By Mary Turfah / Mondoweiss
Through the fog of October 7 emerged the story of a woman, four months pregnant, whose abdomen was sliced open, her fetus stabbed while she and her children watched, and, when the stabbing was done, the woman was shot and killed, again in front of her children. This, according to Eli Beer, the head of an Israeli rapid response team who claimed he’d seen it “with [his] own eyes.” The story circulated quickly, expanding and contracting like an apocalyptic game of telephone. Another first responder offered the age of one of her children in his account, six or seven years old, and claimed the fetus’s umbilical cord was still attached, the knife left at the mother’s side when he found her.
Superficially, certain details raised suspicions: a fetus, at the end of four months of pregnancy, is about six inches long. Haaretz, Israel’s paper of record and liberal Zionist-leaning, discredited the story in a report published in early December after Israel had killed 15,000 Palestinians in Gaza alone (anti-Zionist outlets such as this one had established this well before).
The Israeli police said they hadn’t encountered such a body at all, and “no children 6 or 7 or near those ages were killed” in that settlement. The police added that these responders, without forensic training, were not qualified to determine age or cause of death. Of course, the point was never the victims, but this line, with which Beer closed his testimony: “These are not regular enemies.”
Atrocity propaganda is a form of psychological warfare that spreads “information about the crimes committed by an enemy, especially deliberate fabrications or exaggerations.” The goal isn’t to stop violence so much as to define the enemy—a monstrosity that threatens woman and child and future—who comes to embody this horror. It also maintains a convenient tautology: everything ‘they’ do is aggression, and everything ‘we’ do is retaliation.
Victimization and aggression become intrinsic states rather than descriptors of behavior. The differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are not material but essential: in the words of the current Israeli Prime Minister, ‘the children of light and the children of darkness.’ And after everything the children of darkness have done, to ask about Israel’s behavior, to call it aggression at all, is to sympathize with the enemy. To try and understand a state’s declared enemy’s behaviors—to suggest the enemy is anything besides a nebulous ideological sink—is to sympathize with the enemy. To recognize the enemy’s humanity is to sympathize with the enemy, and to sympathize with the enemy is to cede your own humanity. Everything ‘we’ do against the enemy is necessary; the violence must be ‘disproportionate’ because ‘this is the only language they understand.’ Nothing short of extermination is enough.
“Are you seriously keep on asking me (sic) about Palestinian civilians? What’s wrong with you?” a former Israeli Prime Minister snapped at a Sky News anchor who’d asked about one of the many consequences of the Israeli siege on Gaza, specifically what ‘no power’ might mean for babies in incubators. The former PM scoffed at the mention of Palestinian children, as though raising the fact of an enemy child’s humanity was a propaganda tactic.
“Atrocity propaganda begets atrocity,” wrote Paul Linebarger in a seminal book on war propaganda, first published in 1948. Atrocity propaganda is quite old, and certain stories are inevitably recycled. During the Irish Rebellion of 1641, English pamphlets circulated this one about Irish rebels, the language easy enough to make out if read phonetically:
“They being bloodthirsty salvages, not deserving of humanity, without any more words beate out [a man’s] braines, then they layd hold on his wife being big with child, & ravish her, then ript open her wombe, and like so many Neroes undanedly viewed nature’s bed of conception, [and] afterward tooke her and her infant and sacrifiz’d in fire their wounded bodies.”
The truth of these stories was neither here nor there—they evidenced the savagery of the Catholic Irish, who, per the English, wanted the total annihilation of Protestantism. The English slaughtered the ‘Irish rebels’—and a generous quantity of those who fostered, by existing under occupation, their emergence. These were ‘bloodthirsty savages’ (human animals), and they should be treated accordingly.
The pregnant woman, because she carries child and future, symbolizes both immense hope and vulnerability. Harm against her, if carried out with intention, can constitute a measure intended to prevent birth, which is evidence of genocide. Atrocity propaganda has no time for subtlety; the primitive brutes act with their bare hands to make their intentions explicit. On the hierarchy of intention, you can kill a woman and kill a child, you can kill a pregnant woman and leave her body intact. You can kill and dismember her. To kill her and kill the growing life inside her, one by one, leaves no room for questions of genocidal intent. These are stories for going to war. And, any person of honor should fight for their people’s future.
The story of the pregnant woman in the kibbutz reminded me of something I’d read a few months before, in an old print issue of Race and Class mailed to me by a friend in London. The issue, called The Invasion of Lebanon, came out in 1983, some months after the Israeli siege on Beirut and the Sabra and Shatila massacre. In the essay “Lebanon: an American’s view,” I came across this passage:
On 27 July 1981, Israeli jets (US-made F15s and F16s) had swept in from the Mediterranean. That raid, which occurred at mid-morning when the streets were full of women and children, killed over 250 people and wounded 1,100 more. A young Palestinian woman, eight months pregnant, was killed in the attack when shrapnel sliced into her abdomen. Her child, a premature infant girl, was taken to a nearby Red Crescent hospital and placed in an incubator. She survived, and the doctors and nurses named her ‘Filistin’ (Palestine).
It’s not quite the same story. This woman had been torn open by a bomb rather than a knife. The knife requires the assailant to tolerate their victim’s screams. The bomb privileges its users with the ability to kill at a remove. The difference between a bomb and a knife matters if the story is about means rather than ends, if the demonstration of violence addresses the killer before the victim.
Among the differences between atrocity propaganda and testimonies of atrocity is that the former seeks to preemptively justify the unjustifiable, while the latter starts and stops with the event. Testimony doesn’t seek to justify anything. Of course it fits into a larger narrative, a context, but it does not seek to be totalizing, to occlude time and space before and after, the way atrocity propaganda does.
Another difference between the two is how the listener is meant to receive the story. Atrocity propaganda prioritizes gruesome details to the extent that the victim is reduced to an object, a mirror for the perpetrator’s cruelty. The narrative trick is to make the listener blame the perpetrator for the erasure of the victim’s humanity, too.
Still another difference between testimony of atrocity and atrocity propaganda: The initial response to testimony is rarely anger. How, when you are facing a person, and it is about them and what they remember? As a survivor narrates, the worst details might be put away, to protect their dignity. You might sense this and let it pass, because the story does not belong to you, and the reason to act, in the case of Palestine, was established well before you existed. In this moment, before you is a person.
In early March of 2024, a Palestinian woman’s child, a five-year-old boy named Faisal, said they shot his mother in her belly, in front of him. His brother Adam watched his father die—writhing as his soul left his body, he told his aunt. Have you ever seen a soul leave a body? Faisal’s father and mother died in the same week, he said—as he spoke with the interviewer, the Palestinian filmmaker Bisan Owda (whom many of us know from Instagram), he struggled to get the timeline down. He moved between they ‘died’ and they were ‘killed.’ He used the verb takh for shoot; it sounded especially harsh coming from a mouth whose corners are almost tucked under baby fat. His mother, he said, was pregnant. In the seventh month. He said this particular phrase with a solemnity that outsized his tiny frame. His cheeks sunk as he strained himself to remember without expanding the horror in his eyes, blank, so that he could continue. Owda asked him about his favorite foods to distract him. He smiled, cautious even as his face gave. Owda ran her hand through a tuft of his hair, as his mother might have were she there to protect him.
As they testify to atrocity after atrocity, witnesses in Gaza are unafraid to acknowledge narrative gaps, to pause to think, to say ‘I don’t know.’ They struggle with eye contact, and then they don’t, and once again—as a memory floods their consciousness—they look away. A child can’t be trained to carry themselves like that, to struggle against a contracting posture.
Every act beyond the self requires some level of performance. In the interview with Bisan, Faisal performs the seriousness he imagines his testimony requires. He sits still, upright—although much of this is, in spite of himself, a child’s visceral response to touching a wound that will remain raw for a long time. And the interviewer performs some form of detachment so that she can do her job. She reaches to comfort him, then, as a disruption of one performance for another, one that takes infinite precedence. She prioritizes the person, the small child, in front of her, and she is obligated, to him and to his family and to her world, to assume the role of care-giver, in the literal sense. She does it, I am sure, reflexively. Just as he adopts the voice of an adult where he must. If he doesn’t, who else? His parents deserve the whole world from him, and he will give them everything. The story reveals itself how it will. It will shatter you whichever way it lands.
By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss
As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin.
Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.
Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes.
Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.
Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.
On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.
There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.
The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.
Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.
They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel
The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.
We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.
The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.
After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago.
What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.
“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”
“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality.
Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.
“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.”
Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed.
“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”
When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.
He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.”
I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows.
We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.
/sp
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Mary Turfah
Mary Turfah is a writer and medical student.