The silence of death is louder than all other sounds

A missive and photos from my friend Yousef in Gaza, who asked me to post these. I have lightly edited, grammar and syntax only

Between death and life, between fear and safety, between darkness and light. In our city, you can taste the taste of death in the alleys of the streets that have turned to ash. You know whenever you pass through the darkness of its alleys, you can smell the scent of death. We walk in the dark roads and empty streets and fear grips our hearts; we ask whether we will reach our destination or not. You may become a martyr at some point while you are walking, or even if you are sitting in your house or tent where they forced you to move.

Here in Gaza, people have lost their minimum rights. Here in Gaza, survival inside Gaza is a matter of luck. We ask ourselves: Are we really alive? Or maybe we are dead and we don't feel it? We and death sit in the same trench. We watch each other silently. My silence is filled with terror. The silence of death is cold, deep, and penetrates the skin to the bones. It penetrates the heart and increases its beats. All around us is a mixture of sounds. We distinguish the sound of death from other sounds, by experience.

We hear this mixture every day: fire belts, cannons, tanks, reconnaissance planes, and missiles of all kinds. Explosions. Devastation. Screams of women, children and elderly people moaning, crying, gasping for air. The silence of death is louder than all other sounds.

It performs its mission with the brutality of the occupier, the thirst of the usurper, and the power of the oppressor. We and death are still in the same trench. We watch each other silently.

Death has passed us by many times. We are alive but not well. We need to rest a little.

We need rest from fear, from anxiety, from expecting the worst, from the trouble of thinking, from the dozens of battles that we fight at the same time.

[The pool of standing liquid in the photo above and added to the gallery below is water mixed with the blood of three of Yousef’s cousins, killed when their home was bombed in December, 2023. The family narrowly escaped—they had left not long before.]