Dear Reader,

Before you read this testimony, I ask that you go to a window or balcony. Observe the adjacent houses, the streets with their branches and alleyways, lamps, traffic lights, crosswalks, billboards. Look at the vendors and pedestrians, focus well on all the details. Then go back into your apartment, your room, and give your eyes the chance to meditate on the walls, the color of the paint, the pictures, the frames with the certificates and honors… and before you wallow in melancholy with me, walk over to your wife and children’s beds, kiss them as though for the last time, and come with me, abluted, to recite our prayers in this great wasteland.

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As I started to write this, I asked myself: How can words capture the hell that has overtaken our souls? How can a text, a poem, or even a novel begin to describe what we are living through? Gaza has come to resemble a graveyard whose stones have awakened and declared war on the flesh, where every rotten corpse has arisen and fused its bones with every other to form some kind of frankensteinish zombie, a last line of defense against those who had spilled its blood and guts at the temple of God. How can words convey the screams of children who perished beneath the rubble? What were their final moments like? Were they groaning? Hurting? Or did they depart quickly, as the holy book says? The martyr dies in an instant, as though stung by a bee. How was it for our neighbor, who dreamed of finding a can of tuna before shrapnel tore her chest into a red rose? How did the old man receive news of the martyrdom of his entire family in the Al-Shati camp after he had evacuated to the south? Are we still normal? After all this death and destruction and loss, will we still feel? Will madness seep into the belly of the pregnant mother who saw the strewn bodies as she rushed to Al Rashid Street to clutch a handful of life? Or will it be carried by the air like the stench of gunpowder, sewage, and decaying bodies? Graves are so in use that they have become part and parcel of the ground, barely noticeable, their occupants only a passing tale to the living, a distraction from the storm that has not yet passed, from the floodwaters that will yet rise until they hit the heavens where God above is remodeling the Earth and its inhabitants. Every inhabitant of this city has a story. And the city used to have many colors, before they all faded into the blood of a child one afternoon when a missile struck a residential building.

The streets are still our streets, but they are also vast graveyards, pits, and mounds for bodies buried helter-skelter, so that their former owners may become one with the earth and connect to the heavens, and the dirt in the alleys may throb with revolutionary song. The Palestinian must then reassume his whole, reassemble himself in a frenzy. He emerges from the ashes like a phoenix, grows and grows into a ghoul, fuses with every destroyed building, every mosque and its murdered dome, every ruined church, until the veins and arteries of his body pulse with the elixir of life, the blood of every martyr, holding in one hand a rifle, in the other a violin, playing hymns, reading, praying, before leaping into the air like a Hollywood superhero, catching a bullet meant for a child, returning it to the sniper who is planning a passionate evening with a lover and lodging it into his penis lest he multiply, then he leaps onto a tank that has fired at a hungry family waiting to break their fast on a handful of dates, and the soldiers all die at once, and life springs into the souls of the innocents, and the children who wake up in a panic and know not why have hope once more in their faces, dusty and lined with scars like the map of a torn nation. Women who have held onto life by a single breath straighten their necks. They find the sadistic soldier who extinguished hundreds of cigarettes on the bodies of young girls for sport, and gnaw off his fingers. They search for his heart and discover the problem: he has none, his people have none, and their brains have rusted.

On the walls of a refugee school a soldier scribbles letters to his lover in the kibbutz, announcing that he had killed a fetus and appeased God by raping a Muslim. Let the maroon-stained reel of history record how many of these killers were adolescents, brimming with enough bigotry and hatred to wipe whole cities off the map.

But cities, like the tales of prophets, never die.The road to our city is a maze, a sad musical score, like the compositions of Yasser Abdel Rahman and Omar Khairat, no color in them but black. In the passageways were houses, and the houses had walls, and the walls had framed pictures which have faded now amid the ash and flames. Here’s a photograph of a child who earned first place in the hundred-meter swim, his father beaming and mother ululating. That’s a photograph of a grandfather who died before witnessing the calamity. This is a painting by a local artist, steeped in his craft, who steeped his arugula in orange juice. The inscription at the bottom reads to the most beautiful of women, my wife. There’s a portrait of a family, some of whose members have emigrated with nothing to return to, while some died in different circumstances, in battles and wars that have rendered the city lifeless.

There are also papers and documents amid the debris, to each its own date and story. Here’s a birth certificate, a diploma with highest honors, a divorce paper, a court order, a letter from a brother who lives in the lands of snow, writing to his twin in the Al-Shati camp that he is weary of travel and longs to return but for the fear of being killed.

“They have killed everything,” writes a one-eyed child in an UNRWA school-turned-shelter. Another girl who had lost a leg draws a picture of black and gray houses, above which is a smiling devil with eyes like F-35s. Every evacuation order turns these drawings into paper airplanes that soar higher than the occupation’s drones.

We sit in the streets counting our gallons of water, looking for something to busy ourselves with after we have lost our houses and jobs and universities. We place bids on a can of peas. We run towards the cold-water-seller at the corner of the camp. We put forth our life savings for a food package dropped from a plane overhead, because Israel targets humanitarian workers too, and has, in a very civilized way, blocked life-saving supplies from reaching us. We return empty- handed. A boy returns in a body bag. The package had landed on his head. With no preface or exposition, a life ends like a short film. A father who has lost everything he owns in order to protect his children sees them depart one by one into the sky, as though they were just going into the next room. No wailing in this town.

We hunt down power poles. Their wood is good for cooking, in the absence of long-forgotten gas and electricity but is barely even enough for those who have lost their houses in the north. Forests of fire spring up. Women look for flour, the bread burns their bodies, and a teenager dies in an alley overlooking the sea, shot by a quadcopter while carrying a loaf of bread over his head. His other hand still clutches a can of beans. It cost twenty-five cents before the genocide.

People carry their things and run from life to death, from death to life. They escape their total destruction by becoming ears of wheat, spreading their seed with the wind, strengthening the soil enough to split open and release the children, naked, starving, thirsty, facing those who stripped them of their rights, hoisting a Palestinian flag atop the buildings that look like crumbling biscuits, higher and higher as if proclaiming victory against the endless warplanes above, the battleships littering the sea, and the tanks that fell into the trap of Gaza.

Our streets are stories, time-worn and waiting to be retold. Through them, we write about love, the love of light, the love of the sun, the love of children and women and life. Return to us, O God, our children from the graves that have overrun our streets, our women from the south so we may embrace them like the readers who have never felt what we feel now. Return them to us, let us have our Jannah, and let others enjoy their lost paradise.