Victor de Currea-Lugo | August 24, 2024
I met Ahed in Iraq, in the city of Karbala, less than a week ago. There he told me the story of his family. He lived in Jakarta with his wife Suhan, while his three children were in Gaza, where they studied and received remittances from their parents.
The eldest is Shaymaa, the boy is called Malik and Duaa is the youngest. Now, because of the war, they were trapped and became what some call “Instagrammers.”
Days before October 7, the mother decided to help Shaymaa with her school exams and so she returned to Gaza. When this phase of the occupation began, she and her three children were trapped. Now, they are another of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians looking for a place to survive. From there, they answered the following questions for me.
1. Describe please, right now, where are you? What is around you? What do you see? How it smells?
We are “@gazanvoices” (in Instragram) three siblings currently in Gaza Strip amidst the genocide. We got displaced 9 times and we are presently in tents. We have been living in a tent since the 5th of January. We arrived at the tents during the winter; we had to bear the cold weather and the continuous rain seeping into the tent.
Now it’s summer and the heat is unbearable. We are surrounded by more tents as more people in Gaza, and we are forced to evacuate, especially after the Rafah military operation. The streets are full of sewage due to the destroyed infrastructure with the continuous bombing in Gaza.
2. What does mean Instagram for you, before the 7 of October?
We were all students before the 7th of October. Shaymaa is a computer engineering student; Duaa is an English major student, and Malik is in 10th grade. We were always taught to avoid social media as much as possible so only Shayma had an Instagram account, and she only used it a few times and then deleted the app. We were not big fans of social media since we thought of it as a waste of time.
3. What is happening with your family in these months? Did you were displaced? How do you find food and medicines? How to sleep?
Our family is trying to survive through these horrible conditions despite not being able to get access to the most basic needs. We were displaced from our house on the 7th of October since we live very close to the borders.
We got displaced with our entire neighborhood, so now we are together in the same camp, and we all try to provide for each other to find the most needed things. For a big period of this war, we slept on the floor because there was a lack of mattresses since we moved with our entire family, thankfully, now each of us has a mattress that we put on the ground and sleep on.
4. For each one of you… tell me about your biggest loss during these days and your happiest moment, if there is one
For all of us, our biggest loss was the loss of over 70 members of our family, two uncles, our grandmother, and many cousins who were murdered with their family members. And our second biggest is probably losing not just our house, but our entire neighborhood in Shujaia that had a ground military operation.
When the soldiers left the neighborhood, it was completely destroyed without a single building standing. All our childhood memories, all our photo albums, and our prizes and certificates from school are all gone.
We had recently saved up to give our room a makeover; we made our dream room after saving up for two years. We finished renovating our house at the beginning of September and on the 7th of October, we left and never returned.
Is there any future in Gaza?
5. You are so young, all of you… Could you imagine a different world for Gaza and outside Gaza? Do you see any future?
We undoubtedly see our future in Gaza. It is our land and if we leave Gaza, it would only be to finish our studies and then return to be a part of rebuilding it. We know that Gazans can rebuild Gaza and make it more beautiful than it ever was. We will stay on this land until we see it free of the Zionist occupation and see our people live in dignity and freedom.
6. When did you decide to use Instagram to show the situation in Gaza? Do you have another backup count in case to lose this one?
After 17 days of the war, one of our cousins showed us some videos of Gazans sharing their story from inside Gaza; many of them didn’t speak English properly so they had very limited reach, and not many people followed their stories, so we felt like it was out responsibility to share stories to people who didn’t understand Arabid especially since we all knew how to speak English.
7. Does it make sense for you to report daily the situation about the genocide? Why? What kind of hope do you have in the social nets?
We now know how powerful social media can be, we see whole nations moving and taking a better stance to support Palestine and boycott the occupying country after seeing unfiltered stories from Gaza. We see thousands of protests, calling for a ceasefire and an end to the occupation.
There is more awareness about the Palestinian resistance and our right to return to our land and defend it. The world now sees the horrible side of the occupying country that they have been trying to conceal forever. Now it is very clear how bloodthirsty they are and how they shouldn’t be on this land in the first place.
8. Something to tell the influencers who focus on fashion, food, or travel.
We know that history will remember this genocide for as long as humanity lasts. So, everyone who stayed silent and didn’t take part in putting an end to this will be recorded in the pages of shame.
They will be described as people who didn’t have an ounce of humanity to stand for human rights and reject this genocide with everything they had. So, in the end, standing for Gaza is not for Gazans anymore but for each human being to confirm their humanity is still there.
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When I spoke to her father, Ahed, he told me that they will accept the will of God, of Allah. For 14 days he was offline. The sad thing is that Israeli attacks on them have been common. He tells me that if his children are martyrs, they hope to go to paradise, «in any case, any hope is better than the hell that Gaza is living through.»
I told Shaymaa about my feeling of uselessness in the face of genocide, which I share with many of my friends. And she replied: «You are already doing a lot, please don’t feel that way. We are strong because you are strong with us! Please don’t give up and we won’t!» I wish it were true that we are doing a lot. In the face of this reality, everything would not be enough.
Please help more and more people to follow the Instagram account @gazanvoices so that we can be informed, without filters, about what is happening in Palestine.
