one year after the attacks of October 7, a Palestinian journalist reports on the daily life of Gazans, between deprivation and fear

A year after Hamas attacks in Israel, more than two million people have had to leave their homes or apartments in the Gaza Strip. Palestinian journalist Rami Abu Jamous reports on the living conditions in the camps for displaced people.

Rami Abu Jamous is a 46-year-old Palestinian journalist. On October 7, 2023, he was living in Gaza. After the start of Israeli military operations, he left the city with his wife and children to take refuge in Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, then in Deir el-Balah. He reports on the situation on site through videos on social networks, articles for the Orient XXI website, and on franceinfo.

franceinfo: What has your daily life been like for the past year? In what conditions do you live with your family?

Rami Abu Jamous: Since we left our home, since the war began, we have lived a life of humiliation: leaving home is the beginning of humiliation. We are humiliated when we are bombed at home, we are humiliated because we cannot do funerals. It’s been a year since the war started, and there are people who are still under the rubble. We are humiliated when we go out to walk with just a few bags and despite that, we are shot at. We are humiliated once we arrive in a tent. We are humiliated because we cannot find food. We are humiliated because we only eat cans. We are humiliated because when my son Walid is sick, I can’t find medicine for him because there is a blockade and there is nothing coming in, especially not medicine.

“We have returned to the Middle Ages in everything: we live on mattresses, on sand. We cook with fire and a clay oven… All that is humiliation.”

Rami Abu Jamous

at franceinfo

franceinfo: You wrote in your logbook on the Orient XXI website: “I realize that everything we do, everything we experience today is making us hate the place where ‘we live.’ For you, this is what Israel wants ?

Of course, it’s hating Gaza, hating Palestine, hating belonging to this territory. What the Israelis did was erase any connection with this land: they bombed archaeological sites, museums, universities, schools… 85% of Gaza’s homes were destroyed. And not only have we managed to erase any connection with this land, but they also want to make us hate this land. We start to hate where we are.

You are with your son, your wife’s children. How do you make this conflict not too painful for them to experience? ?

This is the hardest for me. It’s always putting a mask on my young son Walid, to put him in a life somewhat parallel to what we live. That is to say, explosions are fireworks, you have to applaud. When the night turns red with the bombings, it’s a spectacle, you have to applaud. Living in a tent, picnicking, it’s a very comfortable adventure.

“I always try to act like a clown and I always try to put on this mask, to keep smiling when there is a bombing. It’s my way of protecting the children.”

Rami Abu Jamous

at franceinfo

And when we talk about the tent, the word “tent”, I always try to remove it from my vocabulary. When I speak to Walid (because I speak to him all the time in French), it’s always “the villa”. I want even in his brain to register that the word “tent” does not exist, it’s a villa, we are living in luxury. I don’t know if I succeeded yet. Walid is growing up. When the war started he was two years old, today he is three years old. I don’t know how much longer this war will last, and I don’t know if this cinema that I’m making will last long, nor when the truth will really be known.

In your head, your own heart, what is there ?

It’s fear, anxiety, fear of the future. Fear for my family, fear of being bombed. It’s the fear of not being able to provide for my son’s every need. it’s the fear that my son will tell me one day “Dad, why did you leave me in Gaza ?” I want my son to be proud of me, proud of this decision. I want him to always have the word dignity in his head and in his heart. Because everything we do today, even if we live in humiliation, it is precisely because we seek dignity. We lost all that because we are looking for dignity. We would rather die than leave Palestine.

Your wife is pregnant. How do you see the future in these conditions? ?

I know it was a very difficult decision, but it’s our way of resisting. It’s our way of telling the occupier that despite the genocide that I call “Gazacide”, life goes on. Love continues, even in a tent. Several hundred, thousands of flowers withered, these children who died. There will be flowers that will be born and we will continue on the path. And one day, these flowers will continue, will succeed in having an independent state and live next to Israel, in peace.