Mojtaba

“The challenges facing Palestinians are harder than anything we could have imagined; the moment the challenge isn’t just ‘how to survive today’, a whole world of future suffering will open up to us. I remembered my early thought, when I was in the north, that the real war starts when the military operations end. It’s true, both politically and at the level of human drama. When the guns are shut down, the pain and despair of ordinary people will come to the surface. It will be that moment of realisation: both of the loss they’ve suffered and the new conditions they have to live with. In this sense, thinking of tomorrow is more difficult than thinking of today.”
― Atef Abu Saif, Don't Look Left: A Diary of Genocide

“A few years ago, someone daubed on the wall of the UNRWA school east of the camp a strange slogan: ‘We progress backwards.’ It had a ring to it. Every new war drags us back to basics, back to the beginning. It destroys our houses, our institutions, our mosques and churches. It razes our gardens and parks to the ground. It leaves us nothing for the future. Every war takes us years to recover from, and before we have recovered from it, a new war arrives. It doesn’t trigger warning sirens or send messages to your phone. It just arrives. We find ourselves suddenly in the middle of it.”
― Atef Abu Saif, Don't Look Left: A Diary of Genocide

“Feeling the claustrophobia I look up at the sky, then remember what’s up there.”
― Atef Abu Saif, Don't Look Left: A Diary of Genocide

“The Israeli Army’s instinct seems to be to kill as many as they can. The death toll’s not important, what’s important is that Gaza dies. To them we are just numbers, and when you’re turned into numbers, it doesn’t matter if it’s ten or ten thousand. It’s just a number.”
― Atef Abu Saif, Don't Look Left: A Diary of Genocide