EYES ON GAZA, ONE MORE TIME

Amjad and his family & Rulin and her family

Between being sick, preparing to be away, blah blah, I didn't notice until day 3 of the blackout that I hadn't heard anything out of Gaza – you probably know by now that there was a roughly week-long Israel-imposed blackout of internet connection from the Strip. You also probably know that Israel and Iran are in a shooting war, possibly the Last War?, and that nobody in media is paying any attention to Gaza, which is entirely intentional on Israel's part.

What I know from Gaza is apocalyptic: apart from the mass slaughters at the "aid delivery points," which were never designed to be anything but killing fields, there's no shelter or safety anywhere, every school and state-run medical institution is gone, virtually every paved road is gone, I frankly don't know how anyone is eating enough to survive – which makes me worried that nobody is eating enough to survive – and there are constant forced relocations, which consist of the IDF using planes or drones to drop leaflets on refugee encampments that say "You're in a war zone, you're fair game, leave now."

This, of course, means dropping everything immediately, including your tent, if you have one, the tent you spent the previous month praying for, the tent that's been the most significant wall between you and death for as long as you've lived in it. In everything I hear, this forced reimposition of homelessness, over and over and fucking over, seems to be tearing people apart with as much violence as the famine or the massacres. One Gaza contact has estimated to me that, from the moment of the "relocation" leaflets, it costs about $2,000 to get a family to a new refugee camp, with a new set of whatever meager aids to survival they've had to abandon, principally tents. And then the leaflets drop again.

So I don't know how long there'll be real news from Gaza, I don't know how long the money media will pretend to care or Israel will wait to impose another blackout, and whether it'll mean generators turned off and cables hacked or everything bombed to dust. But as long as this goes on, the "relocations" will too, and that means Amjad and Rulin and their families need whatever help is left from whatever fraction of a fraction of "civilization" we wish to maintain as a viable pretense.

Thank you

M