The Price of Survival in Gaza

Since this war began, I am living a life like Robinson Crusoe's. He faced an existential ordeal on his island, but fought brilliantly for his survival: Here in the ruins of Gaza, I face the same ordeal, and fight with all my might to survive. I may envy Crusoe for the abundance of food he had on his island, but I would not dream of taking his place there, because he certainly would not accept coming to the hell of Gaza.

All types of fuel have been unavailable for almost half a year. I have had no choice in these months other than feeding our house furniture to the fire in order to feed our children. Yet I did not succeed in filling their stomachs or quelling their hunger, because in our house we have lots of mouths and few mouthfuls. Despite all of that I did not give up, but insisted on wrestling with the hunger monster: I planted my nail in his neck, and harnessed all the power I had to budge him away from my children.

I threw almost every flammable thing I had into the mouth of the fire. I burned our bed, sofas, chairs, tables, frames of the doors, and also burned some of our clothes and curtains. What pained me the most was carrying my books to the altar. I burned all the books of my home library: hundreds of valuable books on history, anthropology, philosophy, geography, religion, literature, and memoirs were incinerated.

I felt heavy sadness and bitter nostalgia as I tore each page from each book and gave them to the cooking fire. I had special memories with each one. Sometimes I cried when it came to tearing books stamped with dedications by fellow writers. My tears fell like showers of rain as I tore up books dedicated to me by my closest friend, the apostolic poet Saleem Al-Nafar.

Our horizons have become dark and melancholy, the smell of death has become the air we breathe, and blood has become the dew of our mornings.

Food is rare and more expensive each day. Thus I have wandered for many days and hours to find the black market's vendors, until I become dizzy and fall down in exhaustion from this waste of calories. Finally I get back to our house with a few handfuls of grain, or at best a kilogram of wheat flour. We eat one humble meal per day. My wife and I compete in depriving ourselves of the most food. What we save from our sole meal we give to our children as a second meal, which is often dinner.

When I cook for my family, I don't cook familiar dishes, but invent new ones by mixing anything with anything else, because we have so few ingredients. Our food lacks many nutrients, whether vitamins, minerals, or fats, and perhaps the most deficient thing is protein. My knowledge of wild herbs led me to the purslane plant. Although it was rare this year, I searched for it patiently, and fed it to my children. I believe it replenished their bodies with some minerals and vitamins.

The shelves of Gaza's pharmacies are almost empty: There are no more food supplements such as an iron-rich syrup to treat our children's malnutrition, nor any milk formula to feed our newborn daughter, nor any medications. We cook with an iron skillet because it imparts some iron into the food. If your anemic child gets sick, you will be the real patient, because you will visit lots of pharmacies and come away with empty hands.

We are getting terribly thin. I have stopped sitting on hard surfaces, because my pelvic bones rub against them. I get depressed when I look at my children during their sleeping, because their legs and arms are becoming increasingly skinny. Our clothes are loose on our shrunken bodies. My trousers have started falling down off my body, so I tie them to my waist with a rope.

There is another enemy stalking our family: the vile mosquitoes that creep in through our house windows, which were shattered by bombing. Since my children have severe anemia, it hurts me to see a mosquito bite one of them. So I spend two-thirds of each night making patrols around them. I chase their buzzing enemies, and as I kill a mosquito and see blood spurting out of it, I pray that the source of this blood is not my children's arteries.

Getting water these days is like giving birth from the flank. It is more scarce or wholly unavailable each day, far from our home, and heavy to carry. I walk long distances to get it. It does not quench your thirst, nor is it suitable for household use. It is polluted and salty because it comes only from ancient wells: it clearly damages our teeth, and over time may be harming our kidneys. The scarcity of water is accompanied by a scarcity of hygiene materials, so we can bathe only rarely; therefore, my children's hair is not clean, and a painful rash never clears from their skin.

The fire over which I cook harms my body a lot. It fills my lungs with thick black smoke, paints me with soot, turns my eyes bleary red, and causes me a lot of burns: Just breaking the wood of our belongings cuts my hands. Tears often accompany my sitting by these fires, sometimes due to the smoke and heat, and other times because of pain and sorrow.

It is not just our bodies that have withered and wearied, but also our souls. We have endured more suffering and psychological pain than mountains could bear. Atrocities we experience drive us to the brink of madness. We encounter fear, anxiety, depression, nightmares, and hopelessness. Our horizons have become dark and melancholy, the smell of death has become the air we breathe, and blood has become the dew of our mornings. We have reached a stage where we envy the dead for their death, and wish we could lie beside them in their graves.

We have survived until now by a miracle: perhaps it is our resilience, but I cannot guarantee it to last forever. So we crave salvation as we hunger for our only meager meal every 24 hours. We hope for a salvation like that of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was fortunate enough to escape the jaws of Nazis and Vichy France. We need the luck of Strauss.

You can read more about Muhammad, his family, and his experiences over the past five years at jackdempseywriter.wordpress.com and on around 60 podcast programs on Palestinian subjects at the YouTube channel 37Dionysos.