5th of January 2024

I wish you a Happy New Year from a tent. Israel’s Christmas gift for us was… eviction. On the 23rd of December the IOF came back to our town. We had been under artillery bombardment for about a week by then. To this day nobody knows what the hell they were targeting. They drove all of us out of our homes. Am talking about a town that had 6,000 inhabitants before the Israeli invasion. Because of the refugees from the north the population had swelled to somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000. Hard to say with people constantly coming and going. Who knows how many are left now? Who knows if they have left even one building standing?

The eviction was awful. They gave us 30 minutes to gather our things. Magda and Christina had decorated a Christmas tree in our living room. Since they’re Christians it was really important to them. Not the kind of tree you know from Christmas movies, just a branch of some tree. Am not a biologist or a botanist, so I have no idea. People are chopping down trees all over Gaza for fuel. The ecological damage due to the invasion must be enormous too. The girls were happy to have found a piece of wood with leaves on it. They managed to make it look like a Christmas tree. We are muslims and we had never had a Christmas tree, but we all liked it. It’s just a tree, but I felt peace emanating from it. If that makes sense. Well, three IOF soldiers smashed it. Tore off the decorations. Stamped them to pieces. Threw the Christmas tree out of the window. That was to set the tone, I suppose. It got worse from there.

They made us strip to our underwear. All of us. Even Magda and Christina, who aren’t even teenagers yet. It was mortifying. We tightly crossed our arms in front of our chest and walked out. While they were pointing their guns at us, laughing.One of them pulled out all the drawers of all the cupboards and dumped the contents on the floor. I had my clothes pressed against my chest in a ball, my diary hidden in there. It’s the only personal thing, aside from some of my clothes, I have been able to salvage.

The eviction has really broken my parents. That apartment was their life’s work. All their savings went into it. Materially they have lost everything. I’ve mentioned how our car burned out. Now we’ve lost the apartment. They also took our money. My mum didn’t even try to hide it. She said: ‘If you want to taint your soul with stealing I will make it very easy for you.’ She led the soldier to an old tea pot she kept the money in. He crushed it under the butt of his rifle and pocketed the money.

Those soldiers were extremely nervous. They move weirdly. Talk unusually fast. Their eyes dart in every direction. Like people who’ve drunk way too much coffee. They are so stupid, so arrogant and look down on us so much they could never guess that we don’t just have money when it comes to valuables.

My dad invested in gold some years ago. He has several Canadian Gold Maple Leaf coins. Each one is worth close to 2,000 US dollars. He hid them in his mouth. He’s used one of them to buy us the tent we are in. It was hard for him to part with one of his coins. He enjoyed collecting them and was very proud of them. He loved how they always went up in value, little by little. He bought them when he was still working on construction sites in Israel. He was planning to sell the coins when my sister and I would get married. You know, to get us started. There’s still two left. I know where he is hiding them, but I won’t write that in this diary.

Back in town there was still something like a normal economy going. There were still some shops. They didn’t have much, but you could still buy something. Here in the tent camp there is nothing like normalcy. We are now entirely dependent on a trickle of food aid that comes in sporadically. There are people from all over the Gaza strip. Some have tents and some don’t. Some dig holes in the ground and sleep in those. In winter. It’s bad enough in a tent. At night it gets very cold.

The water quality is worse than back home. If we already had digestive problems before they got a thousand times worse now. The crudest possible latrines are half a mile away. I can’t imagine what the stench will be like in summer, it’s already bad in winter. Oh, with all our stomach issues not everyone makes it from their tent or their hole to the latrines in time. You can imagine how embarrassing it is when that happens to someone.

Everyone you meet has awful stories to share. We’ve talked to people who saw relatives shot from up close by Israeli soldiers, right in front of them. A woman told me how an Israeli soldiers asked her husband what his profession was. The man said he was a mason. The Israeli soldier said he respected that and shook his hand. Then he shot him. No explanation.

Another woman told me something similar. An Israeli soldier walks up to her husband and asks: ‘McDonalds or Burger King?’ The woman’s husband says he has no preference, he’s never eaten anything from either one. The Israeli soldiers says ‘wrong answer’ and shoots him in the head. Then he turns to the woman, who’s dropped to her knees, and goes: ‘If you dare crying am shooting you too.’ I don’t understand how anyone can be so cruel.

I heard shots during our eviction. Thankfully I didn’t see anyone shot right in front of me. I saw them beat an old man. He refused to take off his clothes. They made all of us strip to search for suicide belts. Which is absurd because if someone does have a suicide belt, why would he take off his clothes and not just blow himself up? Anyone wearing a suicide belt is not going to obey your command to strip. It’s just an excuse to humiliate us. I mean, they’re standing right next to you when they make you strip. Any serious suicide bombers would pull the chord at that moment.

All girls have stories about how they had to strip and Israeli soldiers told them disgusting things. They asked my sister if she’s already started shaving her pussy. To me one said: ‘You’re dog faced, so I will fuck you doggy style.’ I was terrified he would actually do it. I was extremely relieved when we left town and started walking, even though in that moment we had lost almost everything we owned.

We can still hear explosions in the distance. We have said goodbye to the apartment. The chance of it being destroyed is just too big. Best to let go of any emotional attachment to it.

Am glad to have my thoughts. They can never steal those from me.

6th of January 2024

An old man here, in the tent camp, put all his belongings on a wagon pulled by a donkey. He sleeps under the wagon with his cat. The cat never leaves him. A sign he is a good man. He has an Encyclopedia collection published in 1978. Just imagine. He had to flee his home and he saves an Encyclopedia set. His grandmother’s porcelain set he left behind, but not the encyclopedia. 27 volumes bound in green leather. Everything known to humanity, summed up, A to Z.

My sister and I spent the day looking up stuff. It has funny, old looking pictures. By today’s standards it looks very innocent, almost cringe. People had comical haircuts in the seventies. It’s uncanny how you can look at a picture and know in which decade it was taken. But this only works as of the second half of the 20th century.

The first thing I looked up was the word ‘dysentery’. Here’s what I learned: ‘Dysentery is characterized by diarrhea, high fever, weight loss, an upset stomach and nausea and vomiting. If you have bacillary dysentery, your diarrhea may contain blood or mucus.’

It’s true, my sister has blood in her poo. I do not, but it’s a question of time.

I read about the war of 1973. It made me realize, more than ever before, how long this shit has been going on.

Oh, and I have never read with so much focus.

My mind feels laser sharp, even though the rest of my body is falling apart.

Mum says it’s because I so desperately want to forget about my current surroundings. Dad says it’s because fasting helps with concentration.

I looked up the word ‘ADHD’, but it’s not in there.

It must be impossible to cram everything into a set of encyclopedias. Even 27 volumes don’t cover the whole human existence.

I wonder what a girl my age will read on Wikipedia in 50 years.

Probably nothing about how my sister looked at her shit this morning and said she was bleeding to death.

It probably won’t mention the little popping sound we get when we squish our lice to death.

Lice are linked to typhoid fever.

I have already looked it up, am prepared.

9th of January

‘They’re debating who started it. We’re dying and they’re obsessed with finding out who started it.’ Nobody can deny something to my cousin. She still manages to get online, with the help of generous strangers, though very irregularly, even in a tent in a refugee camp.

I think she could be a sociologist later. Somebody who studies trends in society. I don’t know, she’s good at spotting patterns. I remember her predicting the rise of K-pop, before I had ever even heard of the word K-pop.

Today she’s angry because she’s managed to scroll X for a couple hours. She’s seen ‘debates’ where strangers call each other the silliest, most childish names and basically go:

‘Israel started this!’

‘No, Palestine started this!’

And lots of lazy questioning of each other’s intelligence. It makes you wonder why they even bother to talk to each other at all.

It’s different for us.

We all have family members who remember living in Israel. We remember the old names. We remember the names of some 500 villages that were destroyed. We have all met at least someone who still has the key to their house in Israel. Their house long taken over by someone else.

It wouldn’t occur to us to wonder who started what.

The old man with the encyclopedia was a small boy in 1948. He remembers the last time he saw his uncle. He was put on a truck and nobody ever saw him again. Nobody knows what happened to him. His grandmother walked for days. It’s very similar to what’s happening now.

The old man said: ‘They give you a flyer saying you need to leave and they wonder why you are not thanking them profusely and kissing their feet for the warning.’

He added: ‘If Putin dropped the same flyers on Ukrainian cities they’d call him a cynical mass murderer, when Israel does it, they say no army in history ever showed such mercy and kindness.’

It’s hard for me to understand why we are treated so differently.

Let’s say I go around the camp and randomly round up 50 people, all of different ages, between 15 and 100 and ask them to list what Israel was doing to Palestinians when they were ten years old. They would all be able to point to horrible stuff that was done to Palestinians when they were ten years old.

Western minds are working round the clock to find a way to say that bombing us to a place worse than the middle ages is justified.

And I swear to you, here and now, you fill find not one person here in this camp, who’s ever personally harmed an Israeli. Yet they will all tell you how their lives and the lives of their loved ones have been affected by the blockade, for example. I can immediately go and find you several people suffering from diabetis who long before October 7th had the hardest time to get insulin. Why should a diabetic in Gaza have it harder than in almost any other place on earth?

What I can also find, if you give me an internet connection, is social media posts by people who’ve never been to Gaza who claim Gaza was paradise on earth because horses were smuggled through the tunnels for a riding school 99,99 percent of us have never even seen.

On a personal level:

Diarrhaea, coughing, mosquitoe bites, I miss brushing my teeth with real tooth paste, tedious chores, gathering wood, boiling water, waiting in line for food, asking new arrivals about the latest developments, bartering.

It’s not all bad. The kids invent new games. Throw thirty kids together and you have your own entertainment think tank. We dance too. We all share food, swap clothes. A hairdresser is cutting hair. A pastry chef does what he can to come up with tiny, but delicious cakes which he hands out for free as long as people bring him ingredients. This morning I heard one guy explain to two other men how to programme an app for a business. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about. One of the guys took notes.

I don’t want to say life is great here, as a matter of facts it sucks, but life certainly doesn’t stop here.

My cousin wants to talk about her latest social media findings, so I have to go.

12th of January 2024

You know that analogy. A starving thief walks into a supermarket and feels like he has no other choice than to shoplift. The police come and try to bomb the whole supermarket with everyone in it, including children, until only a huge hole is left where the supermarket used to stand. That’s Israel’s reaction. Except that they somehow manage to miss the thief. Except that they are the reason the thief was hungry in the first place.

Conditions in this tent camp?

Where to start? Dear God, where to start?

All the comforts of modern day life have been taken away. Water is scarce, food is scarce. The most caloric food we’ve had in the past days is some American peanut butter with crackers. Am not allergic to peanuts, but some of us are. That doesn’t stop some of them from eating it anyway. Hunger will make you do the craziest things. Yes, some of us have tried eating grass. Some drink brackish water. They end up with intolerable cramps, crushing headaches, dizziness, nausea…

Flour still comes in, but irregularly. There is no way to know if you will eat tomorrow. This is unimaginable for most people in the US, Canada or Europe or even most poorer countries. Very little protein. Mothers have their heart ripped out every second of every day because they can’t feed their babies. Nobody has it worse here than mothers and fathers with newborn babies. The cries of the babies, but also the desperate pleas of the mothers to help their babies, cut through marrow and bone. Personally I find these sounds worse than the sound of the bombs or the idea that a tank can pass by here and lump some shells into our camp, just like that. It happened two days ago. One woman died. Three were injured. Their crime? Being Palestinian, I don’t know what else I could say.  

Meanwhile it’s absurd that so many westerners are now experimenting with intermittent fasting and extreme diets to get their ideal summer body when we are forced to fast. You can find thousands of podcasts with episodes taking up two to three hours of your time telling you tricks on how to lose weight. Priorities…

My cousin, who grew up on a steady diet of Instagram and American TV, is as western as they come and proudly showed me her sixpack this morning. I refused to give her a compliment and, surprise, surprise, she is again not talking to me. She also tries to get my sister on her side. You know what? It’s good. As long as my cousin is picking fights with me I know she is still in good health and not dying. You have to learn how to see the good in any situation here.

15th of January 2024

The diary of Anan Farah. Itchy rash on my arms. Strange boils on my thighs. At night I can’t stop myself from scratching them. I wake up with blood caked under my finger nails. All of us are affected. There is no sanitation system anywhere. Washing yourself becomes a daunting task around here. I have met people who haven’t been able to change their clothes in two months. Mum does her best to make sure me, my sister and my cousin get to change our clothes twice a week. She never sits still and is always toiling to make our lives a bit more bearable. Father’s mental state is not optimal. He is brooding, sulking, usually doesn’t say much. We have to push him to eat, because everything he gets he wants to give to us. 

A young man has set up a classroom in a tent. He teaches the kids maths, some chemistry, some biology, he tells them stories. He teaches the younger kids, but he is very passionate and sometimes I go and attend his classes. He doesn’t charge anything for his work. Parents bring him some food. He and some of his friends have also created toys out of debris. They have made swings and a climbing rack. I was on one of the swings today. Quite fun. I was probably four or five the last time I was on one. They also created some sort of hinderance parcours with tires from destroyed cars, car seats, tables, rubble…

My cousin is very good at it. She is almost as fast as the boys.  From time to time I run into someone criticizing Hamas. An old man, a baker before the invasion, says Hamas gave Israel the excuse to murder all of us. Because of his age nobody directly challenged him. He named one of his donkeys ‘Sinwar’ and yells ‘yalla, yalla, Sinwar’. Later I heard people say that Hamas is the only group that is capable of getting the Palestinians leverage at the negotiation table and that Israel has walked into a trap. We’re paying a frightful price, but it’s Israel that chooses to kill us. If ten guys escape from Auschwitz, knowing that the guards will kill other inmates in retaliation, that blood is not on the hands of the escapees, but on the hands of the guards. They make the decision to kill. 

Very disturbing is the formation of armed gangs run by local crime families who take advantage of the chaos to rob their fellow Palestinians. This is partly because Israel is killing our police force. Our police force does not combat Israel, but functions as any other police force. Law and order is breaking down because Israel is killing them. Maybe they think they are all Hamas, but that would be a mistake. Not everyone with a gun here is a militant out to fight the IDF. Things are so much more complex here. We are some cartoon in western minds. The evil terrorists versus the nice little democracy.  With nothing to do I often day dream about taking western visitors on a tour of our lovely terrorist stronghold. They would be baffled.

The role religion still plays here must be incomprehensible to western minds. If I had a dollar for every time I hear someone say things like ‘God’s plan is always more beautiful than our desire’ I would be richer than Elon Musk. Who, by the way, is of course letting himself be manipulated by the side with more money. He should come and stay with us for a few weeks. Anyway, enough about that, rich people receive too much attention as it is. I prefer unsung heroes. Elon Musk is who every white male wants to be. Become a billionaire and essentially stay a child. Am rambling because am tired and hungry and my skin is on fire, but adults who can keep their childhood imagination and wonderments alive and employ those in a systematic way have the best chance to become rich. Adults whose inner child is killed by western schools just get a job.

20th of January 2024

My sixteenth birthday. I looked up the sign of Aquarius in our old friend’s encyclopdia. One of my favorite things to do here is to leaf though those thick volumes. The old man is always happy when I show up. ‘You are helping me prove smartphones were never smart’, he likes to say. He repeats himself a lot and laughs about his own jokes, but he is truly a gentle soul and very generous.

They say Aquarius is more interested in social issues and rooting harder for collective progress than other signs. If you really go deeper into the astrology rabbit hole I am actually born on the cusp. So I should have some traits of Capricorn as well, but don’t ask me what that would mean or how to determine that. Being the typical Aquarius that I am I must say I don’t believe in astrology.

I’ve kindly asked everyone to please not celebrate my birthday. This wish was mostly respected, but my parents couldn’t be stopped from sharing their favorite anecdotes from my childhood. Like when I thought a Playstation was a gas station combined with a playground. My idea was that parents would fill up their gas tank while their kids would be playing. I sometimes think this never happened and my parents don’t want the truth to get in the way of a good story. Maybe some of the traits of our Israeli neighbours finally rubbed off on them.

My rash is getting worse. The boils on my legs are filling up with blood and puss. I can’t stop myself from scratching them open or lancing them with a needle. There’s something perversely satisfying about it, but I know I have to stop. My mum fears I could get some permanent scarring on my thighs.

Western girls get tattoos, I get scars.

Sorry, on some days the allure of wallowing in self-pity gets too strong.

This whole mess would be a lot easier to bear if we had a clear end date in mind. If someone were to tell me: three more months of this and on the 30th of April you can try and rebuild your life everything would be easier to bear.

Hmm. Or maybe not. Because everyone would be a million times more scared of dying and getting more scared of dying every day, because nobody would want to die so close to the finishing line. I mean, the saddest thing would be to die on the 29th of April.

Yesterday someone got an old radio to work and for about two hours picked up some music.

A song came on called ‘It’s a wonderful world’ by some guy called Louis Armstrong.

I have never seen so many grown ups cry. Even the ones who don’t know a word of English. I don’t know. It was just the whole vibe, you didn’t have to know what he was singing about. I cried too. I think we all cried.

This morning we found lip balm in a plastic bag which was otherwise filled with useless shells from sunflower seeds.

You have never seen three happier girls in your life.

If this was a university experience then I think the main subject is: ‘Happiness is about the little things. Here’s 1001 examples to prove that.’

22nd of January 2024

And yes, we have been displaced again. The free ride on the Israeli carrousel continues. This time I don’t know where we are going. We are walking. Hey, it keeps you warm. The Gaza strip is beautiful. We are getting to see a lot of it.

My cousin has accused me of being too unemotional. She says my reactions are not normal. I asked her what she would have me do. She says I should be angrier. I said I was too tired to be angry. I said I failed to take what is happening to us as something personal. In the case of my cousin you’d think Israel launched this operation with the sole purpose of making her life hard.

She screamed: ‘But this is as personal as it gets! Those people want you dead! They want your sister dead! They want your parents dead! They want my parents dead!’

She broke down and cried in a way am not used to from her side. It made me realize she hasn’t seen her parents since October and no matter how tough she always sounds and acts, she’s 15. She turns 16 in August. We’re just kids. She’s too proud to admit that she wants nothing more than to sleep in her own bed and wake up to the voices of her parents in the next room.

And this isn’t about me being calm. My sister is the calmest of all of us and never complains, but you won’t see my cousin attacking her. It’s because my sister doesn’t look up to anyone the way she looks up to my cousin. As long as you treat my cousin like a Queen she will never confront you about anything. I refuse to make that deal with the little devil.

Maybe it doesn’t show in my face but on the inside I am anything but calm. It’s only that I am clueless as to what I could possibly do. I mean, seriously, what does she expect me to do? I’ve stuck to all my prayers, I help where I can, I am as polite as I ever was to everyone I meet. How is me getting angry going to help? My cousin could climb o the top of the tallest building in Gaza and scream: ‘I want you to get mad!’ What good would it do? If the world isn’t angry over what is happening here, the world will never get angry.

I haven’t accepted yet that I will die, but that outcome is becoming more likely every day. I know I am innocent and if there is an afterlife, which I believe with all my heart, I have nothing to fear. Those who will kill me, and who have killed others, they have everything to fear, but not me.

It’s harder to write while we are on the move. Right now am sitting on my backpack by the side of the road. My parents are trading stuff for food with some people they have met. They have a lot of food in a cart pulled by a donkey, because they ran a small grocery shop before this hell started. Funny fact: we now look at a donkey like normal people look at a Porsche.

If you want to experience what the middle ages were like, you can come and visit. Israel has recreated that historical period for all you history lovers out there.

Am not sure though if women and children were such a target in those times. If peace ever returns I’ll find me some good book about the so called dark ages and check.

Am not an expert, but I can kinda guess they call them ‘dark’ in the west, because they ignore the blossoming of Arab culture around that time.

24th of January 2024

Rivers of blood. I always thought it was a poetic image, not something you can ever see in reality. I was wrong. We were walking through the streets between buildings that look like cardboxes in a field after a herd of cows have stampeded across them, only much bigger. With dead people inside. Some maybe still alive and dying of thirst. We didn’t see it happen, but we heard. It takes a big explosion now to have us even look up.

We’re tired. Our feet are covered in blisters. We’re in search of a real safe zone. Perhaps further south. Since yesterday morning I’ve been walking without shoes. So yes, there is blood on my feet right now, caked together with dust. As am scribbling this my parents are looking for water to wash it off. We heard the explosions. They were close. You can feel the sound of them rattle your chest. The sound works in stages. There’s a whoosing sound, a crackling sound and then the boom of the air displacing. The sound of buildings collapsing. Sometimes it’s destroyed in the explosion, but sometimes structures stay standing for a bit and come down piece by piece. Then the screams. Sometimes sirens. Sometimes there is an eery lull and there’s a new rattle.  

Worse than the sounds are the faces, the eyes of those who have no more screams left. About half an hour after the worst explosions it started flowing. Blood came down the streets. As if there had been a short, but heavy summer storm. It smells like a mix of burnt  honey and iron. We wonder what this place will be like when it gets hotter. The flies that will be gorging themselves on what remains of us. I saw people stare at the blood as if it was indeed rain.

People come out and start cleaning. So far I haven’t seen anything so bad that some people don’t start the clean-up. You can see people create shelters out of rubble. They collect the best pieces of concrete and bricks and pile them on top of each other, create walls, throw some kind of covering on top to serve as a roof. People go on with their lives.

Your system shuts down. You stop caring. I mean, you care, but you’ve lost the reflex to show you care. It’s a protective mechanism. Everything we’ve seen will have its full impact only when it’s all over. The seeds of more nightmares later are being planted into us. The necessity to stay alive helps us filter all the impulses that come in. This means that once peace comes, we won’t have actual peace. Our minds will give us no peace. They’re postponing their haunting thoughts to allow our bodies to survive.

We’ve all seen headless corpses. Some gnarled pink, purple, reddish, blueish wires crawling out of their neck.

I can focus on a mother who tried to dig up her own son. She clawed at the earth until the bones of her fingers was exposed.

I asked someone who knew the woman, maybe her sister, I didn’t want to pry, why nobody was stopping her. ‘As long as she’s digging in the wrong place we let her. Her son is buried six meters to the left. Let her dig. It exhausts her and lets her sleep at night. You don’t want to be in the same space with her at night when she can’t sleep.’

I need to wash my feet now.

29th of January 2024

You learn a lot when all you can do for entertainment is swap stories. Right now am sitting in the middle of an empty indoor swimming pool. It only took a genocide to get me into a swimming pool for the first time in my life, it holds no water, but am definitely moving up in the world. One of the richer families in Rafah has opened up one of its houses to refugees. Boundaries between people are rapidly fading. This is by far the most beautiful house I have ever entered in my short life. No electricity, no running water here either, but we aren’t picky. Odd fact: we’re in one of the worst war zones on the face of this earth and people still take off their shoes when they enter a home. Sometimes I think my people are a strange people. In American movies people never take off their shoes indoors.

Chances of being bombed here are said to be low, at present. Very crowded here. Couldn’t tell you how many people are sitting around me right now. Being in a waterless pool gives you the false feeling of being protected, like you’re in a bunker.

An unemployed taxi driver, together with his pregnant wife, have just explained the theory of ‘six degrees of separation’ to me.

Theoretically there are only six people between me and Trump, same with Putin, same with Bibi, same with Obama. I highly doubt that, but according to the theory someone I know will know someone who can get me one step closer to Trump. Then that next person knows a person who’s even closer until I hit upon someone who’s really close to him and deals with him from up close.

Maybe between me and Trump it’s is a little more than six. Six degrees is the average, I think.

This theory is easily debunked since my cousin has been reaching out to so many people online since this whole mess started that by now she should be on a first name basis with every US senator and every member of the Duma and the Knesset. Wouldn’t do us much good.

Most stomach uprooting story of the day: a mum had the hardest time to have a little girl let go of the hand of her two years older brother. She had picked up his torn off hand in the rubble and she wanted to hang on to it to put it back on his body after they would find the rest of her brother. The brother is dead, they have told her many times, but she keeps asking when he will come back. In her mind he is hiding, cause he is so scared, because they took his hand. It’s not the mother who told me. You won’t get that sort of detail directly from a mother. The grandfather of the girl told it to my father and I overheard their conversation. It’s not like we’re wallowing in privacy here.

Daylight is fading, so I have to cut if off here for today. All the people here have generously piled all the food they have together and you could say we have something like a very modest feast tonight, though as I know my people, nobody will dare to touch the food now, for fear of looking greedy. At least the youngest ones will eat.