“Take me to Loop and kill me there,” Nadal implores, on the way to that cloistered place where two million people have been subjected to continuous bombing for five days. Where more than 1,100 have had their lives taken away. Where the houses remain reduced to rubble. Where the truce is a utopia. “We don’t want money, we don’t want to live in humiliation, enough is enough, we are tired,” cries a powerful voice that does not break. All of it tenses the vein in the neck of this Gazan from Khan Younis, from the patio of a pavilion in the city of Ramallah in the Occupied West Bank. There, for a couple of days, some 700 Gazans who were working in Israel when the war started. Everyone wants the same thing: to return home, even if it is no longer there.
-I do not want to be here. “I want to be in Gaza and if I have to die, I will die with my children,” says Amin, a father of seven, from the Daraj neighborhood in Gaza City.
–What’s the point of me living here and my whole family dying? No, we all die together; We are already done with life. We don’t want anything, just to die together – explains Ahmed, from Khan Younis.
–What has Gaza done? It is the resistance [en referencia a Hamás] who is killing them. What is the fault of us, the civilians, the families? We came to Israel. We work in Israel to feed our children, to strengthen them against fear, against hunger, against everything. Because? What is our fault today? – asks Sharif.
Interrogated by Israeli authorities
Less than a hundred kilometers away they await their destination. “Return to Gaza by any possible path,” defends Ahmed, Nadal’s brother. Return to Gaza to die. Dying because they are already dead. “We are still alive, our bodies are here, but we no longer have a soul,” he confesses to this newspaper. Over the past few days, these men have witnessed their homeland, their “beautiful Gaza,” fading away under the Israeli siege. Meanwhile, they were interrogated by the Israeli authorities, because, now, anyone who looks like them is a suspect.
Nadal, Ahmed and Ali are brothers. They live wall to wall with their respective families in Khan Younis. Or they lived. In the last four days, his life changed: from earning a living working in the central Israeli city of Petah Tikva to wandering the country that massacred his children. “We were locked inside Israel“Ahmed laments. “I came here naked“They took my mobile phone, they took my money,” he says a few hours after finding refuge in Ramallah after being liberated by the Israelis. Without the phone, he cannot know how his family is doing.
“We came to Israel to live with our children, to make them happy and change their lives, “We have been under siege for 18 years.”explains his brother Ali. They are some of the thousands of Gazans who received the Israel’s permission to work in its territory, as cheap labor. “If there are already 700 people here, where are the other 20,000?” he asks. Ehab Bessaiso, volunteer coordinator of this improvised shelter. Between accelerated calls and requests from newcomers, he still has time to be moved by the response of Palestinian citizens. “I am very proud to be part of the Palestinian family of Ramallah,” he says. Shaukiat 11 years old.
Enough
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Everyone – mostly men, the women are in hotels – wants to talk. Beyond their mortal desire, they ask that the world listen to them. “We want to tell the Arab League, the European Unionthe United Nations and President Abou Mazen [Mahmud Abás de la Autoridad Palestina] that we have had enough,” insists Nadal. “Enough is enough. Wake up!” he shouts. “What is happening to us is a mass exterminationit is prohibited internationally,” recalls this father of two children, ages two years and four months.
Fatigue sets his speeches on fire. “All our lives have been wars“, states Walid, after listing the different conflicts so far this century with their respective hundreds of deaths. He celebrates the revenge of Hamas against Israel, whom he describes as “the largest terrorist organization in the world.” Although it would be easy to get carried away hate, these men only seek empathy. Empathy and action. “Why are their children human and our children animals?” Nadal asks. Lying on the floor on mattresses barely a couple of centimeters thick, they wait to return to a Gaza that does not exist. A homeland that will bury them.