Tragedy and Half-Truths: A Gaza Diary
Atef Abu Saif’s ‘Don’t Look Left’ provides a vivid account of the horrors of daily life in the Gaza Strip, yet omits to mention Hamas’s role in the war.
Atef Abu Saif, the Ramallah-based Palestine National Authority’s minister of culture since 2019, was on a trip that was part work, part vacation, with his son Yasser, to the Gaza Strip when war broke out on 7 October 2023. He was there for 84 days, until Hamas and the Egyptian and Israeli authorities allowed him to leave and cross into Egypt. Abu Saif was born in 1973 in Jabalya, a slum neighbourhood of Gaza City, in the north of the Strip, a place that had previously been a large camp of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 War. Abu Saif’s parents and extended family had fled there from the coastal town of Jaffa, which became part of the state of Israel that same year.
Just as he had done during a previous 51-day bout of Hamas–Israeli clashes in 2014—which he described as a “war”—Abu Saif kept a diary, recording each day’s events between 7 October and the end of December, 2023—the violence, the devastation, the many chats over narghiles with friends and relatives, and his peregrinations through the corpse- and rubble-strewn streets during the first few weeks, while he still had a car, as well his thoughts, including the metaphors and conceits that filled his mind. A writer by profession, Abu Saif had five novels and two collections of short stories under his belt when he published his first war diary, The Drone Eats with Me, in 2014. The second, Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide, appeared in 2024 in Arabic and has already been translated into 11 languages. A Hebrew translation is currently in the works.
In Don’t Look Left, Abu Saif describes the daily horrors endured by the 2.3 million inhabitants of the Hamas-governed Strip, which has been subjected to continuous pounding by the Israel Air Force (IAF) and IDF artillery since 8 October 2023. Over the past eleven months, most of the Strip’s inhabitants have been forcibly uprooted from their homes either by Israeli orders or by the circumstances of battle—especially the inhabitants of Gaza City and its surrounding towns, who have had to evacuate to the southern Gaza Strip towns of Rafah and Khan Yunis and to the agricultural areas and sand dunes of the Mawasi area, and who have endured major privations of food and clean water. Many of the buildings in the north have been turned to rubble and the streets and infrastructure of the towns have been steadily demolished. More than a million of the uprooted now live in school buildings and hospital compounds, in makeshift tent-cities, and in partially destroyed buildings. Over the course of the fighting, some 20,000 noncombatants—including, according to Hamas Health Ministry figures, thousands of women and children—have been killed and many have been permanently maimed.
All this is graphically, shockingly described in the pages of Abu Saif’s diary, as are the sights and sounds of bombing, urban warfare and siege, dead bodies and body parts, and the smells of death and rot amid the rubble. Death haunts every page; everyone lives in fear that today might be his last. And almost everyone is forced to flee, to be constantly on the move from one neighbourhood or town to another. Overhead, there is the routine hum of the IDF attack and surveillance drones and jets, and seemingly endless explosions of shells and bombs shake the houses between which Abu Saif moves as he visits relatives or seeks temporary haven. No one can sleep through the night.
Throughout the diary, Abu Saif harks back to the various milestones of Palestinian history—from the failed anti-British Revolt of 1936–39 to the catastrophe (Nakba) of 1948, the 1956 and 1967 wars, and the two failed anti-Israel rebellions or intifadas, of 1987–91 and 2000–05—in order to firmly embed the current Gazan catastrophe, which he calls the “second Nakba,” in a continuing tale of Palestinian misfortune.
Benny Morris
But why the ongoing tragedy of the 2023–24 war in Gaza came to pass—at least, its immediate context—is completely elided in the book’s 280 pages, which renders the work, however accurate and moving in its details, a piece of propaganda. Completely absent from its pages are the Hamas fighters and their brothers in the smaller Islamic Jihad organisation, who, in a surprise attack on 7 October 2023, invaded southern Israel and murdered 850 civilians, raped countless women, and took some 250 Israelis hostage —most of them civilian men, women, and children ranging in age from a few months old to octogenarians—and killed some 360 IDF soldiers, while they destroyed most of the border-hugging kibbutzim with their peace-loving, left-wing inhabitants. Yet it is that assault that triggered the devastating Israeli response, now in its eleventh month.
Incredibly, the word “Hamas” appears only twice in the book and Hamas fighters, whether alive, wounded, or dead—and, according to the IDF some 15–20,000 of them have died so far—are nowhere mentioned, not once. The book is populated solely by Palestinian noncombatants, victims all—and, of course, by IDF planes, drones, tanks, and faceless soldiers, who are routinely described as latter-day Nazis. For Abu Saif, Gaza’s civilians are always “innocents,” though they may be the fathers, siblings, and nurturers of Hamas fighters, and though so many of them supported and still support the terrorists’ goal of destroying Israel, and have provided its fighters with safe havens, weapons storage facilities, and assembly points for years.
Fittingly, Don’t Look Left begins with Abu Saif’s lengthy but vague and misleading diary entry of 7 October. That morning’s invasion of southern Israel is never mentioned let alone described—and there are no references to it in the diary’s subsequent entries. The 7 October entry is full of such elisions. “I never thought it would happen while I was swimming [in the Mediterranean, near Gaza City],” he writes. “Without warning, rockets and explosions sound in all directions.” The destination of these rockets—Israel—is never mentioned. “I carry on swimming. ‘It’s a training manoeuvre,’ I think ... My friend, the young poet and musician, Omar Abu Shawish, [who] had [also] been swimming ... was killed along with a friend ... by a shell from a [Israeli] warship. They are the first two victims of the war,” he writes. In fact, the hundreds of Israelis slaughtered in the kibbutzim were the war’s first victims. It is possible that offshore IDF patrol boats responded to the Hamas offensive that morning by shelling Gaza. But it is more likely that these Gazan deaths occurred over the following days, when Israel had launched its response to the terrorist onslaught. Abu Saif relates that later that day, “from my window I hear a group of people [talking] ... ‘Maybe Israel assassinated someone really high up, and Hamas retaliated.’ ‘I heard the assassination was in Turkey.’ ‘No, it is just another escalation.’ ‘This is no escalation.’” (In fact there had been no Israeli assassination of any Hamas leader in Turkey or elsewhere.)
In Abu Saif’s telling, there was no cross-border offensive by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, no massacre of civilians, no rapes, no hostage-taking. Likewise, among the following months’ diary entries, there are no mentions of Hamas fighters battling the IDF in the Gaza Strip. Hamas is simply whitewashed out of the story, as if it did not exist. Indeed, there is no war at all, only a massive Israeli air and ground assault against Gaza’s civilian population. What we have here is a half-truth combined with a glaring omission. As Abu Saif explained to his fellow Palestinian National Authority cabinet ministers in Ramallah by Zoom on 9 October, “The most important thing is to expose the Israeli crimes against us. The world needs to break out of the Israeli narrative about this being self-defence.” This, in short, is the purpose of Don’t Look Left.
Abu Saif’s diary contains a lot of concrete, graphic details, which drive home the reality of life in the battle-stricken Strip over these past 11 months. Take the entry for 1 November 2023, which describes the aftermath of the Israeli bombing of the Sinada neighbourhood of Gaza City:
This is a massacre … Some 50 buildings had been brought to the ground … I spend two hours helping … search for survivors and removing bodies Everyone is ... clawing at the rubble … Under the concrete we find books, lots of them ... Raed, a friend ... says, “Yes … this is the living room, these are my father’s.” … Suddenly we touch hair … it seems to be a woman’s head. After ten minutes … we are eventually able to carry out the severed head and chest ... After an hour, we have only managed to collect severed pieces of her body. Part of an arm. A few fingers. A few spinal discs and the legs. Someone brings me a spade and I dig, looking for more bodies ... I feel completely exhausted … I feel contaminated.
Occasionally, as on 20 November, Abu Saif spends his mornings collecting and clearing garbage from the streets, as the sanitation department has stopped functioning and the stench is overpowering.
As early as 9 October, Abu Saif is writing that Gaza “City has been transformed into a wasteland of rubble and debris.” By 14 October, he is comparing the damage—which at the time was minimal—to the Anglo-American destruction of Dresden in February 1945, during which the Allies killed as many as 25,000 Germans in only three days. He seems either unaware of or untroubled by the implied comparison of the Gazans with the Nazis.
Death and horror encompass everything. But Abu Saif also proffers some positive observations. He finds Palestinian resilience and community everywhere. He frequently refers to the camaraderie, solidarity, and altruism of the suffering populace. From time to time, he berates profiteering local Palestinian businessmen who exploit the food and fuel shortages; and he lambasts both the Arab and Western worlds for not doing enough to help the Palestinians—echoing a common Palestinian refrain dating back to at least the 1930s. But Abu Saif is careful not to offer a word of reproach to the Palestinian leaders—the Palestinian National Authority, Hamas, Islamic Jihad. And this notable absence of self-criticism has also been a constant in the history of Palestinian nationalism.
In his diary entries, Abu Saif periodically alludes to the Palestinian past—and to his own past. He recalls his youth during the First Intifada, when, as a 15-year-old stone-thrower, he was wounded by Israeli gunfire and his life was saved by a visiting British surgeon. But the 1948 Nakba occupies pride of place in his narrative. On 23 November, Abu Saif writes: “No Palestinian likes the number 48.” On 29 November, Abu Saif includes a highly misleading description of the events of that year. “Today is Palestine International Solidarity Day,” he writes. “Most people forget that 29th November is the day when, in 1947, the United Nations voted in favour of partitioning Palestine, as it was, into two states: one for the Jews and one for the Arabs. The Jewish one was realised the following year after 800,000 Arabs were driven out [the real number was closer to 700,000], their men shot, their women raped … Terror was what destroyed that half of Palestine.” In actuality, relatively few Palestinians were murdered in 1948 and—unlike during the events of 7 October—only a handful of women were raped.
What Abu Saif, who once served as the PLO’s spokesman, crucially fails to mention in his brief account of the 1948 War is that it was the Palestinian leadership, backed by the Arab states, who rejected the General Assembly’s partition proposal, rejected the very idea of Jewish statehood in any part of Palestine. And it was the Palestinian militias who, on 30 November 1947, launched the Jewish-Arab civil war that led to the collapse of Palestinian society and the beginning of Palestinian refugeedom.
Sol Stern
During his months in the Strip, Abu Saif repeatedly meets with relatives. Among them is his grandmother’s sister, Noor, who was displaced twice: from Jaffa to Gaza in 1948 and then again during the current war, from Gaza City to a tent camp in southern Gaza. “Her life,” writes Abu Saif, “a history sandwiched between two displacements. Her childhood in one tent. Her eighties in another.” Elsewhere, Abu Saif describes the current war as the “newest Nakba.” “Even if the Israelis promise this is just a temporary deportation … no one will believe them,” he comments. “This is exactly what happened in 1948.” But this is nonsense; this is not what happened in 1948. With the exception of the inhabitants of one or two villages in the Galilee, the Palestinians who fled or were expelled in that year were never told by Israel that their exile would be temporary—no matter what some of them may have believed.
But Abu Saif’s book goes well beyond describing the current war as a “second Nakba,” a second displacement. As the book’s subtitle indicates, for him, as for many misguided Westerners, this war is a genocide. On 11 October—a mere four days after the start of the fighting—Abu Saif’s son Yasser asks him: “What does genocide mean?” to which he answers, “Everything that’s going on around us.”
But much of what Abu Saif writes contradicts this definition. For example, on 18 October and other occasions, he describes Israeli aeroplanes dropping warning leaflets telling the inhabitants of specific Gaza City districts to evacuate—“presumably so they [i.e., the Israelis] can flatten” them. But if Israel’s intention was genocide, why warn the inhabitants to clear out? He tells us that Israeli aeroplanes fired small dud missiles at the roofs of Gazan high-rises and in some cases even telephoned specific families to warn them to evacuate their homes. This is very strange behaviour for genocidaires. In real genocides—such as the Nazi genocide of World War II and the massacre of around two million Turkish Christians by their Muslim neighbours in 1894–1924—such warnings are never issued.
Abu Saif does his best to portray Israeli soldiers as genocidal monsters. On 20 October, he tells us that “the Israeli army’s instinct seems to be to kill as many [Palestinians] as they can.” On 9 December, he writes: “From the start it was clear the [Israeli] aim was to destroy everything and kill as many Palestinians as possible.” He depicts Israeli soldiers as savage sadists. On 17 December, he writes of “trigger-happy genocidal young Israeli soldiers.” On 30 October, he writes of Israeli attack-drone operators: They have “an hourly quota [of kills] to meet, I’m sure.” On 14 December, he comments: “I can’t help but think about these young killers behind their screens somewhere beyond the Gaza border, watching us and enjoying their work, like they’re back at home on their PlayStations.” On 18 December, he writes: “If you dare walk the streets, you’re likely to be picked off by [IDF] snipers, by young kids in battle wear having fun, enjoying themselves behind a wall of American-funded military equipment.” Every army has its fair share of sadists. But I doubt that most Israeli soldiers, even if impelled by vengefulness, have “enjoyed” their work over these past 11 months.
Occasionally, he describes Israel’s war aims as not genocide, but the “degraded” or lesser aim of ethnic cleansing—by which he means, the expulsion of the local population. On 21 October, he writes: “We all understood Israel’s mission was to evacuate all of the north of the Gaza Strip, and soon no doubt to do the same with [the] southern half, until the entire population was kicked out, into [Egypt’s] Sinai Desert.” He repeats this on 9 November: “The Israeli Army always knew what the mission was: ethnic cleansing of the whole of the Strip.... It’s not Hamas they are cleansing. It’s Arabs. When they see you, they will either kill you or force you to leave, whichever is quicker.” Three days later, he writes that “some Israelis” seek to transform the Strip into “a giant entertainment park, a Disney World for colonisers and settlers.” He adds that Israel’s “entire” post-1948 “tourist industry .... is built on such” a foundation—“‘Come and party on Palestinian graves’ ... Dance and be merry beside the world’s largest prison’ [i.e., the Gaza Strip].” This is fantasy. In all the footage I have seen of IDF soldiers in Gaza, none seem “merry”; most appear grim, some despondent. But all are determined to crush Hamas and return home as quickly as possible. Tourism to Israel is, of course, not based on a wish to gloat over Palestinian graves but is, in large measure, driven by people’s desire to visit ancient Jewish sites and graves like Masada; but this is problematic for Abu Saif as the official Palestinian narrative is that the Jews have no historic connection to the land of Israel/Palestine, that there were no Jews here in the past—or that, as Yasser Arafat told Bill Clinton in Camp David back in 2000, there was no Jewish temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.
Occasionally, Abu Saif reports unsubstantiated rumours and gossip—sometimes as conjecture, sometimes as fact. On 14 December, following an IDF strike that devastated the Jabalya cemetery, he reports, “Some rumours claim they’re harvesting organs from the recently dead”—though he acknowledges that “this doesn’t make sense” since long-dead bodies taken from a graveyard cannot be harvested for organs. But he is less sceptical about other equally unfounded allegations. On 18 December, he tells us that “the [Israeli] army [in north Jabalya] is reported to be burying wounded people alive along with the dead.” That same day, he writes that, “eight corpses were found in Shadia Abu Ghazala School in the Fallujah area. According to eyewitnesses, they were executed by Israeli soldiers. More corpses are found every day like this. It’s terrifying. So many mass executions are taking place and none of them are being reported.” There can be no doubt that, in the eleven months of close-quarter combat in an extremely challenging, densely populated environment riddled with homicidal terrorists, it is likely that some IDF troops have committed war crimes. But I have seen no evidence, no reports by reliable Western journalists—most of whom cannot be accused of pro-Israeli bias—to corroborate these allegations.
One striking falsehood that Abu Saif repeats is that on 17 October the Israeli Air Force bombed Gaza’s Al-Ahli Arab Hospital (formerly known as the Baptist Hospital), where he himself was treated during the First Intifada. “More than 500 people were killed,” writes Abu Saif, “though the Israelis knew that hospitals are protected by international law.” It is true that, shortly after the alleged events, newspapers around the world immediately reported Hamas’s announcement of the Israeli bombing as fact. But subsequent foreign press investigations concluded, as did the Israeli military, that the explosion near Al-Ahli was caused by a rocket fired by Palestinian forces from within the Gaza Strip, which fell short of its target, instead hitting the hospital courtyard and killing 100–300 people.
Abu Saif even suggests that Israel wants to systematically destroy Gaza’s most prominent architecture. On 11 October, after an IAF strike against the Karmal Tower building in Gaza City, he writes: “The Israelis always go for these kinds of buildings; new, impressive, exciting hubs of development and investment. I remember the destruction of Basha Tower, al-Shorouk Tower, and of course the Italian complex in 2014. The aim is always to send us back in time, to make the city look poor and ugly again.” It seems far more likely that these buildings were targeted because the IDF and Shin Bet believed that they contained Hamas or Islamic Jihad offices or communications hubs. It seems unlikely that the pilots were motivated by aesthetic considerations or by a desire to impoverish anyone.
During his months in the Strip, Abu Saif—like all Gaza’s inhabitants—must have been fully aware of the presence of thousands of Hamas fighters all around him. He may well have known which buildings they were concentrated in. He must have known that the IDF fighter-bombers, drones, and artillery were targeting Hamas concentrations rather than the civilians among whom they were—and are—embedded. Yet there is not the least hint of this in Abu Saif’s book, just as there are no dead or wounded Hamas fighters—only dead and wounded women and children—shown in the TV footage coming out of the Strip. The local media is tightly controlled by Hamas and broadcasts only what Hamas wants people to know. (Israel is also partly to blame since this media brownout is exacerbated by the country’s inexplicable reluctance to allow either foreign or Israeli journalists to enter the Strip without IDF “caretakers.”) Abu Saif constantly refers to IDF bombings of schools, mosques, and hospitals—when he must know that Hamas and Islamic Jihad use these buildings as military headquarters, assembly points, havens, weapons depots, and entry points to the Gaza militants’ underground tunnel network, knowing that the world will censure Israeli attacks on or near such structures.
Over the past 11 months, IDF air and artillery strikes have certainly caused thousands of collateral civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip. Abu Saif puts a human face on these tragedies by describing the fate of his niece, Wissam, who tragically lost both arms and a leg in an IAF bombing. Over the months, Abu Saif visits her in successive hospital wards. At one point, she pleads with him to put her out of her misery (he refuses). Eventually, in December, she ends up in an Egyptian hospital accompanied by her sister, Widdad. But, after months at Wissam’s side, Widdad suffers a nervous breakdown and ends up in a psychiatric ward. These two women’s lives were blighted by an Israeli missile attack, something undeniably horrific and tragic. But it is worth recalling who started this war: not Israel, but Hamas.
Don’t Look Left is fodder for the naïfs on American and European college campuses, who ignore the actions of the Muslim fundamentalists of Gaza on 7 October and are likely to eagerly swallow the book’s lies and half-truths about Israel’s subsequent onslaught against Hamas. To the rest of us, the absence at the heart of Abu Saif’s book is glaring: there is no acknowledgement that Palestinians have any agency or bear any responsibility for their current suffering.
