Sunday 19/11/2023

A person has to know the opposite of a certain state to be able to find balance in life. To know rest, you need to have experienced exhaustion, and to know quiet, you need to emerge from chaos. Our days in European Hospital are hard to describe. So many injured and martyred souls have entered the hospital during the past two days. A state of terror as homes near the hospital are bombed - two homes - during two days. We heard and saw the missiles descend on the homes, followed by screaming. 

I decided to separate myself and go somewhere where I would not talk to anyone and meditate on the faces of passersby - their actions and their movements and their stillness. I watched the sunset and could breathe a little - I felt I had a soul again. I sat by the emergency entrance to the hospital and watched the birds and pigeons above the water tanks on the roof of the hospital. There are so many birds in the hospital. It seems it is not only humans who have sought refuge in the hospital out of fear from the bombing. After each bombing, the birds would fly away and return to the roof of the hospital as soon as the  bombing stopped. 

The first bombing was at around 7pm, the bomb fragments landed in the part of the hospital where my father is staying. They told my father he has lost his cornea and they are working to transfer him outside Gaza. He may still have a chance to regain his sight, but the delay and neglect in receiving approval- needed from one doctor - is part of why he has reached the point of losing his cornea. 

It is 6:28 am, and we have just been woken up by the sound of bombing very near the hospital. A few minutes later, the ambulance arrived carrying the dead and wounded covered against the cold. They slept and were dreaming and woke up  to their injured bodies. 

I am sitting in a small corridor in the hospital where the Internet can reach but barely so I can write to you. And so I can tell you that my neighbour from the Shujaia neighbourhood arrived in the South today - he had been at the Falah School in al-Zayotun neighbourhood. He says the Israeli Occupation Army bombed the school with 70 dead and 200 injured. No one could reach them. Not the Red Cross, while communication was cut off. They stayed on the ground till their blood seeped out of their bodies and dried up.

19 November