Where to begin? The constant explosions? The buildings that “fall like columns of smoke”? The bread lines a half-kilometer long? The body parts? Their smell?
Or the inescapable knowledge that all this has come before and will come again, because “the proper question is not what is happening, but what has been happening for more than 75 years”? Abu Saif was visiting family in Gaza on Oct. 7, the day Hamas attacked Israel — and Israel embarked on a massive counteroffensive. He began journaling then about the experience and has not stopped.What the 10 entries depict is more visceral and gut-wrenching than could possibly be described here. He takes us into the hospitals where patients are operated on without anesthesia.
“I see death approaching, hear its steps growing louder,” he writes. “Just be done with it, I think.” Abu Saif’s journal is awful. It is also necessary. Please read it. Comprehend just this fragment of the pain Gaza endures, and you will understand that it cannot go on.coming out of Gaza, “there is a morass of lies.” If we’re looking for the “small-t truth” online, she says, we’re in trouble.She examines two of the biggest cases of confusion from the war so far: the claims that Israel killed hundreds in a hospital bombing and that Hamas beheaded Israeli babies. headtopics.com
We aren’t going to get clear-cut answers from the internet. “What we will almost always find instead,” she writes, “is messier: an angle on the world not as it literally is but as people feel it is.” Molly isn’t ready to give up small-t truth, but she explains how there’s still utility in the “emotional and moral big-T Truth” the internet. This belief is core to the complicated support some Palestinians hold for Hamas, and if opponents of terrorism don’t engage with that reality, they will never succeed in the long term, even if Israel obliterates this iteration of terrorism.