update: Rulin waits by the sea

Because I mentioned the other family I know in Gaza, and people have asked, and because it might be safer to report this way than in an episode, I wanted to let any concerned subscribers know about Rulin –

She's from Jabalia, a mid-sized town just north of Gaza City (I think it may even be a continuous suburb of Gaza City), and that's where her little brother was killed in the first attacks that destroyed her family's home. She and her family have now been displaced up and down the entire Strip, over and over and over, for more than a year, from the North to Deir al-Blah to Rafah to Khan Younis and back again; she was there, telling me in real time, when Israel set the al-Mawasi tent city on fire "by accident" – remember when they used to pretend these were accidents? – and she's been present at more attacks and massacres than I can name.

I just heard from her again today, because Jabalia, the home to which she can't return, the former city of 170,000 people reduced to ash and rubble and starving people within a tightening noose of IDF-imposed encirclement (I have no idea how many people are still alive in the North, and I deeply doubt that anyone else does either, except perhaps the IDF, but if you got caught behind Israel's new illegal "border" up North, you can't leave it, and if you've got food or medicine or volunteers or doctors for the North, you cannot get them in) – Jabalia, which has been leveled so many times that only complete institutional hysteria can explain attacking it again, well, Jabalia was just hit once more, and at least one of Rulin's close relatives has been killed, with several more in critical condition.

(There is a doggedness, there is a militarily pointless obsessiveness, to the IDF's "strategy": they're pathologically consumed by some psychotic need to eradicate everything, not just to "win" or "take territory." Their aim is no longer "victory," which has likely been decided already by recent events in Syria and Lebanon already; their aim is Arabfrei. A Gaza coastline of American-built resorts and vacation homes for stupid fucking Gulf royals, or Saudi-built resorts and vacation homes for stupid fucking Americans, with their newly planned petrochemical pipelines feeding unimpeded to the Mediterranean, and then perhaps a terrified and helpless population of ten or twenty thousand Arabs left in the South, which was strategically "underdeveloped" by Israeli intervention and American sanction long before October 2023, and which has now been reduced nearly to wasteland.)

The one hope we can see is the possibility that the now-closed border between Rafah, the southernmost part of Gaza, will be reopened, and that at least a few thousand Palestinians will be able to escape into Egypt and establish a new foothold and legal standing to bring their families over as well. The last I knew, Hamas and Fatah were having joint meetings with the Egyptian government about the re-opening; a year ago, Egypt had nationalist concerns about a Syrians-flooding-into-Turkey scenario, but now it's terribly clear that this is no preventative emigration, and that the single nation (other than "Israel") which shares a border with Gaza will be an accessory to genocide if they don't fucking DO something.

No one knows yet when the border might re-open, but Rulin is clinging to that hope as the last plausible alternative to just hoping the genocide ends. To get across that border (administrative fees, transport, a place to go when you're in Egypt) will probably cost about $5,000. I am clocking Rulin's Gofundme at $12,450 right now (Friday, 12/13, 3 p.m.), and though I know you decent people must be near the end of what you can give, I'll just say once more that getting the Gofundme up to roughly $17,500 could mean the difference between life and something else, possibly death, possibly neither death nor living.

Once again, that's https://gofund.me/497436a8

Thank you all kindly, and know that you have both Amjad's and Rulin's thanks as well, and the gratitude of people who have suffered more in 14 months than most of us will suffer in half a dozen lifetimes.

<3

MSJ