Palestinians are not numbers: an Obituary for Muhammed Alagha

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead …

W H Auden

On 25 September, 2019, our Wellcome Trust project field researcher, Ziad Abu Mustafa, interviewed a young Gazan man, Muhammed Alagha. The main objective of our project was to shed light on how power, violence and health become entangled in conflict zones. We paid specific attention to the urgent humanitarian case of Gaza. We did so through in-depth interviews and documentation to show how the organisation of space affects a community’s basic rights. With these materials in hand, we analysed the effect that Israel’s demolishing of private homes had on Gazans’ access to basic human needs. We also examined alternative forms of resilience that emerge in relation to the mental health of Gazans. But nothing could have prepared Ziad, himself originally from Gaza, for ‘the toughest interview ever’.

At the time, Muhammed Alagha was 24 years old. The interview took place at his home, located east of Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip, close to the Islamic University’s south branch. Muhammed was, by then, an unemployed, married man. In grave detail, he described how he had lost all his family members during Israel’s 2014 “Operation Protective Edge”. His words are important to quote directly here:

“I remember the unimaginable event in 2014: It was 27 July, around 21:45 hours. We gathered the family, to watch television: my father, Nader (55 years old who worked inside Israel and was not a member of any Palestinian faction), mother, Nirman (48 years old), my brothers Ahmed (24), Iyad (14), Fadial (7) and sisters Dilaj (had just completed secondary school) and Dounya (whose name means life), and my cousin’s wife, Marwa, and their four children, Muhammed, Abed, Nidal and Attia …

Suddenly, our house turned upside-down and I felt pain in my back and then fell down on the ground …

After the dust from the bomb strike settled, I moved my fingers and legs – just to be sure that I was still alive. The house had all been completely destroyed: There was fire and smoke and it was complete darkness …

‘Let it be a tale’: On Refaat Alareer and the martyrdom of the Gaza intellectual

Neighbours came and took the bodies, or rather what was left, of Marwa, Dilaj and Dounya who had been blown outside with the blast. The rest of my family members’ dead bodies remained under the rubble …

I was later taken by ambulance to the European Gaza hospital, and was informed that I had been injured in my back and required urgent treatment. When I came to, I went to pay respect to my sisters in the morgue’s refrigerators. There were bodies marked as “unknown”. When I asked why the bodies of my family members were marked as “unknown”, I was told: ‘We could not recognise nor identify them … yet’. One by one, I went through the white boxes and identified my brother, Ahmed, my father, Nader, my cousin’s wife, Marwa, my cousin’s son Nidal, my sister Dounya  … , all along I was wondering and asking: Who has remained alive from my family?  …

The next day, after the Red Cross had brought bulldozers to clear the rubble from the site of my home, and the rest of my dead family members’ bodies, including my mother’s, I was asked to identify them as they were brought to the hospital. No one was spared from the strike, apart from myself … They were all buried … When I was alone at the cemetery, I asked myself what will I do without my family? I sat next to them in the cemetery … nothing was left for me. My entire family had been eliminated …

The first year after their passing away, was the most difficult. During the second year, I started to focus on my studies and avoided being alone. I was sure that I would go crazy … Just imagine: There were 14 members of your dear family and, in one bomb strike, all of them disappeared and you are the only person left … The human brain cannot possibly imagine this kind of suffering …”

“I cannot forget what happened until now”.

Muhammed’s phone rang during this interview. The ringtone was a special song about destiny being very strange… “My whole community played the role of my psychologist: they really compensated for my family by their unlimited support and they stand firm in their support until today.”

“Sumud” (steadfastness) is a term used to refer to Palestinians’ resistance to Israel’s illegal Occupation of their land. This idea of resisting dispossession loomed large across all interviews conducted in Gaza during field trips conducted between 2019 –2020, as well as during Ziad’s most recent field work for a supplementary project that was funded by MENASP: But Muhammed Alagha’s “sumud” resonated particularly strongly amongst our team. By conveying his personal tragedy to Ziad, Muhammed emerged as one of the most heroic practitioners of sumud I had ever encountered in my own research and work in Gaza over the past 16 years.

On Sunday, 7 January, 2024, Ziad contacted me via Whatsapp: “Today, Muhammed Alagha was killed in front of his house in Khan Yunis, where I had interviewed him back in 2019 …” He is dead. W H Auden’s poem, ”Stop the clocks” has been ringing in my head since …

Muhammed had described how Israel had bombed his house on the false premise that it had been a store for ammunition and weapons: But the Red Cross (and Israeli human rights organisations) testified that there had been no evidence to that effect. He had shared with us that “after eliminating my whole family, the Israeli forces have also eliminated for me the concept of ‘life’ itself, I live a ‘non-life’.” But when neighbours lost loved ones to further Israeli attacks on Gaza, following the 2014 war, Muhammed had acted as a key pillar of strength. He had managed to complete his Bachelor degree studies, although he had expressed his melancholy during his graduation ceremony which was meant to bring joy: “It was one of my most difficult days in my life. As I saw other students with their parents, brothers and sisters, but I found myself alone. This was an unforgettable moment for me as I have a lot of pain in my heart. In spite of my pain, I pressed on my wounds and celebrated. Imagine, I have one cousin who lost his brothers in the same incident, but I did not invite him as I did not want him to reopen his wound. However, I was surprised that he, his wife and son came to the ceremony and everything was fine.”

“However, the day of my wedding was another one of my hardest and most difficult days for me. I felt alone on that day, despite the many people around me, as my family was not there at all. However, the presence of my community alleviated my suffering that day.” Muhammed had described many other families who had experienced the same sad fate. He had also expressed gratefulness for the support surviving families’ members had provided to each other: they shared and lived with the same pain. Muhammed had found hope for life in having found someone like him.

Gaza: 10,000 children killed in nearly 100 days of war

“Marriage also helped me and filled some gaps, but not all of them. The significant gap was not filled: I still miss my family… I hesitated even to get married because, in Palestine, we have a tradition that the groom has something we call ‘the morning of the couple’, when the groom’s parents knock on the couple’s front door and bring Palestinian traditional sweets and flowers. I did not have that and was so sad. In order to limit my own sadness, I went to my uncle’s house – who lives next to our apartment, on that morning … I knocked on his door but, to be honest, that did not compensate the feeling of sadness and loss …”

Muhammed had informed his wife-to-be, who has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, that he needed support because he felt so alone, without any family and that she herself would have to live a life without in-laws.

In spite of his degree, Muhammed did not manage to find a job. (Gazans have long grappled with persistently high rates of poverty, vulnerability and one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, which stood at 46.4 per cent in the second quarter of 2023).

And, although he was married, he had no children, despite a number of IVF treatments that he and his wife had undergone. The couple was due to undertake another IVF treatment in January 2024: Their wish being to rebuild a (new) family.

Muhammed is survived by his beloved wife, Alaa Mahfouz Alagha.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.