Summary
Palestinian writer, author of “In the Haze of Fifty-One Days” in Light in Gaza (2022), a memoir of returning to Gaza from graduate studies abroad on the eve of the 2014 fifty-one-day war (Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, PDF p.207-212).
Details
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He left Gaza at sixteen and spent summers in Egypt or Jordan, fearing he would lose his scholarship if he returned and became stuck; in the summer of the chapter he traveled through the Sinai to Ma’bar Rafah to spend Ramadan at his parents’ house, against his siblings’ warnings that a war was coming (PDF p.207-209).
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His family is scattered between Europe and North America; his mother had lost her sight, and his father’s severe stroke had paralyzed one leg (PDF p.209-210).
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Recording the first Israeli strikes on his neighborhood on his mobile phone, he writes that technology “can be a badly triggering medium”, and that Israel’s technological prowess “reduced me and my family to possible testing targets for its advanced weapons” (PDF p.212).
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The chapter completes in part 4: during the war a “roof-knock” struck his brother’s empty house next door and the family fled to the garage with the land deeds packed; the bigger missile never came (PDF p.214-216).
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He writes that a roof-knock is what Israel calls a fair warning, and that it is “in fact, deadly”, so that some families did not make it out in time (PDF p.214-215).
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Ill throughout the war with a rash, fever, mouth lesions and a swollen throat, he left during a humanitarian cease-fire a few days before the war ended, waited twelve hours on the Egyptian side of Rafah, and was convoyed to Cairo airport as a foreign-residency holder (PDF p.213-214, p.222-224).
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He closes listening to the one song that got him through the fifty-one days, “I Lived” by OneRepublic (PDF p.225).