Khan Younes, Gaza – An expensive companion doesn’t need to be human to be deeply missed when misplaced.
Typically, it’s a cellphone – a loyal witness to your joys and sorrows, your moments of sweetness and darkest chapters of ache.
Within the harshness of life on the earth’s largest open-air jail, it turns into greater than a tool. It’s an extension of your self; your portal to the world, your approach of reaching family members scattered throughout the jail or outdoors it.
Via its lens, you generally seize pleasure and wonder, however extra usually, it solely captures falling rockets or the rubble of homes overlaying the corpses of their residents.
However what are you left with when that loyal companion is disappeared by the genocidal chaos?
My cellphone succumbed to its accidents
My cellphone succumbed to its accidents.
I can’t imagine I’m describing it this manner, with the identical phrase I exploit when reporting on 1000’s of my individuals killed after being denied pressing medical therapy, punished merely for surviving Israeli bombs.
However in its personal approach, my cellphone endured its share of this extended Israeli cruelty, the technocide of power-starvation, corrosion by mud and sand, suffocation in overheated tents, and the fixed torment of poor connection.
It tried to carry on, however everybody has a restrict of endurance. It fell the day we left our broken house for our 14th displacement amid chaotic stampeding crowds.
In some way it survived the heavy blow, however it solely lasted 70 days after its display cracked, its physique blistered, till its wounds unfold too far to bear.
After which it went darkish for good.
Oddly, I felt consoled. Not as a result of it wasn’t painful, however as a result of I wasn’t alone. I’ve seen the identical occur to others: Mates, family members watching their telephones slowly perish, similar to the individuals they cherished.
Surprisingly, we discover consolation in these small shared losses. Our family members have perished, and our wellbeing is shattering, and but we anticipate our telephones to not. The actual miracle is that they lasted this lengthy in any respect.
Smartphone dependancy is thrown round as a buzzword. However in Gaza, in the event you’re fortunate sufficient to nonetheless have one, it’s not an dependancy, it’s survival.
It’s an escape. A small, glowing portal you cling to. It helps you slip briefly into the previous, scrolling by reminiscences, staring on the faces of family members who at the moment are names on graves or names you continue to whisper in hope.
Your cellphone’s impassive reminiscence nonetheless holds their lovely smiles. It connects you to individuals you may’t attain, voices you may’t in any other case hear. It dulls the ache not by therapeutic it, however by distracting you.
Like a starvation you may’t fulfill, so that you scroll by reels of mouth-watering meals, mocking your vacancy.
You watch strangers at household dinners whereas your desk is buried below rubble. You surprise, how dare they publish such scenes, realizing that youngsters are being starved to dying just a few kilometres away? And but you retain scrolling, as a result of for a second, it’s a brutal soothing sedative.
‘Are you alive?’
Once you’re somebody who stories day by day on the continued genocide to the world, discovering a brand new companion turns into an inevitable should. But the search is disastrous in Gaza.
You may suppose it’s not possible to seek out one right here, the place life has grow to be ruins and even bread is scarce, however surprisingly, there are many choices, even the most recent high-end manufacturers that in some way discovered their approach by the blockade.
However that is Gaza, the place a bag of flour prices $700, so the price of a cellphone is on an entire totally different degree.
Even the lowest-quality telephones in makeshift retailers promote for greater than what it prices to construct the store itself, inflated by genocidal situations.
And it doesn’t cease there. You have to pay in money, in a spot the place virtually nothing is free besides the air you breathe.
An iPhone may cost $1,000 elsewhere, however right here it prices $4,200.
So that you flip to cheaper choices, hoping for one thing extra inexpensive, however the calculations stay the identical.
However that’s not me – as a result of both approach, by spending such unthinkable quantities, you’re solidifying the very actuality your captors try to impose, and doing it with your personal cash.
You realise that you simply’re feeding into their design. We’re already draining no matter’s left in our pockets only for flour throughout this genocidal siege, and we don’t understand how lengthy it’s going to final.
So that you cling to what you’ve gotten, to keep away from paying your soul at a GHF centre for lethal “help” you’ll by no means get.
For some time now, I’ve felt paralysed, a helplessness particularly acquainted throughout June’s two-week complete communication blackout imposed by Israel – throughout which my cellphone lastly died in complete silence.
When the captor cuts yet one more lifeline, it’s extra than simply being unable to verify on family members. It means ambulances can’t be known as. It means a wounded individual may die at nighttime, unheard.
It’s like somebody is on the market, cruelly deciding once you’re allowed to contact the world or to be contacted, to obtain the now-typical: “Are you alive?”
There’s a merciless irony in Israel issuing expulsion orders on-line even because it cuts off the networks individuals in Gaza have to obtain them. You solely discover out once you see 1000’s flooding the streets, the earth trembling beneath their toes from Israeli assaults.
The hand that controls your digital lifeline is identical one which’s been blockading and colonising your land for years.
And also you realise, with certainty, that if they might block the very air you breathe, they might not hesitate.
So, you rise
There are nonetheless moments when, instinctively, I attain out to name somebody or verify one thing – however my hand touches nothing.
My companion is gone. I stay phoneless, helpless below blockade, each digital and bodily.
After which, you begin to examine your shackles to the abundance your captors take pleasure in, genociding you with full entry to each technological privilege, each luxurious.
You, however, are being hunted down with the world’s most superior weapons, below the watchful eye and silent complicity of the tech giants whose instruments are backing your erasure.
Whereas they use satellites and precision-guided missiles, you simply wish to inform the world you’re nonetheless right here.
How very important your misplaced companion was. It wasn’t only a cellphone. It was your sword, your protect, your witness.
And within the face of this tyranny, surrendering is one thing you can not afford. So, you rise.
You whisper, “Relaxation in energy, my companion,” as a result of we refuse to be slaughtered in silence.
We’ll preserve telling our reality, even when all we have now left is a scrap of paper and a drop of ink.
