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Palestine: Violence against civilians in Gaza
I survived Gaza's horrors. I watched NAZA to learn how Israeli soldiers live with it I survived Gaza's horrors. I watched NAZA to learn how Israeli soldiers live with it Submitted by Ezzideen Shehab on Fri, 10/16/2026 - 16:54 The testimony of perpetrators sheds light on what was happening on the other side, as we frantically scrambled to stay alive Palestinian mourners gather in Gaza City after the recovery from the rubble of the unidentified remains of more than 100 people, on 30 September 2026 (Omar al-Qattaa/AFP) Off I recently watched NAZA. I did not go to see the film to learn about what 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 neighbourhoods were wiped away, how residential buildings were bombed with 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 humiliation, down to the smallest detail. Or about the starving people who were killed while trying to reach what were so absurdly called “food distribution centres”. I know all of this. I was there. I went to the film 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 met one of them someday, would he dare look me in the eyes? How do they sleep at night? How does a person silence his conscience so completely? This, to me, is why the film matters. Life and death 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 criticise 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. How many people can disappear behind such words? How many lives can be made to sound like nothing at all? But I want to hear how he explains what he did. I want to understand how he justifies it to himself. The testimony of the perpetrator does not become more important than that of the victim, 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. 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 realised how mistaken I had been to believe that leaving Gaza might also mean being able to leave those memories behind. The imaginary line 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; 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 metres, bullets would strike a wall in front of us, and we understood that we could not go any farther in that direction. We learned where we were allowed to go from the bullets being fired at us. NAZA review: Portrait of Israel as a nation stuck in a moral abyss Read More » 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 could have cost us our lives. I remember 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. Filmmaker Yuval Abraham asked him how people were supposed to know where that line was. He answered that they had to “learn the hard way”, through blood. "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 happened to us on that day from the other side. We were 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. The same soldier then spoke of 140 people who were killed. He said they were all civilians. The filmmaker asked him again, almost as if he could not believe what he had heard: had none of them been carrying a weapon? No, the soldier answered. None of them was armed. One hundred and forty human beings. I kept thinking of all the times we 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? The children of Gaza 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 did; he was killed for something he did not know. I have thought about that child ever since I watched the film. 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 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. Then the filmmaker asked about the bodies of the civilians who had been killed in those areas; the bodies of people who did not know where the streets they were allowed to walk along came to an end. The soldier was silent for a moment. Then he said that dogs had eaten them. He explained that he couldn't watch it himself, but others with him had seen the dogs eating the bodies. The filmmaker asked whether he could 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. 'Following orders' 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 you divide it into smaller tasks. NAZA: Why the world watches only when Israelis document genocide Read More » 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 he did nothing more than the small part he was asked to do. But the person is still dead. I cannot help wondering: who, then, is responsible for his death? I had hoped to find something else in their testimonies. I wanted to know what happened inside them afterwards. Did they think about the people they 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 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. The day my family was destroyed I still haven't 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. Suddenly, a question came to mind that I couldn't shake: could the building he was talking about have been my family’s home? The home that was bombed on 12 October 2023, when 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 lost, the person who 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 afterwards. 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 families spending 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 I had spent years of my life with. 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. Taking pleasure in killing But what made me angrier than these soldiers' 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 participant said soldiers would talk about enjoying themselves whenever there was an escalation; 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. 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 I have seen more suffering than I ever thought a person could see. But I have never understood 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 cannot comprehend. What troubled me even more was hearing one participant say that many of those who had done these things were not far-right members. 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 cafe. 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 towards 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? Still in Gaza I left the film with an anger I had not felt in a very long time. I did not go to learn about what happened in Gaza. I was there. I had seen enough. I went because I wanted to understand how the people who did these things could keep 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 was looking for remorse. Perhaps I wanted to hear one of them say he had finally understood what he had done, even if it had taken him too long. As elections loom, NAZA controversy strikes at the heart of Israel's crisis Read More » But I did not find the answer I was looking for. Instead, I came away with questions that frightened me even more. 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 was not able to save. And again and again, I found myself returning to the day my family’s home was bombed; to the people I lost that day. I walked out of the cinema, but I did not really leave the film behind. And perhaps, in some part of me, I have never left Gaza at all. Everything I cannot forget Ever since I departed Gaza, I have been trying to learn how to live again. I am trying to accept that I can now walk outside without fearing a shell will fall, buy food without risking my life, and return home knowing it 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 since I arrived in Europe. I 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? I went to the cinema because I wanted to hear how they remembered what they had done to us. And I came out thinking of everything I cannot forget 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 sleep without seeing them. I do not know how to reconcile these two feelings. They live with me every day. Three years ago, on a single day, I lost 42 members of my family. I do not know what the person who bombed their home did afterwards. I do not know whether he went out for beers with his friends, returned to his wife and children, or slept peacefully that night. I do not know. But I know I haven't slept peacefully since that day. And I know that although I survived, although I left Gaza, I still carry that home with me, along with everyone who was inside it. I went to the cinema because I wanted to hear how they remembered what they had done to us. And I came out thinking of everything I cannot forget. This article was adapted from the author’s social media posts on X (formerly Twitter). The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. Israel's genocide in Gaza Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0
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