Chris Hedges: Israel Cannot Be Allowed to Erase Gaza’s Stories

Joshua Scheer

Genocide seeks to destroy not only a people but the memory of their lives. Speaking on his Requiem for Gaza book tour, Hedges describes how he and illustrator Joe Sacco interviewed 29 Palestinian families who had escaped to Egypt, documenting the destruction through the people forced to endure it. He recounts testimony about doctors and journalists being targeted and argues that the assault extends beyond killing and demolished buildings to the destruction of a people’s history, culture and memory.

A child’s exam paper. A wedding album pulled from the rubble. A teddy bear left behind when a family flees its home. These are the fragments of Palestinian life Chris Hedges brings before his audience—evidence of people whose hopes, routines and relationships disappear behind the bloodless language of military briefings. In this talk, the distance between that language and the lives it conceals becomes unbearable.

Then he reads the story of a family briefly returning home during a ceasefire. Children carefully put away their toys, as though good behavior might allow them to stay. A mother confronts the birthday-party list still on her kitchen whiteboard and mourns a sister killed with her husband and their four children. Elsewhere, relatives search the rubble for bodies, buy fuel to keep an excavator running and bury their loved ones in curtains because there are no shrouds.

These lives demand more than the ritual expressions of concern that allow governments to acknowledge suffering while evading responsibility. Drawing on decades of war reporting, Hedges insists on the obligation to preserve the evidence and the names: so the dead cannot be reduced to disputed statistics, and those responsible cannot later claim that nobody knew.

The transcript of Chris Hedges’ remarks appears below.

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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, best-selling author & activist

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Editor’s note: This transcript has been edited for punctuation and readability. Timestamps, verbal fillers and false starts have been removed. Some names and passages are unclear in the supplied automated transcript and are marked accordingly. This text has not been checked against the recording.

Chris Hedges: Well, thank you. Thank you very much.

One of the places that I was disinvited from was the University of Pennsylvania. I was scheduled to speak there on Palestine, and they didn’t like the fact that I wrote an article comparing Zionist terrorism to ISIS: foreign fighters, foreign money, and, of course, the imposition of outside forces to dominate and ethnically cleanse, which is what the caliphate was and what Israel is.

This book had its genesis in a phone call that Joe Sacco, the cartoonist, made to me just a couple weeks into the genocide. Now, if you don’t know Joe’s work, you should. I saw they have a couple copies of his books out there, Palestine, as well as Footnotes in Gaza.

Footnotes in Gaza I consider one of the masterpieces of the Palestine-Israel conflict. Its genesis was in a magazine article that Joe and I wrote for Harper’s Magazine called “A Gaza Diary,” where we went and chronicled life in a Palestinian refugee camp in Khan Younis, day by day, without interviewing any officials. No Israeli officials, no Fatah officials. It was written off the ground.

We were actually there one afternoon when the kids got out from school. The Jewish settlers were still in Gaza. I speak Arabic, and I heard over the loudspeaker of this armored Israeli jeep, “Ta’al,” which means “come.” Then I heard them begin cursing—[Arabic phrase unclear], which I won’t translate—and this kind of stuff.

These little kids—we’re talking about nine- or 10-year-old kids—picked up rocks, which is what they wanted, and kind of threw them feebly toward this armored jeep. The Israeli soldiers got out of the jeep and shot them.

We not only were there, but we had the day, the time, the names. We went to the hospital afterward to verify the wounds and, in some cases, the funerals.

As you can imagine, when this was published, it set the Zionist world alight. It was actually far harder in those days to stand up and speak on behalf of Palestinian rights. I think there’s, because of the genocide, a much broader understanding of the nature of the Zionist project in Palestine.

But also, in the course of that article, we had interviewed elderly survivors from the massacres that Israel had carried out in 1956. It occupied Gaza for 100 days, and they lined up boys and men against the walls in Rafah and in Khan Younis.

The editors, nervous—the Zionist lobby is a powerful force, even at Harper’s—took it out. This incensed Joe, who then scraped together whatever money he could and went back several times, hunted down other survivors, and wrote this book. He calls it Footnotes in Gaza because it’s a moment in Palestinian history that very, very few people, even many Palestinians, know anything about.

So Joe called and said, “We have to do something. We’re getting old.”

He told me after Footnotes in Gaza, “I’ll never do another book like this again.” But I think we felt a kind of moral imperative to write this book.

I, as you heard, was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I spent seven years in the Middle East. I was based in Cairo. But because of my Arabic, and I think also because I wasn’t Jewish—the New York Times bureau in Jerusalem, everyone was Jewish. In some cases, these reporters had children in the IDF. They did not speak Arabic. They did not want to go to Gaza.

So I was sent to Gaza and lived in Gaza for weeks and sometimes months at a time. If anyone knows Gaza, I was at the [hotel name unclear]. None of this exists anymore. My office in the central square of Gaza, of course, has been destroyed.

Like anyone who’s worked in Gaza, we have lost colleagues and friends. As the genocide progressed, the way those colleagues and friends were lost is that we would hear from them periodically, and then we just stopped hearing from them at all.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the numbers of dead are far, far higher than the official figures. I know this because I have friends whose extended families were completely wiped out and are buried under the rubble, as Israel took down entire apartment blocks. None of them are registered because their bodies never appeared in a morgue or hospital.

I think that’s one of the reasons why Israel continues to refuse to allow the foreign press into Gaza and has mounted an unprecedented assassination campaign against Palestinian journalists and media workers, unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

I covered a lot of war. When I got to Sarajevo, 45 journalists had been killed, but nothing like Palestine.

We went to Egypt, and Ruba, who translated for us and arranged the interviews—it was very labor-intensive because Palestinian families in Egypt have no legal rights. They can’t work. They can’t send their children to school. So they live very precarious lives and are very reluctant to speak to outsiders.

I think every single interview was through a connection, through somebody we knew. But then Ruba had to—because Cairo is so vast. It’s 20 million people. I don’t know if anyone’s been to Cairo, but Cairo drivers, I mean, stoplights are irrelevant.

We were actually driven around by a friend of mine, [name unclear], who is a kamikaze driver, like all Egyptian drivers. His idea of driving a car is that it doesn’t matter which direction you go as long as it’s pointed in the right direction.

Literally, he would get on ramps and think the traffic was too congested, and he’d just back up. He’d back up on four-lane highways going to Alexandria. Anyway, as Ruba said, “I can’t believe he’s a friend of yours.”

[Laughter]

You couldn’t do an interview in the morning and then get to the other side of Cairo in the afternoon. Ruba was just constantly on WhatsApp.

But I think we felt, both of us, given the amount of time that we had spent in Gaza, had a moral responsibility to do this book.

I think at first we naively thought that we would get into Gaza, and then it became very clear that that was not going to happen. So we went to Cairo and interviewed these 29 families, and then we write the story of the genocide through the experiences of those families.

As much as I know about Gaza, carrying out those interviews made clear for me realities from the genocide that I think Joe and perhaps Ruba, even myself, were not aware of.

One was the very systematic targeting of the intellectual class from the inception: doctors, writers—Palestine produces great writers. I just was in Ireland, which also produces great writers—and journalists, of course.

Carrying out these interviews, it was just clear. That’s why Israel allowed Palestinians to keep their phones, because they use the phones as tracking devices, of course.

We interviewed many doctors. We actually interviewed doctors in Gaza by phone. Doctors would be either leaving their shift—this was also true for journalists. Journalists would literally get off the air and then, often within minutes, be murdered.

Doctors would often get off a shift, get back to their apartment, and the drones would attack and obliterate that apartment. So you might have 10 apartments, but it was the doctor’s apartment, with his family, that was completely destroyed.

One of the very disconcerting things about this work is that everyone we interviewed has everything on their phone in terms of pictures, including the pictures of dead children being dug out from under the rubble with their chalky faces and everything else.

This ended up, of course, being very important to Joe because Joe is extremely conscientious about making sure that what he draws is reality. Since we could not get into Gaza, these pictures became extremely important.

He takes one particular story with a child psychologist named Osama. There’s photographic evidence for almost everything, and then, of course, he sent it back to Osama to make sure.

I remember when we did a book called Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which was written out of the poorest pockets of the United States, including Camden, which at the time, per capita, was the poorest city in America.

We were in southern West Virginia and interviewed a miner named Rudy whose father had been killed in a mine accident. Rudy had gone into the mines, I think at the age of 17, in the ’30s. The only time he left West Virginia was to fight in World War II in the Battle of the Bulge, where he was very badly wounded.

Joe went back and researched all of the equipment that would have been in the mine in 1937 before he drew it out.

Joe, of course, as you may know, invented the genre of comic journalism, which, at the time, publishers of comics didn’t quite know what to do with.

The book was done, I think, because genocide is not just about the annihilation of a people, the annihilation of their physical infrastructure—Gaza does not exist—but also erasure, also the obliteration of a history, the obliteration of their stories.

We wanted to preserve—it’s a small contribution—but we wanted to preserve their stories. We didn’t want their stories to be forgotten. We didn’t want their stories to be erased.

So much of my own work as a war correspondent was confronting that effort, whether it was in El Salvador—I’m aging myself, of course—whether that was in Bosnia or anywhere else. You would have massacres carried out in villages. Then, and this was true in every war that I covered, the military would attempt to hide that massacre by blocking the roads.

We as journalists had to walk in, like in Bosnia or Kosovo, with my satellite phone. Of course, at the time, they would often have snipers who would fire on us, and we would document what had taken place.

It didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be a massacre tomorrow. But I think we felt our job was to record it so that they couldn’t say it didn’t happen.

I remember one time in Kosovo, the Serbs had taken 23 villagers and tortured them, killed them.

You don’t travel in a war zone at night. Even when we got stuck at night, if we ever got stuck on a road at night, we would always turn the light on inside our car in the hopes that armed combatants could see that we were foreign journalists.

Everybody was waiting for the bodies to be returned. Of course, the Serbs didn’t return them in daylight, and all of the press left except for myself. I write about this in my book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. They’re Muslims, so their bodies will be washed, and they will be buried immediately.

I remember when finally, late at night, the truck arrived, and I was the only journalist. I climbed into the back of the truck with a Maglite, and I rolled back the bloody blankets and shone the light onto the faces of each of the victims to see whether they had been tortured or not. And they had been.

But if I hadn’t been there to record that—you might have had relatives—but it’s an outside source that comes in to document. It’s extremely important.

Just a little bit about the mechanics of this book. I’m going to read just one passage from it. My publisher, Simon & Schuster, told me, “Don’t even write a proposal. We’re not going to publish it.”

I had done a book shortly after the war in Iraq began called Collateral Damage. I did it with a great journalist, Laila Al-Arian. We interviewed 50 combat veterans from the war in Iraq. [Unclear phrase.] It was on the record. Every interview was taped.

We went back and checked their service records to make sure that they were in Fallujah when they said they were in Fallujah. It was interviewing combat veterans who had either participated in atrocities carried out against Iraqis or witnessed them.

It was so like this book. It was so well documented that there was really no response. So it fell into a huge black hole in the United States as if it didn’t exist, which is what’s going to happen with this book, because it is so well documented. There’s just no answer.

It was interesting to watch the difference between the reception of Collateral Damage and the reception of this book and what happened in the United States.

Collateral Damage was excerpted in London in The Independent. All sorts of other papers—it had a huge impact. Here, it was as if it was never written.

That’s also what’s happening to Requiem for Gaza. In France, they did a printing of 11,000. It sold out immediately. They had to go back and do another printing. Although even in France, there were mainstream media outlets that usually interview Joe that stayed away from him.

But here, they won’t review it. You won’t see it. The New York Times has already said they’re not going to touch it.

Normally, the Times, although they hate me—they once reviewed one of my books and put it on the front of the Sunday Book Review. I’m not going to get into who wrote it, but you’re not supposed to review books—I know because I’ve reviewed books for the Times. You have to sign a thing saying you don’t know the author.

But this, they gave it to George Packer. George Packer and I fought over the Iraq War. He was a cheerleader for the war, and I, of course, denounced the calls to invade Iraq.

Ralph Nader said, “Look, just be happy they spelled your name right.”

I had another one of my professors say, “Don’t worry. No book’s that bad.”

They just lynched me. But in a way, it was a backhanded compliment because, of course, they felt they had to lynch me.

So this book was hard. It’s not an easy read.

I think by interviewing that number of people who have suffered from that kind of violence, you realize that it’s not just one story. It’s basically everyone’s story.

There were days that, honestly, both Joe and I just had to stop. The material was just so emotionally—and I think Ruba as well—overwhelming.

Since Simon & Schuster wouldn’t take it, I funded the book, which didn’t make my wife very happy. So buy it. I’ve promised her that we’ll make it back. Make sure you buy a copy. I’ll stay here till midnight signing. I promise.

Joe said, “It’s as if these people inhabited my room for the last year.” Now he said, “I can’t ever do anything like this again.”

I just interviewed Norman Finkelstein, who wrote Gaza’s Gravediggers. He said the same thing: “This is my last book.”

This isn’t my last book. I’m not there yet.

I’ll tell you briefly before I read. I covered the wars, as I mentioned, in Central America. We were all in our 20s—the comandantes, the combatientes, everybody. Now, of course, we’re all on the way out here.

I decided somebody needed to chronicle those insurgencies, and I’ve been tracking down all the old comandantes and combatientes from those wars. I was in Mexico. I was in Guatemala.

Perhaps the most important Guatemalan comandante, who was a doctor and then eventually became a comandante, lives in exile in France.

I was invited by Sinn Féin to address the Dáil, which is the Irish parliament—although the Irish said, “Don’t use the word ‘parliament.’ That’s British”—on the genocide. I also spoke at Trinity College.

Before I went there, I stopped and interviewed him in France. I think they also feel it’s time to talk. It’s time to tell these stories because if they’re not told, they won’t ever get told.

Although I did not travel with the Guatemalan rebels—they were very insular—I did travel a lot with the FMLN in El Salvador, and my Spanish is fluent.

I can tell when I do these questions that those questions can only be posed by somebody who’s traveled with rebel units, that understands the mechanics of insurgencies and how they work. So that is my next book.

I’ll just tell you one. Like all journalists, I love the minutiae and the anecdotal stuff that is just bizarre. My favorite being that one of the rebel leaders decided they needed a rebel song, which he wrote and then set to the tune of “Yellow Submarine.”

This vision of 150 Marxist-Leninist rebels carrying G3s, singing—I’m trying to get the words. Nobody can remember. I’ve got to get the words—singing “Yellow Submarine” as they go down to attack Guatemalan army bases is really rich.

So I’m going to read just a little bit of the book to give you a flavor of it before you go buy it.

What I’m going to read is not unique. I think by the end of this book, you just get the horror. As Kurtz said, “The horror! The horror!” It’s all there. It’s all there in terms of the patterns and how vicious and how methodical the Israeli campaign to annihilate Gaza has been.

So this is about our friend Afnan, a wonderful woman who actually came with us to many interviews.

[Hedges reads from Requiem for Gaza. The supplied transcript gives inconsistent spellings for several family members’ names; “Enshar,” “Naja,” “Maidu” and “Sebah” below are provisional. The ceasefire’s opening date is unclear in the supplied text.]

When the first ceasefire begins on November [date unclear], 2023, Afnan and her family are in Rafah with her parents. The ceasefire lasts for seven days.

Afnan asks her husband, Abdullah, on the evening of the second day of the ceasefire why they are not going home.

“It’s dark,” he says. “There is no transportation. There is a ceasefire. The war is over. We can wait.”

“I knew this would be the last time I would see my house,” Afnan says. “I get my kids up. I tell them to wear slippers. I tell Abdullah we are leaving. I am firm. He has no choice. The kids are ready. My bag is packed.”

They leave Afnan’s parents’ house. They find a car willing to take them back to their home. The driver charges 25 shekels, about $7.50. Before the genocide, it cost four shekels.

Afnan plans to stay in her house until the ceasefire ends.

When they arrive, the neighborhood is enveloped in darkness. There are no lights. Everything inside the house is as it was, although covered in dust.

The children rush to the couch.

“Mama,” they say, “we want to watch Paw Patrol.”

“I had a routine for the TV,” Afnan says. “They could watch cartoons for one hour a day. They thought we could return to our routine. I had to explain there is no electricity.”

The children run to the kitchen.

“Mama,” they say, “make us a smoothie.”

“I used to make them smoothies with fresh fruit,” Afnan says. “I had to explain again there was no electricity.”

“I had mixed feelings when I got home,” Afnan continues. “It was my dream to see my house again. It was where I and my family belonged. But I also knew I would lose it. I knew our home would be destroyed. I wanted to get as much from my home as I could in the little time I had left.”

She begins to clean.

“I wipe away the dust,” Afnan says. “I clean the kitchen. It is hard. There is no water.”

The children go to their playroom. Khadar, who is five, is joyfully reunited with Tutu, his teddy bear. He had cried himself to sleep every night since leaving Tutu behind.

“I always had to remind them to put everything back, to pick up their toys after they finished playing,” Afnan says. “You know kids. Sometimes they listen to you. Most of the time, they don’t. But during the two days we spent in the house, they carefully put everything back in its place.

“It’s as if they were saying to me, ‘Mama, we will be good boys. We need to stay in our house. We don’t want to leave.’”

“You think your children knew it was their last time at home?” I ask.

“They didn’t want to know,” Afnan answers.

Afnan collapses onto her bed.

“I had forgotten that feeling,” she tells us. “I looked at every object in the house and said goodbye. I knew I would never be there again. I took photos of the table, the living room, the chairs and the street out front. I filmed a short video of the street.”

Afnan continues: “I went to the kitchen and saw my new coffee machine. I loved it. I asked Abdullah, ‘Shall we take it with us?’ He just laughed.”

She stands in front of the whiteboard in her kitchen. She reads the list she had written out for her children’s birthday party 48 days earlier. She remembers her sister’s admonition to buy food as well as sweets.

Enshar, who worked as an accountant, was 33 when she was killed with her husband and their four young children on November 13, 2023. She was a year older than Afnan.

Israel carried out heavy airstrikes on Enshar’s neighborhood. Hamas members lived in the building next to Enshar’s apartment complex. The Israelis demolished four buildings, including the complex where Enshar and her family lived. It is unknown how many people were killed by these strikes.

“I promise to make food if you come back,” Afnan chokes out as she looks at the whiteboard.

Afnan is convulsed with grief.

“Before the war, I was attached to material things,” she tells us tearfully. “But nothing compares to losing my sister, even the loss of all the things I built for my children over the years.”

On the third day of the ceasefire, Afnan’s father arrives from Rafah. She goes with him, her mother and sisters, Sally and Janna, to visit Enshar’s grave in Nuseirat refugee camp.

Afnan tells us about hearing the news of her sister’s death, killed 11 days before the first ceasefire began.

“The internet had been cut,” Afnan says. “It had been a week since I had spoken with Enshar. We couldn’t follow the news. We did not know what was happening outside. I was worried. I had bad premonitions.”

Afnan and her family are in Khan Younis at the house of her brother-in-law. She is asleep. It is 11 p.m. Her phone rings. It is an unknown number.

“The connection is back on,” she tells Abdullah.

She answers the phone. It is a woman’s voice.

“Afnan, how are you?” the woman asks. “How are your kids? Are you okay? Is everything okay with you?”

“Who are you?” Afnan asks.

“I am your aunt, your uncle’s wife,” the woman says.

Afnan usually spoke with her uncle rather than his wife. They live in Rafah near her parents.

“Is everything okay?” Afnan asks.

“Everybody is okay,” her aunt says.

“Are my parents, my brothers and sisters okay?” Afnan asks.

“I just wanted to check on you,” her aunt says.

Her aunt hangs up.

Afnan is not reassured. She calls her back. Her aunt admits that she has heard that Enshar’s family have been killed.

“It’s not confirmed,” her aunt tells her.

Afnan is hysterical. She is sobbing.

“Can we go to Enshar’s house?” Afnan asks Abdullah.

“It’s too far,” Abdullah tells her.

It is a 30-minute drive by car to Enshar’s apartment from Khan Younis. But there is no transportation. Israeli warplanes roar overhead. There are huge explosions.

Afnan tries to reach her parents and brother. No one picks up. Finally, she gets through to her brother’s wife.

“Calm down, Afnan,” her sister-in-law says. “Enshar is okay now. She is a martyr.”

Afnan pleads with Abdullah to take her to Nuseirat. He refuses. It is too dangerous.

She finally reaches her mother.

“Enshar is under the rubble,” her mother says.

They are trying to find an excavator to help.

Afnan repeatedly calls her mother for updates over the next four hours.

“What’s happening? Is she alive? Did they dig her out?” she asks her mother.

Afnan speaks with her brother.

“Please tell me she is alive,” she pleads. “A lot of people stay under the rubble for two days and are pulled out alive. Maybe she is alive.”

“She is a martyr,” her brother tells her grimly.

Afnan wants to run to Enshar’s house and shout out her name.

“Why didn’t I go on my own?” Afnan asks us, her face streaked with tears. “I knew it was terrifying. Who cares? I hated that everyone could say goodbye to her but me.

“The last time we spoke, I told her to come to Rafah. She asked if we could find a car to pick her up from Nuseirat. But I knew that would be difficult. Cars are targets.”

“I can’t leave my house when it’s full of people,” Enshar finally told Afnan. “My husband’s sister and brother are here with nine children.”

Muhammad, Afnan’s older brother, manages to get an internet connection. He opens his Facebook page the day after Enshar’s death. He sees that a friend of Hassan, Enshar’s husband, has posted that the family has been killed.

“I was in shock,” Muhammad tells us. “I called Hassan’s friend. I said, ‘Hey, my name is Muhammad. I am Hassan’s brother-in-law. Please tell me what happened.’

“When someone wants to tell you bad news, he starts to calm you down so you can absorb the shock. At first, I thought only Hassan was killed. He’s the one who has to go out during the war. He’s the one to get food, to get supplies.

“His friend tells me Hassan is martyred. I ask, ‘What about my sister?’ He tells me, ‘Unfortunately, they are all gone.’ I tried to be calm.”

“I repeat the question. Do you know if it’s just Hassan?” Muhammad asks in desperation.

“They’re all dead,” Hassan’s friend tells him.

“I finished the call,” Muhammad says. “I thanked him. I started to cry.”

“Alhamdulillah,” Ali, Muhammad and Afnan’s father, says to us, choking back tears.

After the phone call with Hassan’s friend, Muhammad goes downstairs to tell his parents the news. His mother, Naja, begins to scream. Several neighbors, hearing the screams, rush to comfort her. The neighbors also start to cry.

Fifteen minutes later, one of Muhammad’s cousins, Maidu, arrives from Nuseirat despite the danger. He has heard the news. It is 5 p.m. It is impossible to drive in the dark.

“I knew I had to act fast,” Muhammad says. “I went to a garage to rent a car. I got a driver to take my parents and Maidu to Nuseirat.”

When Ali, Naja and Maidu arrive in Nuseirat, they find excavators attempting to remove the rubble. The entire block is destroyed. They dig through the rubble by hand. They work most of the night and the next day. They cannot locate the bodies. The excavators run out of fuel.

Ali buys fuel and pays the excavator operators to lift debris from his daughter’s apartment complex.

“I tried to map out where Enshar’s bedroom was located,” Ali says. “I told the excavator operators to remove the rubble at that spot.”

Naja is distraught.

“Oh Lord, I have faith in you. You can bring her back.”

She prays over the rubble.

Naja’s nephew suggests she and Ali take a break and get some rest. The couple refuse to leave.

“People were digging out bodies and body parts,” Naja tells us. “When they would find a body, they would ask people if it was their relative. After a while, they found Enshar’s sons, Ali and Adam.

“It was taking a lot of time to dig through the rubble. Finally, they told us they couldn’t continue because the fuel was about to run out.

“Ali was trying to determine where Enshar’s room was. He was convinced she was in her room. He pointed to a place and said, ‘I think this is where her room was. Let’s search here. We might find something. I will pay for the expenses, including bringing new equipment to find her.’”

Hassan, Enshar’s husband, and their daughter Janna are found the day after the bombing. Their bodies are under a thin layer of rubble near the building.

Two days after the airstrike, shortly before sunset, Enshar’s body is discovered 20 feet under the rubble. Her remains are close to where Ali and Adam were dug out. The body of the youngest son, Sebah, is never found.

Ali shows us photos on his phone of his dead grandchildren, including his namesake Ali, who was in second grade. Their corpses are covered in dust and debris.

Ali, Maidu and Hassan’s brother, [name unclear], carry the bodies of Enshar, Adam and Ali to the cemetery. The cemetery is full. Hassan and Janna were buried the previous day in Hassan’s grandfather’s grave.

There are no shrouds, so the bodies are wrapped in curtains. The gravediggers, working quickly because of the quadcopters and explosions, bury Enshar and her two sons in Hassan’s brother’s grave. They mark the grave with a rock.

Muhammad leaves Rafah to visit Enshar’s grave on the second day of the ceasefire. It is November 25, 2023. It takes a day to reach Nuseirat. He finds [name unclear] at the blasted remains of his [relationship unclear]’s apartment building.

[Name unclear] gives Muhammad a photo album with wedding photos and a paper he found in the rubble of the apartment. He draws a map for Muhammad to show where the family is buried.

Muhammad walks to the cemetery.

“I tried to follow the map, but I couldn’t find where they were buried,” Muhammad tells us. “I met some gravediggers. They asked who I was looking for. I told them I was trying to find my sister, her husband and their children.

“One of the gravediggers remembered the burial. He showed me where they were. I sat by the grave. I tried to talk to Enshar and her children. I could not speak. My tears spoke for me.

“There is only the photo album left and something I carry in my pocket.”

Muhammad pulls out the paper and shows it to us. He begins to cry.

“This is Ali’s exam paper,” Muhammad says of his eldest nephew. “He was eight years old.”

Naja is weeping.

“If I collected all the letters in the alphabet and made every single word in the language, I could never fully describe what we’ve been through,” Naja says.

“Enshar came to me in a dream. She said, ‘Who told you I am dead? I am here in front of you.’

“I asked her if I was dreaming.

“[Unclear passage.] ‘I know you came to visit my grave.’

“In the dream, I lifted up her children. I played with them. It was as if it was real.”

Afnan, her parents and sisters read passages from the Quran at Enshar’s grave. They return to Khan Younis to collect Abdullah and the children. Her father is worried that when the ceasefire ends, Afnan and her family will not be able to find transportation back to Rafah.

Afnan says goodbye to her house.

Four days after the ceasefire ends, Afnan’s house is demolished by Israeli bombs.

Thank you.