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A writer from Gaza remembers [1]

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Date: 2023-10-19  

On October 18 in a special edition of The Link (Americans for Middle East Understanding), a young writer, Rawan Yaghi, published her memories of enduring several attacks on Gaza. The details help us know what the people of Gaza are currently suffering.

When I was 16, I remember lying down on the floor in our Gaza home right after Israel bombed an UNRWA storage facility and thinking how little value my life had to the world, what kind of a human I had to be for the world to look the other way when my limbs would be torn. I remember hoping I'd be killed with my family and not have to withstand the burden of life if they passed.

I remember, in 2018, the dehumanizing pressure of an Israeli airstrike on a TV station a few hundred meters away from my home, 'sheltering' in the farthest room of the house, my then one-year-old niece, Juju, holding onto my mother fearing the air pressure would take her away. I remember all of this and know that it was a fraction of what every man, woman, and child in Gaza is experiencing every second.

I feel all the dehumanization and betrayal, amplified a hundred times when my brother tells me they fell asleep with their shoes on and their backpacks of essentials on their shoulders, or when my other brother can't answer the phone because Juju and her 3-year-old brother, Jad, are trembling constantly while their neighbourhood is completely leveled to the ground. Or when my brother tells me that our father cried while leaving our home in Gaza City. I feel all this pain.

But I hope very dearly in my heart, like that 16-year-old girl on the floor, that our fight for life will prevail. I hope that there are those in the world who see my niece as a human even as she holds her breath through hundreds of airstrikes. I hope, maybe naively, that freedom isn't just a word. That she will live in a world where she doesn't tremble in fear. That the power of those few of us will triumph against colonization, racism, and dehumanization, against the brutal and ugly face of humanity.

Rawan Yaghi

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/19/2200384/-A-writer-from-Gaza-remembers?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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