At 12, Dina Abu Mohsen had already set her sights on medical school, where she would learn to treat the young amputees of the next war on Gaza, or perhaps the one after that. In a November 2023 video, filmed a few weeks after her own leg had been severed, she told an interviewer that, to fulfill her dream, she first needed “someone to take me abroad, to any country.” There, she could find a prosthetic leg, learn to walk again and, eventually, return to Gaza so she could care for her two younger siblings. She explained, in a flat register, that her older sister, Dalia, and older brother, Mohammed, had already been killed, along with both her parents.
Three weeks after the interview, she, too, was killed. On Dec. 17, an Israeli tank shell struck Nasser hospital, where she was recovering, adding to the unfathomable toll of murdered Palestinian children — a list that is now more than 20,000 names long. By the time Dina’s name appeared on it, Gaza had already lost 10 times more children than in the nearly 45 months of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Among Gaza’s surviving children, some 4,000 are now amputees, according to UNICEF — more per capita than anywhere else on the planet.
We have grown too accustomed to these superlatives. In the 15 years preceding Oct. 7, 2023, Israel launched four major assaults on Gaza, exacting a civilian death toll already in the thousands. Throughout this period, an Israeli land, sea and air blockade left the 25-mile-long territory, home to 2 million people, nearly uninhabitable, as the United Nations first warned in 2012. That this was by design was also true 15 years ago. By early 2008, Israel had calculated the minimum caloric intake required to “put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,” as Dov Weisglass, an adviser to then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, explained. Ze’ev Boim, Israel’s housing and construction minister at the time, said of the Palestinians: “We’ll shut off the electricity in Gaza and they can choke inside there.” By the time former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed, in 2023, to deprive Gaza’s “human animals” of electricity, food and fuel, the move had become customary.
In truth, many of the horrors animating today’s global protest movement for Gaza vary only by degree. The protests themselves are also familiar, as is the vertigo, felt by all Palestinians, at having become at once the object of the world’s pity and the subject of its scorn. We watch as online influencers break down at the sight of our children in flames, generating viral videos and, with them, monetizable acclaim. We receive little gifts of consolation from our friends — a donation in our name, a bottle of Jericho olive oil, an invitation to publish “whatever you want.” And we remain polite when the things we write and say make our would-be audiences too anxious and our would-be publishers suddenly too coy. We watch as they themselves publish, over and over, in the same periodicals, lamenting their own inability to save us. We listen as they engage in meandering discussions about the origins of the term genocide, or its utility “after Gaza.” And all the while, we know that, when our blood stops flowing, so too will their encomiums.
Our history teaches us as much. In 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, Israel shelled refugee camps indiscriminately, displacing a quarter of the population, and then struck the U.N.-run schools where they sought shelter. Afterward, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem documented the military’s pattern of bombing residential buildings, killing entire families, to target what it claimed were Palestinian militants. All of these atrocities, in other words, were dress rehearsals for Israel’s current campaign of extermination. But in the awful intervals between, as Palestinians dug through the remains, most of the world moved on — and forgot.
Outrage at the intervening horrors, including the massacres at Gaza’s Great March of Return in 2018 and 2019, spurred some renewed protest; still, none of the conditions that enabled Israel’s near-total annihilation of Gaza over the last two years — the siege, the wanton killing, the military backing of the United States and major European powers — changed. Now, threatened with permanent displacement or the indefinite deferral of their freedom, Palestinians in Gaza continue to document their own erasure, even as the horrifying images they share with the world produce no meaningful change on the ground. While their testimony is still urgent — not least because Gaza remains off-limits to the world’s media — its value too often accrues, not to its witnesses, but to those repurposing it from afar. (Think of the book deals, the award-winning commentary, the slick celebrity fundraisers.) This ecosystem of imagery and protest, in which an alienated Gaza petitions a world powerless to help it, is a familiar one for Palestinians. But even if it is well-intentioned, what worth does this solidarity have if it only gains purchase for itself?
To be clear, many of the people speaking out on Gaza have paid a heavy price. Students have been doxxed and detained, employees fired, citizens arrested. Remarkably, the scale of the crackdown seems matched by the size of ongoing protests, which have continued despite Western governments’ attempts to repress them. Last month, hundreds of thousands of Italians brought their country to a standstill over their government’s military support for Israel. And just six months into Israel’s latest war on Gaza, more than a million Americans had already joined some 7,000 pro-Palestine protests across the United States. These numbers matter: After all, the pace of Israel’s slaughter could just as well have crushed the world’s capacity to resist it. By continuing, the protests signal to the people of Gaza that they have not been forgotten, as the Palestinian writer Eman Abu Zayed wrote recently about the demonstrations in Italy.
The relentless stream of bloody scenes from Gaza, flooding our TikTok and Instagram feeds, has helped maintain the momentum of protest. But it has only offered a microdose of the whole, horrifying story — as Gaza’s journalists, more than 200 of whom have been murdered by Israel, consistently remind us. Al Jazeera correspondent Hani Mahmoud told Democracy Now! viewers recently that what they see from Gaza is “only a tiny bit” of what journalists there could possibly show. “On the ground,” he said, “it’s even worse.”
During Israel’s earlier assaults, reporting was a daunting task, but not insurmountable. In 2012, after Israel’s nine-day aerial bombardment of Gaza, I met Mustafa Hejazi, whose father had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on Nov. 19, along with his brothers, who were 2 and 4. The latter, Mohammed, was named in honor of another brother — killed in Israel’s Operation Cast Lead four years earlier. The same year, I met the teenage brothers Haytham and Amjad Muzannar as they picked through the rubble of their family home, where their grandmother and younger brother had been killed by an Israeli strike on Nov. 18. The same warplane killed 10 members of the Al-Dalu family next door, including five women and four children. On the remaining walls of that home, surviving family members had spray-painted the names of the dead, marking the rooms where they had fallen. My colleague snapped a photo of one of the rubble-strewn rooms: a child-sized wicker chair, a single piece of yellow construction paper, the words “Here Abdallah.” In 2014, during a relatively brief Israeli assault that killed approximately 2,200 people — a quarter of them children — I met members of the Balata family, who lost 11 of their own to an Israeli tank shell on July 29. One of the massacred, Hadeel, was 17 and “wants to be a doctor,” her father told me. He still spoke of her in the present tense.
Journalists are taught: Do the reporting, and the story will write itself. But how does one narrate the stories of 20,000 dead children? In their frequency over the last two years, Gaza’s individual tragedies have had a way of congealing into metaphor. Who, after all, can recall the number of massacres at hospitals and makeshift shelters, or along “safe routes” — much less the names and life details of each of their victims? What about the hundreds, maybe thousands, of human beings who remain, decomposed, beneath the rubble? As the body count grew, we relied on shorthand to convey the scope of Gaza’s undoing. After it razed all of Gaza’s universities and turned its schools into tent camps, we called Israel’s war scholasticide. After it restricted access to Gaza’s arable land, we called it ecocide. And after it took aim at Gaza’s libraries and antiquities, we called it historicide.
Gaza was Stalingrad. Gaza was Dresden. Gaza was the Warsaw Ghetto.
But what is Gaza to Palestinians? When I reported from there during the 2014 Israeli assault, every Palestinian I met referred to the 51-day spectacle of violence as a war (“harb” in Arabic). The mass displacements and targeting of civilians made the accusation of genocide plausible, even then, but for the Palestinians under fire, the point wasn’t whether the word “harb” elided some legal definition of the horrors all around them; it was that those horrors — the thunderous approach of jet sorties throughout the night, the stench of corpses rising from the rubble the next day, the elderly gaze of a 1-year-old burn victim who had just lost his entire family — were legible enough already. The same can be said of extended families, like my own, that have lost dozens of relatives in the past two years. Confronted with death’s ubiquity, deprived of shelter or safe passage, Gaza’s steadfastness (“sumud” in Arabic) manifests in its choice of words, too.
Stripped of the language we use to represent ourselves, Palestinian agency undergoes a kind of load shedding in the English-speaking world, generating just enough energy to mobilize the masses, but not so much as to short-circuit the systems they are protesting against. “When Palestine in English revolts,” the Palestinian poet and physician Fady Joudah wrote in Parapraxis Magazine, “it’s because Palestine in Arabic gives it life.” This may explain why words like “intifada,” conspicuously untranslated, power so much of the street protests in the English-speaking world. But even then, the word becomes metaphor, interpreted — as in the slogan “globalize the intifada” — in ways that have nothing to do with Palestinians’ actual aspirations. Evidence of this can be seen at the near-daily rallies for Palestine across the West, where keffiyehs crisscross with counterculture, and “none of us is free until all of us are free” is a common refrain.
It’s not that these truths can’t coexist; it’s that holding them all should not be Palestine’s burden. Although solidarity from democratic socialists in America, say, may offer welcome recognition, it also reinforces Palestinians’ alienation from the politics being constructed around them. Watching New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani win support from young voters for his Gaza stance was one example of this alienation. Few Palestinians I know were surprised that, after he clinched the Democratic nomination, Mamdani wasted no time making what CNN called a “notable shift in rhetoric,” distancing himself, ironically, from the phrase “globalize the intifada.”
I thought about Mamdani’s campaign as I watched footage of the recent Palestine solidarity event at London’s Wembley Stadium, a genuinely moving expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people, and of anguish over the ever-mounting death toll in Gaza. A theme of the evening, as it has been at protests from New York to Milan, was that Gaza represented a signature failure of the world order. The world’s descent into disorder had been hastened by a succession of antecedent atrocities: the barrel bombing of Syrian hospitals, the genocide of tens of thousands of Sudanese, the earlier siege and decimation of Gaza or Iraq before it. But unlike these earlier calamities, Israel’s actions had risen to the level of an existential threat, not just to the Palestinians in its crosshairs, but to everyone. Hollywood luminaries, Grammy award-winning musicians, students of the Ivy League — all stood Together4Palestine, as the London event was dubbed, and against the forces that would undo us all.
The reality, of course, is that those of us outside Gaza have not endured the same war. In 2014, amid the bombing and destruction, the Palestinians I spoke with were proud to inspire solidarity, but as they told me at the time, that mantle is heavy, and no one would carry it for its weight alone. As the Palestinian writer and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan said to an interviewer recently, “Gaza has become the world’s conscience — which is not something anybody asked for.”
A friend, who has also lost dozens of family members, tells me that, beyond a lasting ceasefire, what Gaza needs most is to be understood on its own terms — and for its people to be heard. We know already that they have no say in the various schemes to absolve Israel of its crimes, including by erecting a Middle East “Riviera” atop the ruins of Gaza and the remains of its dead. Neither do the Palestinians of Gaza have any means to seek restitution under a recently announced 20-point plan for ending Israel’s war. These things have also become customary. But the more difficult truth is that the people of Gaza are too often alienated from friendlier spaces, too.
After the Wembley event, Vogue Arabia shared an Instagram story featuring “meaningful style statements” from the evening, leading with the English actress Florence Pugh (who wore a watermelon T-shirt overlaid with the word “Solidarity”). Seeing this, I thought back to one morning during the 2014 assault on Gaza, when a colleague and I were walking through the ruins of Shujaiya, documenting the aftermath of an especially brutal night of airstrikes and shelling. Amid six-storey buildings that stood my height, and families searching the rubble, we saw a boy, maybe 8 years old, hoisting himself onto a mound of crumpled concrete. Reaching over it, he tugged loose a pair of pants that had been lodged beneath a cinder block. “Bantalon! Bantalon!” (“Pants! Pants!”), he yelled elatedly, then held up his find like a trophy. All, it turned out, was not lost.
Dina Abu Mohsen’s highest ambition was to walk again and to heal. She told us so herself. Though I can’t be certain that the boy from Shujaiya is still alive, my memory of him has felt like a fitting metaphor for these years of constant mourning. But more than that, it is a reminder that this place, Gaza, which has moved so many of us to protest, to prayer and to tears, is still there, waiting to tell us her own story — and where to go from here.
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