Only victims

A Palestinian was crying over the lifeless body of a relative, this Saturday in Gaza City.MAHMUD HAMS / AFP

The children of Gaza are open-mouthed when their parents tell them that in a not so distant time, they went shopping in Ramallah and to eat in Jerusalem and went home to sleep without going through a single military checkpoint.

The story is so far removed from the miserable little planet on which they were born and raised that it seems like a science fiction movie.

More than 40% of the almost two million inhabitants of the Strip are under 14 years of age.

They were born when the Islamist movement Hamas already ruled Gaza and in its short existence they have lived through three wars.

They know how to recognize the buzz of an F-16 and the noise of a Palestinian rocket flying through the sky in the direction of Israel and they have probably lost family or friends in a bombing.

They have only seen through a screen the world that is beyond the barbed wire that mark the border and many carry traumas that translate into aggressiveness, hyperactivity or nightmares, ills of the soul that are difficult to address in the Gaza of 2021.

Fear is part of their lives and the blockade that Israel has applied on Gaza since 2007 cuts off those invisible wings that make children happily children.

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This relentless isolation, accompanied by the restrictions imposed for years by Egypt in the south, has dramatic and unsuspected consequences on the daily lives of civilians in the Strip.

Study, look for a job, put a plate of food on the table, educate your children or face an illness when you live enclosed in 365 square kilometers, an area that is equivalent, for example, to one fifth of the province of Gipuzkoa, and From which it is not left without authorization, it is a daily challenge.

Imam, 37 years old and with breast cancer for four years, has lost count of the permits requested from Israel. All in vain. He only asks that the door of Gaza be opened for him so that he can go to a Palestinian hospital in Jerusalem to receive radiotherapy, which does not exist in the Strip due to the blockade. But being born in Gaza undoubtedly condemns her to a silent and early death from a cancer that could have been controlled and probably cured elsewhere.

Their fear is joined by an indescribable loneliness in a society that is increasingly closed, conservative and patriarchal, where women's health is not a priority and cancer patients are despised and abandoned.

The Israeli blockade, internal divisions between Hamas and President Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority, and the inaction of the international community have accelerated this cruel setback as a society.

Faced with the drama in Gaza, there are those who prefer to close their eyes or hide behind the statistically impossible idea that all civilians are complicit in the decisions of their leaders.

In Gaza there is always a lack of air and, under the bombardments, the anguish of thousands of people who have nowhere to flee makes their endless night darker and more suffocating.

Beatriz Lecumberri

is a journalist and co-director of the documentary

Condenadas en Gaza

.