– My heart is burned. Help me!
– How can I help?
– Tell me about me.
The messages from one of the two sisters with whom I am in constant contact in Gaza are increasingly desperate. Her youngest child, who is 11 months old, has been found to be malnourished and the other three children get at best one meal a day.
– They are traumatized. Not only from hunger, but they behave as if they were oppressed, she writes.
They would have to bear the punishment
She was 12 the first time we met. She then suffered from migraines after many of her family had been killed in an Israeli attack. Two of the victims were her parents. She put her head in my lap and asked for a massage to relieve the migraine. She missed her mother’s cold hand but asked for mine.
Since then, she has grown up, studied, married, had a family. Shown pictures of birthdays, dinners and the first oranges in the grove outside their house. Laughed and lived.
After Hamas carried out the October 7 attack in which around 1,100 Israelis were murdered, she and her family understood that Israel’s response would be long and bloody. They have nothing to do with Hamas, but they would have to bear the punishment. Together with their sister, they decided to stay in an apartment in Gaza City with their families. They felt it was safer than evacuating to southern Gaza and living in tents.
“We will stay and wait for death,” they said then, which I wrote in a column.
Seven months of uncertainty
It didn’t turn out that way. After the Israeli ground invasion began, Israeli soldiers came and demanded that they leave the area. The soldiers arrested the men and told the women to leave.
– I don’t know where they took my husband. I am afraid they will kill him, she wrote to me then.
The same boundless horror as the relatives of the Israelis held hostage by Hamas, they describe feeling. For some of them, it is now almost seven months of hellish uncertainty.
After a while, her husband was released and they are now gathered in a tent in southern Rafah.
At first everyone was relieved that they had survived but soon they realized that all the documents and everything they had bunkered were still in northern Gaza. The younger sister asked a driver to take her bank card so they could withdraw money. But the man was arrested along the way and the bank card was left in the car somewhere along the way. Hope for money disappeared.
At the same time, the need for basic goods is growing.
– I’m desperate for diapers. We manage to get about 6 diapers a week, sometimes none at all. We use cloth strips but because we don’t have water we get eczema and sores. I can’t stand not being able to take care of my children, writes the sister.
“My heart began to burn”
Sometimes it’s the less glaring needs that hurt the most. The sisters’ house was bombed quite early on but they hoped that eventually they would be able to go back and find documents, memories and pictures of their dead parents. But now the whole house has been demolished and the racial masses have been taken to the emergency harbor construction that the US pushed for.
– I know it’s good that more help is coming, but it hurt so much that everything was gone. My heart began to burn. Please help me, she writes.
Through all the years – since she asked for my hand on her forehead – she has never asked for help. Until now.
But how to soothe a burnt heart?