Our shattered humanity lies buried in Gaza
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full screen Sadeel Naghnaghiye was 15 years old when she was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier on June 23 last year. She died after a day in hospital. Photo: The Freedom Theatre
I Gaza vet we don’t know how many children as adults took their lives in 2023. We know that in the last three months of the year, a five-figure number of little people were killed, all of whom were the center of the universe for someone.
In Israel, 36 children were robbed of their lives in one day in October. All of them were the center of the universe for someone.
In the West Bank, 121 children were deprived of their lives during the past year. All of them were the center of the universe for someone.
One of the children called Sadeel and she was fifteen years old. She lived in the Jenin refugee camp. For many years we were neighbors and Sadeel often played with us. I wish you, the reader, could see her when she was playing. When she forgot herself for a moment.
Even play is not free in Palestine, most children are also deprived of their imagination. But in Jenin’s refugee camp, the children grow up with a theater in the neighborhood. At Frihetsteatern, the imagination and creativity of both children and adults are awakened. Theater is dangerous because it not only shows that another reality is possible, it creates another reality in every person who finds a home there. It always starts with play.
Early weekend mornings when others were taking a nap and the yard was quiet and empty, Sadeel knocked. She rarely said anything more than good morning, stepped over the threshold and began to play. Often in the little kitchen I found Rabish, the flea market that sells things thrown away by Israelis, which are ferried to Jenin on truck beds. From the beginning, the kitchen was probably a chest of drawers and it looked too sad, I got it for next to nothing. After I painted and sat in a sink and faucet, also found at rabish, imagination did the rest.
“Shatura Yasmina”, by Sadeel in such a grown-up way to my two-year-old daughter, praised her while instructing her in the arts of pretend cooking. A little later in the morning, Sadeel’s cousins also arrived, Islam and He died. Together with my Jasmine, they formed a four-leaf clover.
No wonder Sadeel looked at me with anger in his eyes when that four-leaf clover was broken after six years. Jasmine had another homeland, it turned out.
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fullscreen Children in the audience at “The Freedom Theatre” in Jenin. “The theater is dangerous because it not only shows that another reality is possible,” writes Johanna Wallin. Photo: The Freedom Theatre
The night of it On June 19, 2023, the Israeli army stormed Jenin’s refugee camp. Sadeel’s family lives right by one of the entrances to the camp. When military jeeps rolled out of the camp early in the morning, Sadeel was already out in the family’s small courtyard.
If she was just tired in the morning, I have thought a thousand times but who can sleep during an invasion, no one answered. No one sleeps through gunfire, explosions, tear gas seeping in through the windows. Sadeel picked up his cell phone and filmed. A soldier in one of the jeeps shot her in the head.
Sadeel’s favorite toy at us was a kaleidoscope. When we moved from Jenin to Sweden, the kaleidoscope stayed with Sadeel. While she fought for her life in an intensive care unit for a little over a day, I held on to the image of Sadeel lost in the symmetrical patterns of the kaleidoscope and wished that what she saw for herself was precisely the beautiful, as layers of the universe.
At the funeral, Sadeel’s green and white striped school uniform lay on top of the bier carried by her classmates.
pullquoteAs relatives of a child who was killed, they are now considered a threat, precisely because they were deprived of a child
The army came back two weeks later, in the largest invasion in twenty years – but it was surpassed in the autumn. Sadeel’s family sought shelter inside the Freedom Theatre. Their own house was taken over by soldiers, a routine operation which, among other things, allows them to go from house to house by breaking down the walls and to shoot at people in the street outside by making holes big enough for gun muzzles in the outer walls.
The theater building was attacked and Sadeel’s father, uncle and cousin were taken to a military base for questioning. As relatives of a child who has been killed, they are now considered a threat, precisely because they have been deprived of a child.
A boy named Ahmed, was killed the same day as Sadeel. He was also fifteen years old. I can’t tell you anything more about him because I didn’t know him, I can only testify that his death too was announced through the minarets of the mosques and that the neighborhood flocked to Ahmed’s home to mourn with his loved ones.
The children who filling the five-figure number in Gaza, all of whom were the hub of life for someone, their names the minarets cannot call out, even the minarets that are still intact. The deaths of those children are layers of catastrophes piled on top of each other.
pullquote No revenge, no further devastation, no continued oppression, brings anyone back to life
Many of them died buried under the remains of their family home but they did not die of any natural disaster. They were killed by adults who made the choice to kill them while others made the choice to watch, or look away. Some make the choice to doubt whether those children ever lived and ever died. And if they died, it was someone else’s fault. The children’s own, maybe even.
We will never forgive you for being forced to hold up our dead children in front of the camera as evidence for youwrites one of the many in Gaza who via their cell phones live-stream the annihilation for us to see, for us to be appalled enough to demand that it end.
No revenge, no further devastation, no continued oppression, brings anyone back to life. There is only us, the living. There is only this world that continues to look at our burned bodies, our disfigured children, our obliterated neighborhoods, our shattered humanitywrites the poet Mosab Abu Toha.
Johanna Wallin is a writer, editor and translator who spent nine years in Palestine, mainly in the Jenin refugee camp and worked at Frihetsteatern, The Freedom Theatre.