Even as I write these words, I want to describe to you everything I know; I am haunted by all that I cannot fit between these lines.
In one of the many videos that have emerged from Gaza since October 7, a woman is pulling two toddlers in car seats behind her as she makes the 14-kilometre route from Gaza City to the central Gaza Strip on foot. With bags strewn on either shoulder and makeshift ropes attached to the car seats, she is dragging them, without wheels, along the pavement. “Super mom,” reads the caption, explaining that she has been pulling the two children for over five hours. Hundreds of others are walking the same route around her—families laden with bags, blankets, and young children.
As I write these words, we are witnessing the total collapse of life-sustaining systems in Gaza. Some 180 Palestinian women give birth in Gaza every day amid mass displacement and collapsing water and electricity infrastructure. Access to food and clean water has become scarce. Women have undergone C-sections without anesthesia. Without running water, many have reported taking menstruation-delaying pills. Babies born prematurely to stressed mothers are left with insufficient incubators as hospitals run out of fuel. Hundreds of health-care facilities have been targeted by Israeli missiles, including the crucial Al Hilo maternity hospital. On November 13, staff within Gaza’s largest hospital, Al Shifa, reported running out of electricity, water, and food.
As Audre Lorde said in 1982, “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” The attack on Gaza is a feminist issue, and not only because of the compounded violence faced by women, girls, and queer and trans Palestinians. As a Palestinian woman, I understand that my liberation is tied to the liberation of my people. I am made up of, and depend on, the safety of everyone in my family and community—including Palestinian men, who are often excluded from the realm of innocence and empathy. My feminism demands the dismantling of Israeli apartheid and the institutions and systems that reinforce it. It demands the freedom of all political prisoners and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands. This includes the 1.65 million Palestinians, who like the woman dragging her two toddlers, were displaced since October 7 across Gaza—a region whose population was already composed of 80 percent refugees, displaced internally during the 1948 Nakba.
The woman dragging her children as she walked was just one scene in a flood of images and videos across social media that have been etched permanently into my mind. The images weigh heavy on me: a father calling out his children’s names while he digs futilely by hand in the concrete pile of their collapsed home; a child’s body blackened by ash, pulled from the rubble by a man in slippers, sagging like a doll in his arms; toddlers, whose lifeless bodies contort unnaturally in the arms of wailing parents; a journalist, in tears at the killing of his colleague, removing his press vest and helmet because, he says, they cannot protect him; a man holding a baby boy who died on the road to southern Gaza, while families piled onto a caravan stare at him silently. “What was his crime?” asks the man, “why should a child like this have to die?” In all the images, I see the now-familiar wide eyes and blank stare of shock.
Palestinians have long documented our most painful moments, bearing our wounds to the camera and calling on the world to bear witness. The condition of being Palestinian, particularly in the West, is to be haunted by an invisible and ever-present burden to articulate yourself more credibly and convincingly—showing definitive proof, citing international law, regurgitating statistics, producing study after study, and referencing the voices of allies seen as more credible than ourselves—to insist that our experiences and our analysis of them are legitimate. Yet this condition crumbles under scrutiny.
“Why should I show you my children’s body parts to make you believe that I’m dying?” asked journalist Ghadi Francis on Lebanese television in early November. The fact is that the atmosphere of denial has little to do with how credible our documentation has been or how resounding our voices are. “Palestinians have been dehumanized to such an extent,” insists Palestinian writer Yara Hawari, “that even when they hold up their murdered children in front of cameras and display them to the world, there are those who will still say they are responsible for their own children’s deaths.”
Palestinians know that many will deny the violence we endure or, to fit into their vision of a just world, say that we deserved it. We still hold our dead up to the camera and hope to be seen. It is a human condition.
The current Israeli onslaught, while unprecedented in scale, is not the first time that Palestinians have lived through well-documented horrors. For over 75 years, documentation has not led to meaningful international intervention. We are not naive. Palestinians know that many will deny the violence we endure or, to fit into their vision of a just world, say that we deserved it. We still hold our dead up to the camera and hope to be seen. It is a human condition. Even as I write these words, I want to describe to you everything I know; I am haunted by all that I cannot fit between these lines.
The effect of sharing images of suffering has long been debated, and in moments like these, it is more than a matter of rhetoric. “I am very sorry for filming you in these circumstances,” wrote Motaz Azaiza, a freelance journalist on the ground in Gaza in November. Another leading local journalist, Plestia Alaqad, writes, “I have nothing left to say.. Why do we Palestinians have to film our own country getting bombed, and our own people getting killed just for the world to watch silently?” Their harrowing images and testimonies have reached millions.
Images, by their very nature, ‘capture’ and objectify. They can create distance between the viewer and the subject, and with repetition, can transform certain people into objects lacking agency, to be analyzed from afar. Images of suffering or war can normalize violence against particular communities, often Black and Brown, and eventually strip the viewer of empathy. Many of these images reach western screens through inherently voyeuristic frames—such as CCTV or surveillance footage, police body cameras, military drone cameras, the personal cameras of soldiers, or through complicit lenses—like those of embedded journalists or mainstream media. But, over the past few years, this trend has been disrupted.
As in the past, Israel has prevented journalists from accessing Gaza during the most recent onslaught. During the Unity Uprising and previous major attack on Gaza in 2021, international journalists could not access even the West Bank due to COVID-19 restrictions. Wide access to cameras and social media, as well as limited access by international journalists to Palestine, has elevated the voices of Palestinian journalists, doctors, activists, artists, mothers, and everyday people. Palestinians are filming and narrativizing their own experiences—from Azaiza and Alaqad in Gaza, to sibling activists Mohammed and Muna El Kurd in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Documenting from within, Palestinian frames offer a social and political context as well as a sense of intimacy. They call us in. When I witnessed the press conference held outside the Ahli Arab Hospital after its bombardment, where health workers stood at a podium surrounded by corpses, I felt no distance.
Images of suffering or war can normalize violence against particular communities, often Black and Brown, and eventually strip the viewer of empathy.
Still, this wasn’t the case for everyone. “How cinematic it is!” wrote Azaiza in the caption of a video showing a man and woman weeping as they rush past him, carrying the body of a dead toddler in their arms, while dozens in the background pray over two shrouded body bags lying on the pavement. “Our lives here are a big movie and you all watch and whenever you want you switch the channel.” He’s right. The effect of images relies on so much more than the frame. Images of war and suffering rely essentially on the viewer; the implicit hope behind sharing these vulnerable moments is that they will capture your attention, contemplation, empathy, or horror, and drive you to take action. The dehumanization of Palestinians makes this impossible for many.
The slew of documentation and testimony from women across Gaza and the rest of Palestine has not led to meaningful stances from major women’s, feminist, or gender and reproductive justice organizations across Canada. The settler-colonial state of Canada is deeply complicit in Israeli violence—exporting millions in arms and providing millions in military aid to Israel, as well as offering unlimited diplomatic and political support to the regime on the international stage. This means that all of us in Canada are complicit. The silence of feminists and feminist organizations is a grave failure.
On November 6, a coalition of women’s unions and grassroots movements representing Palestinian women across historic Palestine and in exile called upon global feminist organizations to take meaningful action to help end the genocide. “Palestinian women have been struggling for decades against the intersection of national, social and economic oppressions, calling out the inherent patriarchal core of Israel’s regime of oppression,” wrote the coalition of 12 women’s organizations in an open letter posted on the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions website. “This moment is the litmus test… for humanity and the very meaning of justice and freedom. If not now, when?”
Imagine the vulnerability of being seen, by thousands or millions, in the moment that you learn your family has been killed. Palestinians are baring their grief and calling on the world to look. We cannot let their invitation be in vain. We must look, and let the images light a fire beneath us.
Rana Nazzal Hamadeh is a Palestinian artist and filmmaker currently based on unceded Anishinaabe Algonquin land. Her photography, film, and installation works look at issues related to time, space, land, and movement, offering interventions rooted in a decolonial framework.