Nakba 2023

Monday, November 13, 2023
Letter from Saed, Aida Refugee Camp, West Bank
On the Nakba of 2023

Hello, Christine, thank you for your support! It means a lot to me. Sorry for the late reply, I have been so busy with the funeral of the boy that was killed in the camp. today, I have written for you a full report of how life is going on here. Nothing has genuinely improved since the previous update. Nonetheless, the situation in the West Bank continues to worsen by the second. For the past 38 days, we have been under a siege. They set up concentration camps in each city and town on the West Bank. We can’t move around freely in it. Armed settlers, aided by the IOF, are attacking Palestinian villages. Over 180 Palestinians have been killed by settlers and soldiers! One of them, a farmer, was picking olives on his land when he was shot by a hateful settler. 200 families got displaced and their houses were completely stolen by the settlers.

More than 2300 people (children, women, elderly men, and young men) were arrested in the last month, and 90% of them ended up in administrative detention, which means they have no charges against them, and the period gets renewed every six months. Showing support for Gaza or spreading news about it is enough for the IOF to storm your house in the middle of the night, demolish everything inside, beat your family, and arrest you. The situation in the prisons is horrific and beyond description! They have no food or water, and each cell 4*4 has more than 30 individuals! They are being tortured in ways that did not exist during the dark times in order to destroy their humanity and dignity.

Three prisoners were assaulted to death. They are unable to obtain a lawyer, and there is no monitoring. Israeli are deliberately trying to castrate young people and telling them “We want to forbid you of hearing the word (Dad) in your whole life”
How did we know this? It’s the testimony of the released prisoners and videos were recorded and broadcast publicly by the soldiers themselves. I don’t know what kind of impunity that they have to start doing what they have been doing for years publicly. We are not exposing them anymore! They are exposing themselves and what happened? As usual shameful silence by the whole hypocrite world especially the so-called leaders. Their long silence has allowed them to become complicit in this genocide by allowing Israel to perpetrate war crimes against 5 million defenseless Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as another 2 million inside the green line.

What is going on in the Aida refugee camp, where I live:

Since Israel erected an illegal military facility next to our camp, we have been subjected to daily attacks. In 2016, an American institution reported that the Aida camp was the most tear-gassed location in the world. What has changed in the previous month?
Daily raids at night and in the middle of the day. Using bulldozers to demolish the camps’ inadequate infrastructure. Every day, they rain deadly gas on the camp, but it’s no longer tear gas! I have never seen or smelled anything like that in my entire life, and It lasts up to 4 hours in the air. More than 60 persons were arrested from their homes without a valid reason.
One of them was a father of three girls who was thrashed in front of his daughters and had the video filmed by an Israeli soldier, which he later posted on TikTok.
A large number of individuals were shot with live ammunition. Two days ago, an Israeli homicidal sniper shot a 16-year-old child inside his home while he was studying, and he was left bleeding for hours until death. The boy’s house is just in front of one of Israel’s watchtowers. Unfortunately, our house is also directly in front of one of the watchtowers.

Death knocks at our doors every single day and it becomes our unwanted guest.
Maybe death saw how generous we are, since that it takes from us, our most beautiful children.
But believe me when I say that the coffins of children and the young are the heaviest coffins ever! These colonizers descended to the lowest level in human history.

We are not accepting our fate and we are not used to it, but it turns out that it is useless to speak out about it. We are still standing but gradually losing hope in humanity. Terms like “human rights, international laws, UN, humanity, western values, the end of slavery, the triumph of humanism and freedom of speech” have all collapsed like flies in front of our eyes and become “myths”. When the world reaches this degree of coldness of the scenes of murder and sorrow, and sees human bodies and children’s heads flying, and hospitals collapsing on patients’ heads, and their conscience is not touched; this is evidence that the world is no longer worth living in. The world has become colder, more aggressive, less humane, and more brutal than ever before in all of history. Besides, the Western media and their slogans of professionalism, responsibility, media ethics and neutrality fell greatly in this experience. I have been watching the news from the western side, we are literally being dehumanized and inferior! We have been taught that double standards are like a cracked mirror reflecting a distorted image of justice! What is happening to the Palestinian is unjust by every human principle. Anyway, you may hide the sun, but you can’t extinguish it

For 39 days, the Holocaust against the Palestinian people has been ongoing, and television screens around the world have been displaying everything in audio and video.
Mothers weep, children die, buildings collapse, people are exterminated, bodies of children are eaten by stray dogs, and Israel forbids their burial. Yet the world continues with its daily routine as if it were just a fantasy movie or another episode of the ‘black mirror’ series.
I had intended to pursue a master’s degree in international law, but I changed my mind! It’s yet another delusion that we’ve been following blindly.

Today, the situation in Gaza is horrific as it progresses to a higher level of devastation, with civilians dying and being injured as a result of unwarranted bombing. For the Israelis, killing Palestinians with bombs isn’t enough; they’re also pushing death by thirst, starvation, lack of hygiene, and the collapse of health-care systems. 25 of the 35 hospitals were entirely shut down, and 7 of them were bombed. We are witnessing a reenactment of the “Holocaust and Holodomor.”
They continue to bomb residential buildings and people on the streets. They bombarded schools, churches (including one of the world’s third-oldest), refugee camps, hospitals, mosques, universities, and press buildings. Nobody has ever done something like that before. Nonetheless, the United States continues to assist, defend, and urge them to do so.
They continue to promote and perpetuate a horrible lie that only someone with a 2% IQ would believe (the Human Shield myth), as well as numerous other lies.
When you ask for proof, they will show you a cartoonist drawing. They’ve gotten to the point where they’re posting videos of massacres in Gaza and claiming they’re happening in Israel. These are not random individuals; they are Israeli officials.
In the Israel news investigation, they reported that there were no mass rapes, no beheaded babies and ⅔ of the people who were killed were soldiers and the rest were killed by their own forces. I will send you the links of the Israeli articles.

Hundreds of people are killed in Gaza every day. The official death toll now stands at over 11000 civilians, including over 4000 children and over 25,000 injured (77% of them are women and children). We simply cannot see them as numbers. They have names, hopes, dreams, families, and stories. In terms of population, that would be the equivalent of killing almost one million US citizens.

As a psychologist, I’m avoiding being around children. I no longer see them normal; every time my eyes meet a child, it comes to my mind the image that they are dead or being dismantled. When I get to sleep, I hear nothing except their screams. When a child smiled at me yesterday, I burst into tears. Every protection for our mental well-being was gone. Faith is our last remaining source of protection.

Finally:

The continuing genocide in Gaza is part of a 75-year plan to eradicate Palestinians and transform Palestine into a fascist and racist state called Israel. They, like other colonists, never recognized indigenous peoples’ rights. Again, this is not about Hamas. This is about Palestine and the Palestinians who have been denied their rights for decades by a Western-backed administration.

Simple questions that occur to me! Do we have the right to defend ourselves and demand our liberation after being colonized and occupied for almost 75 years? Why is it that everyone in Israel is in the army and has military training, and they are permitted to walk down the street with their rifles on a normal day?
Do you see us? Do you hear us? Are we visible to you?
Because English is not my first language, I’m wondering if the rest of the world understands what ‘genocide’ is. What should we do to put an end to this endless oppression? What have the globe and international laws brought us in the last 75 years of stealing and killing except feeble remarks condemning it without taking any action?

This will be my final and last plea to the world’s free people.
You should first save yourselves from participating in this genocide.
You must speak up and reject the genocide being committed in your name and with your taxes. Save what remains of humanity on this earth. Then, be the last voice of children, women, and oppressed people everywhere, not only in Palestine.

The first responsibility is to end this massacre, and then you must hold Israeli and Western politicians accountable for their backing of this unprecedented genocide and ethnic cleansing. You should be careful of terrorists dressed in finery who cast their atrocities against humanity onto others. These individuals have a great deal of blood on their hands.

As a refugee, I’ve spent my entire life trying to imagine what happened to our country in 1948. I was secretly blaming my grandparents for their leaving at that point.
Only today did I become aware of the Nakba’s circumstances, when I watched human flesh burned in Gaza and children’s heads chopped with the support of all the world.
Today I realized what happened to us during the Nakba, and how it is impossible for a disappointed person not to go to the sea to escape the slaughter.

What I’m saying is that “massacres” do not terminate the indigenous. It is not easy for people of rights to die, and it is impossible for the weak to forget those who attempted to exterminate them. The weak will pretend to forget until they get the power, at that point they will burn their memories and rewrite new ones. We are like seeds; if you bury us, we will sprout anew. I can assure you that we shall be as tall as our olive trees. We shall continue to struggle not only for ourselves, but for all oppressed peoples around the world. We will rise from the ashes like the phoenix. We shall never abandon our homelands. We are not wishing any human being to witness what we have witnessed. So please don’t let us down because we will never let you down!
As it is known, “the power of people is stronger than people in power.”