Dr. Saeed continues to write to us from Gaza. His latest letter talks about his desperqate struggle to move his family out of Gaza City as Israel invades:
These are some of the messages I received from friends, some of which were posted on Facebook:
- “Praise be to God—by His favours righteous acts are completed; we left our homes and lay ourselves upon the earth.”
- “At midnight I run now with my family; behind us a gate of Hell whose bolt I push aside. I do not know where we will go, nor when I will stop running.”
- “Ten full hours were not enough to cross the distance from the heart of Gaza to the south. The road remains long, and the city is burning.”
- “I have no objection to moving south. I am now trapped between poverty and flame; my children die a thousand times and I cannot save them.”
Read the words carefully. Read them again:
We left our houses and lay upon the ground—draw yourselves into that state, attend to the small particulars.
Strip a little of your present selves and run at midnight with your children across rivers of fire and shards of broken glass; flee the splinters, breathe in the black smoke of bombing, and let your soft faces be seared by the fever of volcanic mouths.
Try to feel the disorientation as fear encircles you and the fire rips through you.
Try to face death face to face—and see how ugly that face becomes when, with insolent boldness, it demands one of your children, stretches forth its huge hand and tears a child from your arms; then it comes back again for another, and you are powerless to do anything—anything.
Tell me now about yourselves after this imagined exposure to those moments. So tell me: what, then, of one who endures them continually for more than seven hundred days—the number of days of the slaughter?
Dr. Saeed Mohamed Al-Kahlout
The Palestine Trauma Centre
Gaza, Palestine
Image by Emad El Byed on Unsplash
