13 October 2024

Olive trees do not bend

A couple of days ago, I did what I had not done in over a year. I switched on BBC Radio 4 to see if I could bring myself to listen to how they present the news of Gaza. The news presenter said 30 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza.

Strange because Palestinian journalists in Gaza, who have been covering every massacre and all the horrors that follow, are saying that what is happening in Jabalia right now is the worst they've ever seen.

I later spoke with one of the Palestinian people I am working with. It’s a question I ask him almost daily. How his father in law is and how his mother is and how his wife is. And her little brother who would read every single name on the list of people each night who were permitted to leave Gaza, to see if his family was on the list. And his grandmother. And his friend who visited family under the rubble until the Israelis took the rubble away for the fake port at Gaza.

He tells me about each of them. This has been going on since the start of the genocide. I find myself desperate to know more about each of them. How they are feeling. What they are going through. To the point that I can only ever see what's happening in Gaza through the prism of their lives, past and present.

His father in law is in Gaza in very bad conditions. He refused to leave as he wanted to get the certificates of his daughters' university attainments so that they could continue their education in Egypt.

Anyway, on this occasion, he told me that sadly, they lost more family. That they found news on a Telegram page announcing that the family of that name had been killed by Israeli soldiers. That in one house in Jabalia camp there were 70 family members. That the Israeli occupation had split people up into different rooms in the house, mostly women and children. That he had been terrified to call any one of them in case one of them has hidden a mobile phone and the Israelis hear it.

They have heard nothing since. He and his family assume without putting it into words that the worst has happened and that they are gone.

Which brings me to the question, how come the death toll I know of in Gaza through just the people that I speak to is many times higher than the numbers reported by the BBC?