by W.D. Ehrhart
Readers may remember the essay of mine that The New Hampshire Gazette published on May 30th called “A Part of You Will Die with Us,” prompted by a letter written by a Palestinian woman named Rawand Gawad Abu Ghanem and finding its way to me via the playwright Naomi Wallace and the scholar and anthologist Lorrie Goldenson.
Rawand’s letter details the terrible hardships and dangers she and everyone living in Gaza have had to endure since October 7th, 2023, when the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) began what has become the utter destruction and decimation of Gaza in retaliation for the sneak attack on Israel by Hamas.
Since October 7, 2023, Rawand wrote, our lives have been turned upside down by the terrible war in Gaza. My family and I are struggling to survive, like refugees inside Gaza. Our home was severely damaged soon after the war began and we moved in with my parents and siblings. Their neighborhood then became the location of fierce fighting and we were forced to flee again, this time to the south. My parents’ home was also destroyed soon after we left.
She continues, in great detail, to outline the horrors she and her family—and all Gazans—have been dealing with.
At the time Rawand wrote to her friend Naomi, Rawand was pregnant with her second child. Today, Naomi sent me this letter, dated Friday, July 25th, that she received from Rawand:
My dear Naomi, Mohammed was born on the 12th of June. It was the most terrible day of my life. Also the most beautiful.
This is my labor story: There are no hospitals in Gaza because they are destroyed. That night there is heavy bombing. Bombs falling everywhere. Can you imagine? I must give birth while missiles are flying over our heads. I cannot walk because of my labor. I fall in the street, bleeding. Finally my husband finds a car to take me to a clinic that is still half-functioning. I am unconscious when I arrive. There are no pain killers, no blankets on the bed. I feel so cold. I give birth at 4:30 a.m.
Only when I see my child born do I feel that I will live. That I have to live.
You know what I miss now? A spoonful of sugar. I forget the taste of sugar. I have not eaten sweets in a long time. How can I breast-feed my child without strength in my body?
You are the only one to whom I can speak freely about the weakness in my body from lack of food. What we endure? Mountains cannot endure what we endure in Gaza. As a new mother, I need special care, special food, but nothing exists. I want to make a fire to keep my baby warm but there is no wood. There is no water.
I have not eaten flour for days. I am, like many, in starvation. I walk to the kitchen and search for something to eat but I find nothing to eat. No flour. No sugar. I want to buy from the market but there is nothing in the market.
And the mosquitoes! They bite my body and the mosquitoes bite my baby all over, on his face too. I curse the mosquito that keeps biting me.
Why are they waiting to stop this war? So many of us have disappeared into death. Every day more of us disappear into death. Why do they murder us? Why do they starve us?
And I’m sorry to say, but I’m angry. We are angry. They have made us angry. Do you know that we start to prefer death instead of this life? Because we are not alive. We just breathe. But we are not even breathing healthy air. Smoke and destruction and bombing—this is what we breathe.
I want to drink milk. This is my hope now that one day I will drink milk again. We long so much to eat eggs. To drink juice, fresh juice. To eat meat, fish. Chocolate! Now, if we are lucky, we only have some rice and lentils to eat. No other choices. No bread. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Everything has turned upside down. Please stop all this suffering. Your friend in Gaza, Rawand.
A few weeks ago, I went for a walk with a friend of mine who is Jewish. He is a kind and thoughtful man. He does not approve of Netanyahu, but he firmly believes that Hamas alone is responsible for what is happening to the people of Gaza, that Hamas is deliberately exposing civilians to death by using them as shields, and that the overwhelming majority of Gazans support Hamas.
My friend had no response, however, when I pointed out to him that Hamas did not even exist when the first intifada began in 1987, and that the Israeli government bankrolled Hamas in a successful effort to help Hamas win election, gain political control of Gaza, and prevent Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority from unifying the Palestinian people.
(I am reminded of the enthusiastic support of the United States for the mujahadeen fighters in Afghanistan, who less than two decades later morphed into al-Queda and attacked the U.S. And the Israelis are surprised that Hamas has attacked Israel? Well, duh.)
Moreover, when I read about the suffering of people like Rawand and her family, and the travails of Palestinian poet Mosab abu Toha and his family, I find it simply impossible to believe that most ordinary Palestinian civilians support Hamas or desire anything but for the killing and misery to stop.
As Graham Greene so presciently wrote about ordinary Vietnamese civilians in The Quiet American back in 1955, “They want enough rice. They don’t want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another.”
The Ayatollahs in Iran, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza may all be calling for the destruction of Israel, but I’d bet my last dollar that what Greene said about ordinary Vietnamese in 1955 is equally true of ordinary Palestinians in 2025: “They want enough rice. They don’t want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another.”
–=≈=–
W.D. Ehrhart is a retired Master Teacher of History & English, and author of a Vietnam War memoir trilogy published by McFarland.