“The clouds of war gather. Pulsing drums beat on my chest, interrupting a cool spring day. Cloven heads and broken faces haunt me, a red mist coating the breathless balm of early March in shades of scarlet.”
10 pictures showing Israeli soldiers burning Jabalia Refugee Camp in the past 2 days. Obtained through Israeli soldiers on their private social media accounts. Credit: @ytirawi
I think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict often, almost every day at the moment. It is a war that marked my life for over a decade. The journey began when the Israeli state launched a deadly campaign in Gaza in 2014 killing an estimated 2,000 men, women and children in response to the killing of several Israeli settlers by Hamas in the West Bank. The Israelis lost sixty-seven soldiers and six civilians in the fighting. Like many of the protestors on our streets across the world today, I was outraged by the short but brutal campaign. I joined a protest, chanted ‘Free Palestine’, put up stickers, blogged angrily about a conflict I knew little about or its nuances. I had always been fascinated by the Middle East since I was a boy, drawn to the era of the Crusades and the rise of Saladin but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict pulled me in once again in a new and different way.
I consumed books and articles on the conflict and studied Israel and Palestine and the broader modern Middle East at King’s College London. But rather than simply being an intellectual exercise, the conflict soon became much more personal to me in 2016 when I eventually lived in Tel Aviv for four months working as an intern at Amnesty International. After graduating from Kings College, I had ambitions to report on human rights and cover international conflict. As a young man, living in Israel and exploring Palestine was a truly formative experience for me. Learned knowledge in a library was fused with real-life experience. Even in the shadow of occupation and perpetual conflict, one could still find peace and joy, and see life brimming in Israel and Palestine.
Conflict remained omnipresent even if Israeli society was apathetic. The Troubles, the de-facto civil war in Northern Ireland, sprang to mind when I lived there in 2016. Tensions existed beneath the surface, violence frothed and bumbled and disquiet lingered but people kept fiercely living and you came to appreciate that conflicts are nuanced, complex affairs as I lived amongst the Israelis and travelled across the West Bank. I say to people today that it was probably the calmest the two countries had been in decades as civil wars raged across Middle East from Syria to Iraq to Yemen.
On my return to Tel Aviv after briefly exiting Israel, I was detained at Ben-Gurion airport and after several hours of interrogation by several people, I was asked to leave the country with my tourist visa - which extends out to three months - slashed to little over a week, a de-facto deportation. I didn’t leave with a sense of outrage but quietly disappeared still writing away about the conflict until 2020 during the pandemic. Throughout, I had a quiet sense that disaster was looming for Israel and Palestine. I was increasingly alarmed by the rising racist rhetoric in Israeli society and the cementing of military occupation on Palestinian lands, all championed and advanced by the machinations of Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
I warned that Israel and Palestine risked becoming a bi-national state similar to Bosnia in the 1990s where terrible violence, ethnonationalism, genocide and ethnic cleansing eventually tore the country apart and has scarred the Balkans since. As the one-hundred year conflict showed no signs of ending, dangers loomed on the horizon to which most of an apathetic world turned a blind-eye as permanent occupation fuelled a sense of anger and injustice amongst the Palestinian people confined to the West Bank and Gaza and minorities oppressed in Israeli territories. I wish I had been wrong on my predictions.
“Benjamin Netanyahu’s insufferable hubris is walking its people towards a dark era in the country’s history...Beset by accusations of corruption, he needs conflict and division to survive even if it means splitting Israeli society and scapegoating Palestinians. His tenure in office has ratcheted up the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians to unprecedented levels both in terms of the extremity of the violence and the rhetoric involved.”
Little prepared me for October 7th, 2023. Much as the assassination of Rwanda’s president, Juvenal Habyarimana, was the match that lit the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Hamas’s attack that killed nearly 1,200 Israelis nearly three decades later was the spark that set the Middle East aflame and plunged Israel and Palestine into the abyss of genocidal slaughter and horrifying ethnic violence, fanned by the flames of ultranationalism and extremism.
I have covered numerous conflicts in Ukraine, Syria, and Ethiopia but I have never covered an event quite as shocking or violent as that which I’ve witnessed in Gaza. This is not to downplay the horrific violence in these other wars or the atrocities that have taken place in these conflicts. In some respects, these conflicts should be drawing more attention as Israel and the war in Gaza take the headlines. I have done an open-source investigation verifying stomach-turning footage of militias burning people alive in Ethiopia and the aftermath of massacres committed in parts of the country and watched Russia obliterate parts of Ukrainian cities over the past four years with horror. Gaza, however, and the wider conflagration feels different.
Why? One of my colleagues said it is because I lived in and experienced Israel and Palestine up close, that I have travelled the length and bredth of Lebanon, that it is the first conflict I have intimately worked on and been involved in, wedded to the fact that the Arab-Israeli conflict has long generated controversy, that I had a deep bond with the people there. Perhaps that is why it so heart-wrenching for me to digest and process and why I grieve today.
Jabalia | Israeli officer Cpt. Bezalel Vieberman from Givati’s Special Operations Unit now operating in Jabalia RC uploads a picture of him near Palestinians abducted writing: “We have become the pursuers… GAZA WILL BE LEFT A GRAVEYARD” The fate of the men is unknown. Credit: @ytirawi
Since the attacks on October 7th and the subsequent carnage, I have felt guilty for the mixture of feelings consuming me that have ranged from unspeakable fury and wrath to utter sorrow and despair. My experiences pale to those suffering in Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, the people fighting, communities destroyed and families whose homes have been levelled or burned, the civilians permanently maimed and traumatised by violence, grief and war, to the families agonising over the fate of their loved ones held as hostages by Hamas operatives and by the many thousands of disappeared men, women and children languishing, and often being tortured, in Israeli prisons.
Sometimes, I get actively annoyed with myself for being upset when my pain is but a scratch on the surface of how this war has traumatised the people directly involved, Palestinians, Lebanese, and Israelis alike. It is beyond the contours of my imagination, yet I still try to understand it totally and utterly. I try to place myself in the shoes of those having their families obliterated by Israeli bombs and Hamas’s guns and rockets. I picture my family and friends being taken from me, dying in the horrendous violence in the towns raided by Hamas operatives and homes razed to the ground by the Israeli army and it utterly rips me apart.
It leaves me temporarily shaken and broken inside. I become dizzy, my vision becomes foggy and images of death, suffering and pain flash across my vision, my heart pounds and I am down a deep black hole before I gather myself. My inability and incapacity to do anything even as I report, donate, write and bear witness to unspeakable horrors in places I once explored and loved kills me every day. Even from a distance, the pain feels raw, a festering, deep wound that never seems to quite heal.
Perhaps I now understand Romeo Dallaire’s words on Rwanda a little more as the UN commander bore witness to Hutu Power’s eradication of nearly one million men, women and children in central Africa. “It will never ever leave me. It is in the pores of my body. My soul is in those hills, my spirit is with the spirits of all those people who were slaughtered and killed that I know of, and many that I didn't know.” Brushed aside by the killers, Dallaire could do little as the powers that be, the outside world, did nothing in the face of genocide as the country, so beautiful a place that God went to sleep there at night, fell into apocalyptic violence, consumed by insanity.
When I first read about the Rwandan genocide, I was chilled to the bone that after all the lessons of the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, with all the information at their fingertips, that so many people did nothing. Today, as Gaza is razed to the ground, I now fully comprehend why people did nothing and how normal people could be persuaded to do terrible things. It is no longer read from a history book on Auschwitz, the killing fields of Cambodia, Mao’s China and Stalin’s Soviet Union, and the massacres in Rwanda, Burundi and Bosnia. It is a lived experience, no longer a history lesson or intellectual exercise.
I struggle to unsee the livestream of wounded and dead, the mounds of dead bodies piled up at the Nova music festival on October 7th, the images of bloated rotting corpses of Hamas operatives lying in the fields for days, Palestinian bodies crushed by Israeli bulldozers and tanks, children lacerated by famine, families collecting body parts of relatives in plastic bags after they were eviscerated by bombs. I am haunted by the endless bodybags and bodies lined up in mortuaries and hospitals, the tortured bodies of Palestinians cast out of Israeli dungeons, half-starved, the lifeless eyes of dead children lined up one after another in Gaza’s hospitals or crushed by concrete. Even the dead get rest as Israeli tanks and bulldozers uprooted and churned up old and freshly dug graveyards early on in the war.
Jabalia this evening | Israeli soldiers from the 432 battalion shares a picture showing them torching a Palestinian school near Indonesi Hospital in Jabalia. Credit: @ytirawi
You cannot forget the sight of headless, dead and maimed children and babies, a toddler weeping with shrapnel lodged in her chest and the haunting image of a young girl in the hospital with her jaw and mouth freshly split apart and hanging off her face after another murderous Israeli air raid. You cannot forget the images of executed families and people by Hamas’s death squads, the killing of innocents who went about their early morning routines or sleeping in their bed for the sake of fruitless retribution and revenge.
I was appalled at the atrocities committed by Hamas’s soldiers on October 7th but have been equally revolted by the violence and racism of so many Israeli and foreign soldiers fighting in the military in Gaza and the West Bank, who have laughed, bragged and danced as they destroy and kill, posting their acts of evil to social media for sport and egged on by their government. I have been angered by ignorant activists and individuals taking ‘sides’ who have used the conflict as a cockpit for harvesting outrage and nourishing the currents of antisemitism, racism and Islamophobia and a chance to mock and troll the dead, the maimed and the traumatised.
I have been left in disbelief as Israel’s allies have, almost unconditionally, allowed its army to carry out blatant atrocities and genocidal violence without consequences and as a former reporter and journalist at The Economist, Financial Times and The Telegraph, I have been troubled by the active efforts of many well-renowned papers to downplay or obfuscate them even as the Israeli army became responsible for the deaths of 70% of journalists in 2024 and the most on record in any single war. Some Western journalists have actively participated in atrocity denial, called for ethnic cleansing, spreading disinformation and relishing in the violence, failing in the most basic of ethical responsibilities when reporting on conflict.
Where papers have cried foul and been liberal with terminology on conflicts in Darfur, Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo, and documented Vladimir Putin’s widespread war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine, the press has often been remarkably evasive in applying the same terminology to what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank. In equal measure, I have been disturbed by attempts by many governments across the Western world to crush dissent, censor debate and disappear and deport people speaking out where the press and political elites have utterly failed to end a war that has mutated into an accelerated campaign of ethnic cleansing and an orgy of genocidal violence conducted by Netanyahu’s government and the Israeli military. One atrocity, perpetrated on October 7th, is no licence for what has been done since that terrible day. Revenge has eaten Israel alive.
I have felt fear, unnerved and scared by the deadness around the eyes of men and women such as Israel Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and Daniella Weiss, one of the champions of the Israeli settler movement, as they talk of starving and killing men, women and children in Gaza and the West Bank all while stealing their homes and land for settlement. I have felt suffocated by the noxious, black corruption and poison emanating from Netanyahu when he speaks as he manipulates the world with lies, dripping hubris and arrogance, honest Iago driving everyone and everything to ruin as he abuses the memory of the Holocaust and its victims as a cover to unleash unspeakable horrors.
I have been angered by Hamas’s atrocities and the vice-grip it holds over the Palestinians, holding a population hostage to its cause as it holds so many Israelis hostage, putting families and friends through unimaginable personal hell, and the way the organisation has deliberately triggered a tsunami of bloodshed that has consumed Palestine, Israel, the Middle East and the world. Finally, I have felt numbness and desensitisation, too exhausted to feel angry or grieve for the hell unfolding. Sometimes I wish I could forget and make it all go away. But I bear witness. I cannot look away. It is a duty even as so many people’s humanity fails them and the world I once believed in dies. Perhaps it was always a mirage to begin with.
I dream of the Israel and Palestine often now. They come in waves. Sometimes, I’m in the rubble of the crumbling, pulverised ruins of Gaza, in streams of blood, assaulted by death and air raids. In others, shadowy soldiers chase and incarcerate me. Sometimes I stand at the fence, watching the decimated strip get bombed as Israeli soldiers patrol the perimeter. I frequently dream of that airport and the fear of getting caught reentering the country. I almost always get through and when entering the other side in my dreams, I am always blown away by how beautiful the lands of Israel and Palestine are and I am in awe of the historical currents pulsing through the intertwined countries.
I am always joyful that I will have a chance to see friends and colleagues again who I miss deeply. The last few times though, I dream the same dream. My entry is always bittersweet. I am guided through by an Israeli soldier and he instructed me not to talk about specific topics. As I walked along the beaches close to Jaffa and along the coastline of Tel Aviv, all I could feel was the trauma gripping the country and the devastation consuming everyone and everything. People swam in the clear blue waters and lay on the pearly white sand but something felt deeply, deeply wrong as if the country were gripped by a unsettling sickness. Nothing felt the same.
A military jet headed for the enclave flies low overhead, its silver wings glinting in the sun but its noise aggressively breaks the peace above the city. I walk on. Families and friends mingle. Soldiers sit relaxing, and I walk carrying my rucksacks. Small waves cascade up the shoreline, and seawater washes over my feet and creeps between my toes. I have nowhere to stay, and people I do not know, passersby and activists, say that I will be caught because my passport shows I have been to forbidden areas around the perimeter of Gaza, that I have come unlawfully. "Do I stay at Florentin Hostel?" I thought.
The clear blue sky has now vanished. Night has come at an unsettling speed as I come to the end of the coastline. What was once beautiful is now grey and gloomy. I can go no further, for the ground has been churned up and destroyed. The sky is lit up with fire and ash. The land is twisted mud and ruins, guarded by two young soldiers. I stop. They pull up the small wooden bridge to cross into the destroyed area, and I fall into the water beneath. They tell me to get out and leave, mocking my sadness. I depart, unnerved by the encounter. For people so young, their eyes are hollow, dead, and consumed by fear. I turn back but as I walk back, I hear a huge explosion. I turn and see fire lift up into the heavens. The flames roar upwards and smoke twists and curls as the horizon beyond is consumed by hellfire. I walk away as Gaza burns.
Massacre in Jabalia | At least 12 killed Palestinians killed in an Israeli airstrike on Jabalia Refugee Camp. All from the same family from the grandparents to their grandchildren. Alarabeed family in Bir Alna’ja. All Civilians. Including women and children. Credit: @ytirawi
When I awake after such dream, I think of the butchery that continues to consume the Holy Land in a wave of fire and blood and I am taken back to a quote by Balian of Ibelin in Ridley Scott’s underrated Kingdom of Heaven; “Before I lose it, I will burn it to the ground. Your holy places - ours. Every last thing in Jerusalem that drives men mad.” Perhaps I, indeed the world, am consumed and infected by this metaphysical insanity. I always yearn to return.
How do we, how do I, push forward in these darkest of times? We unapologetically live for the dead and for our loved ones. I remind myself of that responsibility every day even as our world burns and humanity fails in the killing fields of Gaza.