Palestinians now suffer beyond our worst nightmares, and it is terrifying to see how much latitude the world offers the Israeli killing machine, writes Saher Safi [photo credit: Getty Images]
I had just turned ten when the First Intifada began in 1987. The Israeli army reacted harshly to Palestinians rising up to demand freedom, arresting thousands, breaking children’s bones, and killing unarmed demonstrators with impunity. The reality today is worse than I ever could have imagined as a child.
Those years were spent in Bureij Refugee Camp, in the central Gaza Strip, where my family has lived since the Nakba. We come from the village of Qastina, which Zionist militias depopulated and destroyed in 1948. We have been confined to Bureij ever since. Israel prevents us from going home.
In my childhood home, I shared a room with five siblings. We slept on mattresses lined together on the floor. The house had three rooms altogether, in Block 3 of Al Bureij. It originally belonged to my paternal grandmother, and my father modernised it a bit. At first there were only two rooms — a guest room and a bedroom my parents shared with me, my older sister, and one younger brother.
That bedroom had a small black-and-white TV. When rain hit the asbestos roof, the sound was so loud you could barely hear it. You had to change the channel by hand, and as a boy of five or six, whenever my father asked me to do it, I’d demand alfeen lira (two thousand lira, less than five pence today) — the price of an ice cream or biscuit. He agreed: whenever it was cold and rainy, he’d give me alfeen lira to get up from under the blanket and switch the channel.
Beyond the sitting room and bedroom there was a small kitchen, bathroom, and toilet, exposed to the elements and a hassle to use at night — we kept a bucket in the corner of our room for emergencies. Above this area was a little concrete roof, free of asbestos. That roof represented freedom. We would haul a mattress up the ladder to read and study in the sun. My father even built a retaining wall so we wouldn’t fall off the side.
That space was where we could watch the outside during curfew. We drilled holes in the blockwork in different directions so we could see without being seen. It made us feel powerful.
During clashes between the Israeli army and the Palestinian youth throwing stones, we monitored everything and warned the guys if soldiers were coming from behind our home. “Hey!” we would shout. “They’re coming from this way. Run!” It was a foundational space in our lives. We felt we were defying the curfew, watching the neighbourhood while hidden from the soldiers.
Out the front of our house was a small square, maybe twenty metres by twenty. That square, with its muddy brownfield ground, was where my life happened. We played football, marbles, and all manner of games. In an overcrowded refugee camp, those few meters of open space were priceless. The camp has since been destroyed, as have all population centres in Gaza since the start of the latest aggression, the genocide.
The home where my family still lives is severely damaged. The one I grew up in has been destroyed. My childhood environment is gone. It will never look the same, if I even manage to return. I lost friends, family, neighbours, and teachers killed by the Israeli army during the war on Gaza.
When I became a teenager, I started sleeping in the so-called guest room. I also used it to study and listen to music. It overlooked the front square, so I could watch the comings and goings of our seemingly forgotten world. I look back fondly on that space. It was where my consciousness most strongly developed. In that room I cultivated my work ethic and passions and nurtured my artistic side. It’s also where I discovered my wanderlust. I knew one day I would leave Gaza, this tiny place that has redefined everything we thought we knew about the world, though I had no idea how it would happen.
The journey began when I was still a teenager. At seventeen, I went to Birzeit University in the West Bank, which I didn’t have permission to enter. I was considered an “illegal” student by the Israeli occupation despite being on the other side of my own country. I was constantly worried about being picked up and deported. Crossing checkpoints was extremely stressful, but I didn’t let my status stop me from seeing Palestine. With some creative planning, I visited al-Khalil (Hebron), al-Quds (Jerusalem), Bethlehem, and many other cities and villages. Nobody was going to stop me from exploring my ancestral land.
The occupation prevented me from seeing the world beyond Palestine, but I found ways to discover it anyway. I met many international students and faculty at Birzeit, and through long conversations into the night I learned about faraway and nearby countries I couldn’t visit.
Now, many years later, I live in a small rented flat in London. I struggled through arrests, deportations, and poverty to arrive here. Through a mixture of good fortune and determination, I received a scholarship to study at Cambridge University and now work as an engineer for a multinational company. It’s supposed to be a different life, a better life, but I’m still the boy from Bureij Camp, Gaza — even more so now that its population is being decimated.
My mother and four of my siblings (and their many children) are stuck in Gaza, turning into skeletons from starvation. I struggle constantly to get through the minutiae of my days in London, knowing how much they suffer and how real the danger is that they may lose their lives. The first time I saw my mom for several months, on a video call, her face was taut and pale, her eyes grey and tired. Her hunger was obvious. When I said I was visiting Egypt, she asked me to please eat some nice food on her behalf.
Out of the seven hens she had, only one has survived. It lays a single egg every other day. She and my siblings rotate who gets it. This one egg, shared among four families, is their main source of protein.
When I arrived in the UK, I worked hard and was conscientious. I followed the law. I explored as many aspects of British society as I could. I was what some would call a good immigrant. In a sense, I aligned myself with what I perceived to be Western values. I wanted to be a citizen of the world and a meaningful part of my new country.
I rejected the notion that the West cares only about Christians and Europeans, or that Muslim immigrants needed to isolate themselves to survive. I was eager to inform British people about the horrors of the Israeli occupation, but through friendship and dialogue rather than confrontation. I also believed the system of international law was capable of fulfilling its promise.
I believed in the willpower of good people, an attitude I developed growing up in Palestine. My thinking was simple: Palestinians are generous and kindhearted, so why would that not be the case for other communities?
One of the shocking things most Palestinians learn while still young is that the occupier lacks compassion and cannot be reasoned with through appeals to common humanity. Still, I had faith in the British public, who had suffered the atrocities of two world wars and knew what it was like to see their youth put into body bags.
The genocide in Gaza has revealed a more frightening reality: the people who boast about democracy and human rights are often silent as genocide unfolds — or they actively support it. I have spent nearly two years watching it happen. It feels like my brain has been rewired by the unthinkable brutality of the current genocide and the depravity of its supporters.
I’m frightened by the fact that good people who do speak up and protest have been unable to prevent the atrocities broadcast across news feeds and social media.
Where is this democracy we hear so much about, if the will of the people is so blatantly ignored? But the main question I have feels impossible to answer: why is the murder of hundreds of thousands of people allowed, and in many cases supported, by the same Western countries that developed and supposedly implemented international law, the same countries that vowed “never again,” the same countries that fancy themselves superior to the brutes of the Global South? Tens of thousands of Palestinian children asked some version of this question in their final moments on earth.
This development of which Western countries boast feels like a lie when the murder of at least 65,300 people is allowed and supported by those same countries. We hear about freedom of speech, yet governments criminalise opposition to genocide.
Entire institutions are defunded for moving to divest from Israel, direct action is treated as terrorism, and people are told what they can and cannot wear. Can it be true that human rights disappear at the borders of Palestine?
I think of my family, and what I would tell the ten-year-old boy growing up in Bureij, born a refugee under the boot of the Israeli military occupation. The boy who had to attend UNRWA schools, a constant reminder of his dispossession. The boy was prevented from attending his father’s funeral. Looking back, I realise how much the Israeli occupation interfered with my education, my movement, my speech, my relationships — with the very air I breathed morning and night.
This lifetime of adversity was only a preview. Palestinians now suffer beyond our worst nightmares, and it is terrifying to see how much latitude the world offers the Israeli killing machine.
I grew up with the occupier insulting us, beating us, shooting us, taking our lands — but now they seem compelled to go even further and exterminate us altogether.
Despite it all, I maintain an ember of hope that the goodwill of people will prevail. No matter what Israel does to us, it cannot extinguish our fundamental goodness, our creativity, our love for our land. Our joy, our thirst for freedom and justice, remains unshakable.
My youngest brother, still in Bureij, recently told me: “I miss the ordinary days: the smell of morning coffee, the chaos of the market, even the electricity cuts we used to complain about. War doesn’t just take lives; it steals time, memories, and the normalcy we once took for granted. But hope remains.”
I share his hope. I won’t give up.