the women sleep in my parents’ bedroom and all the men, including the three young boys, sleep in the living room. One advantage is that with so many people around our apartment feels a lot warmer.
One of the men is a very funny guy and a great story-teller. My father and the third guy play chess like they’re obsessed. It’s motivated me to finally start watching The Queen’s Gambit, but with so many people here and so many things happening I haven’t got far. And we have to be careful with electricity. For now we have electricity because of a generator that runs on oil. It’s a very noisy thing and it could break down any minute.
At night, if we don’t hear any bombs, we laugh a lot, about silly things I would like to write down, but always forget. At night we, the girls, pretend to be away at summer camp somewhere in Europe, but this is not a vacation and things are getting worse by the day.
The dark waters are closing in on us. We have the first destroyed buildings here. Why they were destroyed nobody knows. One whole neighborhood has been flattened. Lots of people have left, but people from other places have been pouring in. Lots of people are just wandering around, there is no system to it.
We have decided to live or die where we are. We don’t want to chased around the strip like hunted animals.
Father kept going to work until last week. He went even though they were no longer paying him. The saw mill was bombed and they have no more wood to make tables or chairs. Two colleagues of my father were killed. The only two who weren’t outside for a smoking break when the bombs dropped. So yeah, father now proudly boasts that smoking saved his life. The only smoking he does now is water pipe, because there are no more cigarettes to be had, but we have a large supply of tobacco for water pipe. The whole apartment smells like mango and it drives mother crazy. Personally I prefer the smell of mango over the sweat of sixteen people with precious little options to wash.
Soap is not an issue. We Palestinians are very neat and stock up on soap. There are plenty of women in town who make all kinds of things practically from scratch. The problem is water. No water, no life. So easy to guess why the Israelis don’t want us to have any. They say Hamas has their own sources, the Israelis know this, so yeah, they’re just hurting us as much as they can, because their ‘untouchable’ image lies shattered on the floor.
If they had wanted to save us from Hamas, like they claim, they could have let us into Israel. Hamas would have never expected that, they would have lost their shit, pardon the word, to see us invited in. If they had set up camps for us in Israel, I think many of us would have gone. Maybe even me and my family. But only with some international guarantee of safety, because nobody trusts the Israelis. Anyway, they would never do such a thing. Yes, it would drive Hamas mad, but Israel would be too scared we’d stay there permanently. Better to slaughter us and claim Hamas is using us as shields.
29th of November
The first thing we do in the morning is try to get more water. Plastic bottles have become precious items. Small committees hand them out, but you never know when or where and they run out fast. Empty bottles we keep to hopefully fill with rain water.
Some families have dug wells, but the water that comes up is too salty. We all have terrible cramps. Most days I have a headache. Each day we go out in groups like hunters and we are very proud when we return home with something useful.
The girls and the boys compete and we win every day, because we talk to people and barter and they just wander around town offering their labor in exchange for goods, but nobody has any use for teenagers now.
Their biggest catch was a crate of berries a vendor just gave them for free, but on closer inspection they were covered in mildew and rotting. This is not how am going to meet my future husband.
All three are relatively good looking, but not very bright. One thinks Iran is going to send amphibious ships to land a relief force. Yeah right. The Americans would sink those ships immediately. I tried to explain that Iranians are Shiite and they don’t care about Sunni, but the boy just said I was wrong and that my nose is bigger than my brain.
Nobody actually cares about us except Yemen maybe, but they can’t do anything for us. All the adults are constantly asking how our fellow Arabs can allow this.
And the Europeans? Like mum says, they care more about their cats and their dogs than about us.
For the record, I do not have a big nose.
Besides, that main actress in Sex and the City, which nobody knows I watched, has a gigantic nose and she’s world famous. And I skipped all the sex scenes, because they just made me feel weird.
When we watch a series now, we skip all the scenes where they are eating. We prefer father’s old action movies collection.
Arnold Schwarzenegger never eats.
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The Confessor 