Yesterday, I watched Naza. I did not go to learn what had happened...

Yesterday, I watched Naza.

I did not go to learn what had happened in Gaza. I am from there. I am one of the victims of this war, one of its witnesses, and one of those who have paid a price that will not end when the war does.

I did not need a film to tell me how entire neighborhoods were wiped away, how residential buildings were bombed with the people still inside them, or how families were forced to leave their homes without knowing where they were supposed to go.

Nor did I need anyone to tell me about the famine. I lived through it twice, with all its humiliations, down to the smallest detail. Or about the starving people who were killed while trying to reach what were so absurdly called “food distribution centers.”

I know all of this.

I was there.

Read the whole Thread below :

#Naza @yuval_abraham

2/

I went with another question in mind.

How can people who have inherited the memory of the Holocaust find so many ways to justify committing atrocities against another people? How can someone who has inherited the memory of being a victim come to defend the actions of those who inflict suffering?

Do they ever truly feel remorse? Do they understand what they have done? Are they ashamed when they speak of it?

And if I were to meet one of them someday, would he dare to look me in the eyes?

How do they sleep at night?

How does a person silence his conscience so completely?
And this, to me, is why the film matters.

The world has heard Palestinian testimonies for a long time. I myself have spent much of this war telling people what I witnessed. But this time, we are listening to people who were part of the military system itself. They speak about their decisions, their actions, and the way they regarded our lives and our deaths.

That is why I disagree with those who criticize the film for giving more space to Israeli voices than Palestinian ones.

I do not need an Israeli soldier to tell me that what I lived through was real. I know it was real. I was there.

But I want to hear how he explains what he did. I want to understand how he manages to justify it to himself.

The testimony of the perpetrator does not become more important than that of the victim simply because it comes from him.

But it can reveal something the victim could never have seen: what was happening on the other side while we were trying to stay alive.

3/

Ever since I left Gaza, I have been trying to live with the memories I brought with me.

I try to live an ordinary life. I try to learn how to sleep without finding myself back there, how to sit among people without seeing the faces of those who are gone, or the places that no longer exist.

But while I was watching the film, I realized how mistaken I had been to believe that leaving Gaza might also mean being able to leave those memories behind.

In December 2023, the Israeli army ordered us to evacuate the area where we were staying.

It was not simply a message or a warning.

Shells were striking the walls of our house. Then they began falling in the street ahead of us as my mother and I tried to run.

We knew we had to leave.

What we did not know was where we could go.

The army seemed to be everywhere. There was no safe road, and no one to tell us which way to turn.

We began to run.

Every few meters, bullets would strike the wall in front of us, and we would understand that we must not go any farther.

We were learning where we were allowed to walk from the bullets being fired at us.

No one explained anything to us. There were no signs, no lines drawn on the ground. We had to understand quickly, because a single mistake might cost us our lives.

I remembered that day so clearly when one of the soldiers in the film said that not a day had passed without someone being killed.

He spoke about an agreed-upon “imaginary line.” Anyone who crossed it would be killed.

Yuval Abraham asked him how people were supposed to know where that line was.

He answered that they “learn the hard way.”

That they had to learn through blood.

4/

Through blood !

Those words stayed with me.

Because that was exactly the language they had spoken to us.

For the first time, I understood what had happened to us that day from the other side.

We had been running through the streets, trying to save our lives, while somewhere there were people who believed that shooting at us was a perfectly acceptable way of teaching us where we were allowed to stand.

For him, it was an imaginary security line.

For us, it was the difference between living and dying, between taking another step and never taking one again.

Then the same soldier spoke of 140 people who had been killed. He said they were all civilians.

The filmmaker asked him again, almost as though he could not believe what he had heard.

Had none of them been carrying a weapon?

No, the soldier answered. None of them had been armed.

One hundred and forty human beings.

I kept thinking of all the times we had heard, after a bombing, that the army had targeted a “threat,” a “suspect,” or an “operational area.”

How many people can disappear behind such words?

How many lives can be made to sound like nothing at all?

Then came the story of the child.

The soldier said they had seen a child through their cameras, walking into the forbidden area.

They did not know why he had gone there.

He was not doing anything.

He was simply there.

And so they shot him.

A child was killed because he did not know that armed men had drawn an imaginary line and decided that anyone who crossed it deserved to die.

He was not killed for something he had done.

He was killed for something he did not know.

I have thought about that child ever since I watched the film.

Was he looking for his parents? Had he lost his way? Was he trying to find his home? Did he even know that someone was watching him, that somewhere a person could end his life with the press of a button?

No one knows.

But I know the children of Gaza. I know how they walk among the ruins of houses, how they go out searching for water, for food, or for someone they have lost.

And when I think of a child being killed simply because he happened to be in the wrong place, I cannot find a word for it other than barbarism.

5/

Then Yuval asked about the bodies.

The bodies of the civilians who had been killed in those areas. The bodies of people who had not known where the street they were allowed to walk along came to an end.

The soldier was silent for a moment.

Then he said that dogs had been eating them.

He explained that he had not been able to watch it himself, but others who had been there with him had seen the dogs eating the bodies.

The filmmaker asked whether he could not have said something.

The soldier answered that it was not his role.

His responsibility was purely technical. He was not supposed to express a moral opinion.

Imagine that.

To know that people are being killed, that their bodies are being left for dogs to devour, and to believe that objecting to such a thing falls outside your professional responsibilities.

I could not stop thinking about his answer.

Since when does a person need permission from his superior to have a conscience?

I thought of the Nuremberg trials, and of the words the world heard after the crimes of the Nazis:

“We were only following orders.”

Those words were not enough to free the people who spoke them from responsibility.

And yet now we hear something even colder.

I am responsible for the technical side. The moral side is not my job.

As though a crime becomes less of a crime when it is divided into smaller tasks.

One person watches. Another chooses the target. A third gives permission. A fourth presses the button.

And in the end, someone dies.

Then each of them goes home, perhaps believing that he has done nothing more than the little part he was asked to do.

But the person is still dead.

And I cannot help wondering: who, then, is responsible for his death?

6/
There was something else I had hoped to find in their testimonies.

I wanted to know what had happened inside them afterward.

Did they think about the people they had killed? Did those faces ever return to them? Did they carry those memories into their ordinary lives? Had anything changed in them?

One of the soldiers said that he had once visited Poland and wondered how German society had managed to go on living after what it had done.

Later, he said, he discovered how simple it could be.

A person could bomb a place and then, that very evening, go back to worrying about a personal appointment.

Another said something I do not think I will ever forget:

“I brought the building down, then went out for beers with my friends that night.”

I do not know how to put into words what I felt when I heard him say that.

I have not yet learned how to sleep through a single night without returning to the war. And there he was, speaking of bringing down a residential building, then going out to spend an ordinary evening with his friends.

As though nothing had happened.

As though no one had been there.

7/

And suddenly, a question came into my mind that I could not get rid of.

Could the building he was speaking about have been my family’s home?

The home that was bombed on October 12, 2023, where 42 members of my family were killed?

Could it be that while we were searching for our loved ones beneath the rubble, while we were crying for those we had lost, the person who had killed them was sitting somewhere, drinking beer with his friends?

I do not know who bombed my family’s home.

I do not know what he did afterward.

But the thought that this might have been possible made me feel sick.

Did he think, even for a moment, about what he had left behind?

Did he ever imagine that there were families who would spend the rest of their lives trying to live with what he had done in a few minutes?

My grandmother was in that house.

So were my uncles on both sides of the family, their sons and daughters, and their children.

They were people I knew. People I loved. People with whom I had spent years of my life.

I still remember their voices and their faces. I remember the little things, the ordinary moments we shared, the details that might mean nothing to anyone else but that I cannot forget.

To the person who bombed the house, perhaps it was simply another building brought down.

Another mission completed successfully.

But for me, a part of my life ended with that house.

Three years have passed.

And still, I return to that day.

Still, I am trying to learn how to live with their absence.

8/
But what made me angrier than their ability to return to ordinary life was something else.

Some of them did not speak about killing as something they had been forced to do.

They spoke about it as something they could enjoy.

One of the participants said that soldiers would talk about enjoying themselves whenever there was an escalation.

That it was “fun, real fun.”

I sat with those words for a long time.

I have seen enough death during my work in Gaza’s hospitals. I have watched children die before my eyes. I have seen families disappear, and people we tried so desperately to save but could not.

I have seen more suffering than I ever thought a person could see.

But I have never been able to understand how anyone could find pleasure in it.

To kill another human being is terrible enough.

But to enjoy killing him?

That is a kind of cruelty I do not know how to comprehend.

What troubled me even more was hearing one participant say that many of those who had done these things were not members of the far right.

They were people from Tel Aviv, people who belonged to the moderate left.

I kept thinking about this.

We sometimes imagine that people capable of such acts must have been extremists from the beginning.

But what if they are ordinary people?

People we might meet at university or in a café. People who might sit across from us and speak about peace, about justice, about human rights.

How can someone be kind to his friends, loving toward his family, and believe in human rights, yet accept that a child can be killed for crossing a line he could not even see?

What happens to a person’s conscience when the humanity of another person becomes something he can simply set aside?

9/
I left the film with an anger I had not felt in a very long time.

I had not gone to learn what happened in Gaza.

I was there. I had seen enough.

I went because I wanted to understand how the people who had done these things could go on living with themselves.

How could they justify killing? How could they persuade themselves that what they were doing was normal? And how could some of them even find pleasure in it?

I think I had been looking for remorse.

Perhaps I wanted to hear one of them say that he had finally understood, even if it had taken him too long, what he had done.

But I did not find the answer I was looking for.

Instead, I came away with questions that frightened me even more.

10/

I left the cinema, but I could not return to my life.

I walked through the streets of Madrid for more than five hours.

Five whole hours.

I did not know where I was or where I was going. I barely noticed the streets around me. I could look straight ahead and still not truly see what was there.

I simply kept walking.

But I was not seeing Madrid.

I was seeing Gaza.

I was seeing December 2023, when I was running with my mother under gunfire, without knowing where we could go.

I was seeing the days of famine, when we could not find even a single loaf of bread to share.

I was seeing the hospitals, and the children I had not been able to save.

And again and again, I found myself returning to October 13.

To my family’s home.

To the people I had lost that day.

I had walked out of the cinema, but I had not really left the film behind.

And perhaps, in some part of me, I had never left Gaza at all.

11/
Ever since I left Gaza, I have been trying to learn how to live again.

I am trying to accept that I can now walk outside without being afraid that a shell will fall, that I can buy food without risking my life, and that I can return home knowing that my home will still be standing where I left it.

These are such ordinary things.

And yet I am still learning how to believe in them.

But after those five hours walking through Madrid, I understood something I had been trying not to admit ever since I arrived in Europe.

I had left Gaza only with my body.

I do not know whether I will ever be able to move beyond everything that happened.

And I am not even sure that I want to leave it all behind.

How could I forget people I loved?

How could I ever make peace with the fact that their lives ended in such a way?

Sometimes I feel that if I manage to live through an entire day without remembering them, I will have lost something more of them.

As though forgetting, even for a day, would be another kind of loss.

And sometimes, all I want is to be able to sleep without seeing them.

I do not know how to reconcile these two feelings.

They live with me every day.

#NAZA