The smell of flesh is everywhere: A dispatch from Gaza

When the bombs fell, I was at home. My family has been staying at the Jabalia refugee camp, in northern Gaza, since 12 October. On Tuesday, Israel targeted the camp. The explosions were about 70 metres away from my house. One bomb landed; there was a two-second pause; and then more bombs hit. I couldn’t move my eyes from looking at the ceiling because I was expecting a missile to fall on us. I ran into the street and saw the most horrible massacre and destruction my eyes have ever seen. I tried to help but the shock crippled me.

Since Jabalia was first bombed, there has been a strange silence in the streets: there are no children playing now. Many people have fled. My aunt Samah has left with her children. When the attack happened, a window landed on her children as she slept. Fortunately they were not injured, but now they are gone: they hope they will be safer in Gaza City.

The stink of death hangs over Gaza. My friend Mariam Nassar was killed with her family in an airstrike on their house. I look at Mariam’s Facebook account to read her last post, from two days earlier: ‘I don’t believe I’m still alive. I don’t even know if after an hour I will stay alive. I am tired of running from one place to another, from one hospital to a street to another house. Bombing is all over us.’

The day after the bombing of Jabalia, I’m sitting in the street, trying to get a stronger internet connection. My younger brother, Hamza, who is about to finish his PhD in Arabic grammar, passes by with his wife and three kids, the oldest being five. Hamza tells me he’s going back to our home in Beit Lahia to clean their apartment on the second floor.

A young man sits next to me. He asks me how to connect to the internet. He returns in a few minutes. The man starts to watch videos on Instagram; scenes of death and destruction greet him. I ask him to turn down the audio and advise him against watching this. He tells me he hasn’t had any internet connection in the past ten days. ‘Oh, Amin is dead. My God!’ he shouts. I’m heartbroken. I knew Amin. We used to play soccer together.

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A few weeks ago, an Israeli bomb destroyed our neighbour’s home, so I decide to go home to check on ours. My father is sweeping the stairs, after having fed the hens, ducks, pigeons, and rabbits. I look at our garden. Nothing is intact: not the fence, not the guava, orange, lemon, olive, mango, or peach trees. Not the eggplants or tomatoes. Not the roses. I go up the stairs and, before I enter my apartment, I see splinters of glass, fallen window frames, and broken pieces from wooden doors.

In my study, I fetch my nail trimmer from my desk drawers before leaving to get my daughter Yaffa’s sandals from the closet. I run around the house, looking for anything I can take with me. I feel like a thief whose sole concern is to put as much money and jewellery in his pockets before the owners show up. I grab my son Yazzan’s school backpack, and stuff as many clothes in as possible, especially underwear. I take hand soap and olive oil too.

My brother and his family arrive. I can hear the children complain about the mess. My niece, Awatef, asks her grandfather: ‘Granddad, who did that to our house?’

I go down to be with them. Hamza’s library room, which has some rare Arabic grammar books, as well as books he published himself, is a total mess. He calls on the kids to see the room, but Awatef insists, ‘I will first check on my room.’ Five-year-old Razan and her sister Awatef frown at the scene. Hayyan, who is two and a half, does not seem to understand. Awatef then heads back to her father’s library room, ‘Oh my God! I shall show them what I will do!’ Awatef does not know who the ‘them’ is.

I ride back to Jabalia, and watch a group walk behind a motorbike carrying the bodies of three dead people. A few days ago, a group of people from the graveyard asked Hamza to help them carry the bodies of the dead. ‘The number of the dead is larger than the number of those burying them!’ Hamza said.

As I approach our place in the Jabalia camp, I can see a firetruck parked on the right side of the street. Three workers are standing. They are exhausted. The smell of rubble and flesh wafts across every lane around me. Like all refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, the Jabalia camp is divided into blocks of houses, whose roofs are mostly made from tin or asbestos sheets. No excavators or bulldozers can enter the camp to help dig for corpses. People are trying to remove piles of heavy concrete with their bare hands and a few shovels.

One of the houses that got bombed belonged to a cousin of my grandfather. Ali Abu Saif, from whom we used to buy eggs at the Jabalia camp market, was killed along with many of his children and grandchildren. A number of his married daughters, who were sheltering at their father’s house, died too, alongside their husbands and children. Ali’s 31-year-old son, Rashad, was sleeping on the first floor alongside his heavily pregnant wife. They both died. His family, and volunteers, are digging to get their bodies and bury them.

I stand in the middle of what used to be Ali Abu Saif’s house. There are no doors. No building nearby is standing. It looks like a packet of biscuits trampled upon by a heavy foot. Every time a corpse is extracted, a new tragedy begins. Two of Ali’s sons who survived are broken. They point to people: ‘Here is where my brother was sleeping alongside his children. And my sister is there. She may be alive.’

And up there, the drones are buzzing over us, as if ploughing the sky, searching for souls and hovering over the bombed house under whose rubble the corpses lie.