16th October 2023

Diaries of displacement in Southern Gaza.

The other side of death, destruction and fear.

I fall asleep at four and wake up a minute later to find that it’s past six. I go to the bakery, where there’s a long human line standing waiting, and after three and a half hours more than the amount of sleep I’ve had, my turn arrives. I’m told I can’t take more than one bundle of bread. I try to explain my situation, but he doesn’t listen. I tell him we’ve been displaced, we’re staying with a family here, together there are seventy of us, including children, and two bundles of bread won’t be enough, so he says I can go back and stand in line again if I want more. I take the bread, mutter a prayer and leave.

I arrive at the house after half an hour’s walk, and they tell me they need water. I take the jerry can, walk to the water filtration station, and join a queue longer than the last one. Three hours later, it’s my turn. I go back to the house after a long day and we tell the kids one glass of water will have to do; don’t waste it. I put my body down on the sofa to rest a little, then they tell me it’s nearly dinner time and they want bread and food from the supermarket—so I return for more queueing and more waiting and more nonexistent basic humanity.

In the evening, I promise them I’ll go back to the house in al-Shuja'iyya in the morning, but ten minutes later we redivide the available space so as to make the most of every inch where a child or adult might sleep—even the passages and the entryway—and cover the floor of the tiny flat with thirty bodies. We sure the women and children have all got room, then distribute ourselves out, two sleeping on the couch and two staying awake in case something happens, God forbid, so they can quickly wake everyone else up, not that that’s necessary, because after fifteen minutes to half an hour of sleep, we will all wake up anyway to the sound of heavy bombing, and the children will cry until their mothers put them back to sleep… And so on until day breaks and the cycle begins again.

1st November 2023

Good evening, world.

Internet and phone connections were cut off last night, and what I once considered impossible suddenly became reality, but under different conditions. The postman can’t make his rounds amid the bombing and destruction, and in any case the newspapers he carries will bear the same headline each day: ‘Gaza is being exterminated. Life sets each evening and does not rise again the next day.’ Maybe tomorrow’s edition will contain the news of my death.

This is what was on my mind at the moment communications were disconnected and we found ourselves cut off from the world, and the world cut off from us and what was happening to us. The bombing became more intense and we placed our hands on our hearts because this was what we feared and here it was, getting closer—we were going to die in silence without the world knowing anything, to the point we couldn’t even record our last moments or shout out our last words.

I live in a small neighbourhood called al-Shuja'iyya, which is on the eastern edge of Gaza City. Every night, the sound of the explosions is constant—explosions of different kinds, coming from different directions—and with every explosion that rocks our house and our hearts, we hold on tight to one another, knowing that at some point there’ll be an explosion we won’t hear because it will have already blown us up.

This is why I’m writing now; it might be my last message that makes it out to the free world, flying with the doves of peace to tell them that we love life, or at least what life we have managed to live; in Gaza all paths before us are blocked, and instead we’re just one tweet or breaking news story away from death.

Anyway, I’ll begin.
My name is Noor Aldeen Hajjaj, I am a Palestinian writer, I am twenty-seven years old and I have many dreams.

I am not a number and I do not consent to my death being passing news‫.‬ Say, too, that I love life, happiness, freedom, children’s laughter, the sea, coffee, writing, Fairouz, everything that is joyful—though these things will all disappear in the space of a moment.

One of my dreams is for my books and my writings to travel the world, for my pen to have wings that no unstamped passport or visa rejection can hold back.

Another dream of mine is to have a small family, to have a little son who looks like me and tell him a bedtime story as I rock him in my arms.

My greatest dream is that my country will have peace, that children will smile more brightly than the sun, that we will plant flowers in every place a bomb once fell, that we will trace out our freedom on every wall that has been destroyed. That war will finally leave us alone, so we can for once live our lives.

Noor Aldeen Hajjaj

Gaza, Palestine, 28/10/23

2nd November 2023

Today I went for a little walk around the city—or rather, what remains of it.

I saw how its colours have contracted into one single colour. Where did this grey come from, this grey that has the power to impose itself upon all the colours we know, if not bearing tonnes of explosives?

I walked across vast amounts of rubble, trying to tread carefully, as if in a minefield, so as to avoid every spot where children had sketched out dreams upon memories.

I wasn’t afraid of touching frayed electrical cables in the street; they were just hangman’s nooses, witnesses to all this destruction.

I saw mountains of shrouds being carried on a truck to the last and only safe place on earth.

There are no funeral processions in which martyrs are carried upon shoulders to their final resting place, because their entire families—martyrs just like them—accompany them to the grave.

Perhaps the last wish they made before the bombs fell was the same we all make: if we are to die, then let us die together. We don’t want to give death the chance to leave one of us alone, grieving for the rest of his or her life over the life the others should have lived.

I passed by a school for displaced children, and my heart bled to see how humanity can be violated, how our basic needs can be stripped down such that we end up haggling over a gallon of water or a paracetamol.

Other people are walking in all four directions searching for a bundle of bread, or somewhere to charge the batteries of the torch they use at night, or water that’s safe to drink, or other basic necessities that aren’t available any more.

All this was just in the course of a short walk, no more than thirty minutes, which took me up and down a few nearby streets. Most of the houses hadn’t survived the strikes that hit their roofs, and had fallen to the ground, collapsing on top of their inhabitants.

God, the scale of the catastrophe. Words and images cannot come close to conveying it. We can’t bear all this any more…

We’re so tired. Please God let this be over sooner, and not later.

Noor Aldeen Hajjaj was killed on the 2nd December 2023, when Israeli war planes bombed and destroyed fifty residential buildings in al-Shuja'iyya.