Gaza Genocide: Testimonies of Israeli Atrocities and Western Complicity
On 21 January 2024, I was hosted by the Electronic Intifada podcast to report on my family’s latest struggles under the Western backed Israeli genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against Gaza. This interview took place at the hardest of times, soon after I learnt that the terrorist Israeli Army has burnt our home, pushed my family survivors into yet another displacement, the arbitrary detention of my two oldest paternal uncles who are child survivors of 1948, and the daily struggles hunt for water and food and other necessities of survival during last winter, and my dad, brother, sister in law and nieces fleeing to Rafah and sheltering in a tent amid relentless bombing. I also exposed my then-MP Harriet Harman for her opposition of calls for ceasefire and recycling of Israeli justifications of the genocide while failing to respond to my pleas upon her to save my family from Israel’s indiscriminate killing machines.
The video above shows my parents enjoying a gathering of family and friends as they always did at our land near the beach in northern Gaza on 3 October 2023. You can see our land that my dad has been nursing for over a decade hosting a special occasion of my childhood friend Mohammed Al-Majdalawi visiting Gaza from Sweden and reconnecting with my parents and mother figures we shared during our childhoods in Jabalia Refugee Camp. Those mother figures include Om El-Amir who is seen on the very left of this sweet choir blessing us with one of the most beautiful songs by Sayed Mekawi. Israel killed Om El-Amir inside her home during the early days of November 2023, leaving her husband surviving with wounds; her son in London couldn’t say goodbye.
The fate of our land remained unknown for months with the area turning into a killing field. We couldn’t but pray that Israel’s machines of destruction spared it. They turned it into a barren land, and made such a gathering impossible to repeat with all the people seen in the video are either killed or displaced. We learnt this through my cousin Khalil, whose wife Rana and three children Jihad, Sham and Leen were massacred in October 2023. Khalil, accompanied by my cousin Mahmoud Abusalama, managed to visit our land in February 2024 but couldn’t find any trace to our land and sent us this picture and video below.
Following the news of the burning and bombardment of our family home in Al-Saftawi Street, this loss was especially devastating to my family and many of my extended family members who used to seek our land as a refuge from the crowdedness of Jabalia Refugee Camp, but it is nothing compared to Khalil’s loss and many others who saw their families wiped of civil registry. Israel dictated a reality where it is a luxury to comfort ourselves with thoughts of returning to rebuild our homes and replant our lands, but the hearts whose beats Israel put to halt can’t be revived. In a just world, none of this would happen.
While my nuclear family had to pay an incredible amount of money to guarantee their lives and secure an exit through Rafah to Egypt in February, my extended family, my dear uncles, aunts, cousins, and their grandchildren most of whom under 15, continue to experience a nightmarish reality that makes them envy our martyrs. Nothing changed between this interview in January and August, except that Israel’s atrocities are rising in scale and intensity and expanding to the Palestinian people wherever they are, and to Lebanon and Yemen. Meanwhile, the US, UK, Germany, Canada and other Western imperial powers continue to unashamedly arm and justify Israel’s crimes against humanity in the hope to cover their own complicity. Simultaneously, the same powers have been engaging in a reductive two-sides narrative, calling for ceasefire to which Israel is the only obstacle, and calling for the so-called two-state “solution” to be implemented in total denial of the longstanding realities of Israeli settler-colonialism and apartheid, and the devastating consequences of the genocide in Gaza. When Israel faces no serious challenge to its relentless atrocities, and instead is rewarded with billions of US dollars in military aid and unconditional support from Western media and diplomacy, Israel’s terrifying culture of impunity can only be reinforced.
Has the slaughtering of our people become a normal part of your everyday life? Please don’t normalise the massacres and destructions broadcasted every day and night from Gaza for nearly 11 months, with military and financial backing from Western governments and tax payers. It is not just Palestine at stake here but humanity is. Israel is spreading evil at all corners of the world in a desperate attempt to escape accountability for their well-documented crimes. Stop Arming Israel. Boycott, organise and keep protesting and disrupting until freedom, equality, justice and accountability in Palestine and the Western invention of Israel is dismantled.
PALESTINE FROM MY EYES 