No Longer Able to Process

When I wrote the first of these posts in November 2023 I thought it would be a one-off. That was many lifetimes and more than fifty thousand extinguished lives ago. I have nightmares of starving figures wandering through scorched terrain, with fire coming from the sky and the earth, nightmares that are replicated by the images I find on my screens when I wake up. I am used to being with people who do not flinch when I tell them that friends have lost thirty, fifty, a hundred family members, sometimes in one night; I am used to looking at babies and thinking: ‘At least they have their limbs.’ To reread the anger and outrage voiced by Palestinians when the carpet bombing started in October 2023 seems almost refreshing. We actually believed that somebody might care? I think in my darkest moments.

Last Tuesday night I listened to the actor and former artistic director of the Jenin Freedom Theatre, Ahmed Tobasi, from Artists on the Frontline, speak about his performance work in Jenin refugee camp, in Israeli prisons and in European theatre spaces. ‘Theatre is everything,’ he said: not just a way of entertaining people, but a form of resistance, cultural resistance, a third intifada. Touring Europe with a play about his life, he says it drives him crazy to hear artists say they are not involved in politics ‘because they are artists’. ‘What? They are out there already using their voices! That’s already political.’

Growing up in Jenin refugee camp, he said, boys learned that they had three options for the future: to be a prisoner, a martyr or physically maimed. When the Jenin Freedom Theatre’s founder, Juliano Mer Khamis, was assassinated, the importance of theatre, that it could be perceived as a threat, became clear to Tobasi, as it did when the Israeli prison guards called everyone out of their cells in the middle of the night after a disc showing a production he’d staged in the prison fell into the hands of the governor. Theatre, Tobasi believes, can help explain not only what is wrong with the occupation and with Israeli society (they’re a mess, he says; the only things that brings them together is us, the Palestinians) but what needs to improve in Palestinian society too.

‘I am no longer able to process what is about to happen.’ The message from my friend Ghassan Abu Sita gets stuck in my head, going round and round, hanging between me and the sunny London streets, making me wonder again what I could be doing that I am not doing to try to stop this. What is happening has been clearly announced by the Israeli government: the eradication of Gaza City, of the north of Gaza. The displacement once again of a population that has been expelled multiple times with nowhere to go, with crippled access to food, water, shelter, the internet. More journalists and civil defence workers killed. More hospitals bombed. More young men killed by sniper fire as they try to reach aid or return with it to their families. Ghassan recently tried to return to Gaza to work as a doctor, but was denied entry to the ‘only place in the world where he feels at home’. Another friend tells me that of thirty doctors seeking to enter Gaza via Jordan with Médecins sans Frontières, only six were allowed in.

K wrote from the north of Gaza: ‘Gaza’s children haven’t been to school in two years. They’re changing. They’re beginning to think: “I will never go to school. I will just work to bring my family food or water.”’

Last month, the White Kite Collective brought the words of writers from Gaza to the stage of the Bush Theatre. Akram Sourani imagined a new high school exam for Gaza’s children:

What’s the difference between Emirati, Qatari and Unicef tents in terms of the number of flies in each?
Calculate how many hours you can walk barefoot on scorching sand from the tent to the bathroom and back.
How many times have you gone to the bathroom without ‘toilet paper’, and how many times have you gone to the bathroom without a ‘bathroom’?
What’s the difference between the sound of fava bean cans, kidney bean cans, and the sound of your stomach after eating lentils?
If you still have teeth, do you brush them with sand or seawater?

Ahmad Abo Amreen:

As you bit into the loaf of bread made from spoiled flour
You try hard to ignore its foul taste and revolting stench
Then suddenly – a worm, or maybe a cluster of them
Writhing at the heart of the bread
You push them aside with practical indifference
And keep eating as if nothing happened
Other times, you might not even notice them at all –
Swallowing them whole without realising
Thanks to God

Sami:

On day seven, they took seven of us to a hall, empty of any furniture, nothing but soldiers. We all of us were still in our underwear. They took the youngest one of us – he was maybe seventeen or eighteen years old. In front of us, they tore his underwear. They raped him. Three soldiers raped him one after another. I tried to close my eyes but they beat me on my head threatening that I would be next if I closed my eyes. The young boy was screaming with pain and shame.

Omar Hamad:

I kept walking and walking and walking seeking a refuge to protect us from the weariness of the empty days.

Upon a bare patch of sand, barely eight square metres – if even that – we claimed a space. Twenty metres of nylon, some overpriced wood, and a few ropes: this is how a scar is carved into the land and named a ‘tent’. A structure tasked with sheltering an entire family and containing all their needs within its thin, flapping sheets.

Inside, there is no bathroom, no kitchen, no floor, no supports, no covers, no warmth – nothing but a heavy heart, a wandering mind, an empty stomach, thick fog and an unbearably long night whose only companions are sorrow, the loss of loved ones, the wind, the rain and a cold that pierces the bones. And so, we wait for death.

Then, I pick up my pen and write on the outside of the tent: ‘Everything was deadly, but we did not die.’

Ahmad al-Adawi:

I am an artist … I have never carried a weapon. I carried a brush and kept painting life amidst death so that my heart wouldn’t collapse.
But I am also a father.
A father trying to steal moments of warmth in a storm of fear.
Trying to draw a smile on the faces of his three daughters while the walls tremble and the ground splits beneath their feet.
Every night, I hold them close, wrapping their souls in mine.
I invent colourful bedtime stories, because reality is only fit for tears.
I hide the sound of drones with songs from my imagination,
so they won’t know that the world has chosen silence as we burn.

Sameh Shahrouj:

You think I’m here to die.
You think that’s all we know how to do –
bleed, bury, break.
But listen.
I grow things.
Tomatoes in rusted cans.

Hiba Abu Nada, killed aged 32 with her family under bombardment on the evening of 20 October 2023:

In our books, hunger and bread are synonyms,
light and darkness all broken shards.
I have learned to find hope in the extremes of love
and rainclouds in the desert of rhymes.

Fatima Hassouna, a photojournalist featured in the documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, killed with her family in an airstrike on 16 April 2025:

We, we’re dying here every day in many colours and shapes. I die a thousand times when I see a child suffer; I splinter, I turn into ashes. It hurts me, what we’ve become. This nonsense hurts me, and this monster that eats us every day: it hurts.

It is hard to process what is happening now. Israeli forces are destroying Gaza City by bombing entire blocks. No buildings remain in the Zeytoun area, once part of the walled old city, home to the fifth-century church of St Porphyrius and the 14th-century Mamluk al-Shamah mosque.

Israeli officials declared on 27 August that the forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza City was ‘inevitable’ and ‘unavoidable’ but claimed there was space for them in the south, in Deir al-Balah and al-Mawasi.

The mayor of Deir al-Balah responded by saying there is not a single spot left to accommodate more tents for displaced Palestinians. The coast is overcrowded, the eastern part of the city is under bombardment, infrastructure has collapsed and the water desalination plant is barely operational. The Mezan Centre for Human Rights reports that people are sleeping on the streets and in public squares.

On 22 August, famine was confirmed in Gaza. ‘After 22 months of relentless conflict,’ the IPC reported, ‘over half a million people in the Gaza Strip are facing catastrophic conditions characterised by starvation, destitution and death.’