Aman Abhishek 
This is the third article in a series from Israel-Palestine. Read the first article here and the second, here.
It is October 13, and Israel has ordered the 1.1 million people living in the North of Gaza to evacuate to the South. Khalil and his family live in the North.
My friends who are in touch with Khalil are sending screenshots of their conversation with him on our group chat:
R: I just found out about the inhumane evacuation notice. Praying that you have a place to be and that you are being held by loved ones right now 🤍
Khalil: It is displacement and cleansing. It is a miracle that I could move South, but my sisters and grandmother are stuck there.
R: I am so so sorry. I am thinking and praying for them. It is a true miracle that you could move South. I don’t know what to say except that I love you and you are a light in all of this darkness. I am in awe of you and your strength. I can’t believe you made it. I am thinking of you every moment 🤍
Khalil: 🤍
Someone in the group chat asks if Khalil said anything else about his sisters and grandmother. “He said that they couldn’t move for fear of the bombings on the roads,” texted another friend, “apparently 70 people fleeing have been killed.”
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I am in my room in Jerusalem and looking at the Old City from the window. Its walls look beautiful at night when it reflects the floodlights. People are saying that Israel is going to shut down the internet in Gaza tonight.
I want Khalil’s voice to reach far and wide, so I contact two reporters in the United States who work for major news organisations:
“I am reaching out to share a contact I have in Gaza, maybe you will be interested in being in touch with him? He is an educator, studies literature, and is an amazing human being. He has been running from the North to the South, and I am really scared about him.”
One of them never responded, and the other texted the following day that they were able to contact him. “He was doing okay,” the reporter said – which in the present context means bare survival. My friend tells me that she connected Khalil with the Associated Press. Now he is being quoted in a few of their news reports:
Israel orders the evacuation of 1.1 million people from northern part of Gaza, the UN says (October 13, 2023)
“We can’t flee because anywhere you go, you are bombed,” one neighbor, Khalil Abu Yahia, said. “You need a miracle to survive here.”
The number of people forced from their homes by the airstrikes soared 25% in a day, reaching 423,000 out of a population of 2.3 million, the U.N. said Thursday. Most crowded into U.N.-run schools.
Lack of water worsens misery in besieged Gaza as Israeli airstrikes continue (October 15, 2023)
The besieged Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million people don’t have access to clean, running water after Israel cut off water and electricity to the enclave as it intensifies its air attacks in response to a bloody Hamas attack last week.
‘It’s like we’re in the stone ages,’ said 28-year-old Khalil Abu Yahia in the central town of Deir al-Balah.
Khalil has a vast perspective and experience of war and colonialism, of resistance and nonviolence. But we have not created a world where voices like Khalil are heard easily, or heard at all. In the article above, he is quoted in passing. It could be worse for him; he could be reduced to a statistic – the number of displaced, wounded, and dead.
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I call an emeritus professor who is Jewish, lives in Jerusalem, is a long-time anti-occupation activist, and a dear friend of mine. I want to ask him how he is doing and whether I should leave given the deteriorating situation.
“I think the ground invasion of Gaza is imminent. Once that happens Hezbollah might get involved, in which case there might be missiles striking all over Israel,” he says. “If you are getting the opportunity to leave, you should probably leave. This is not going to end anytime soon.”
Also read: War Will Surely Bring Peace This Time: Notes from Israel-Palestine
I feel quite shaken by his advice and the idea of uprooting my life here within a couple of days. He was traveling abroad when the war began on October 7, and he returned to Israel today.
“My kids who live abroad told me to not go back to Israel. But I had to come back, I wanted to be with my grandchildren in Jerusalem. This is my home.”
I am telling my Israeli-American friend, who is a secular Jew, about my conversation with the professor. My friend had to move from the United States to Israel many years ago because of difficult family circumstances. “I understood very quickly that my stay here must be temporary, that the occupation is evil but that I must be here now with my family. Everything I’ve felt all these years about living here is coming to the surface at once now,” she says.
“My grandparents cannot leave because they are too old, and my mother is not going to leave them here. What if the situation gets so bad that my family tells me to go to the United States by myself?” she says, crying.
“What will I do then?” she asks herself.
The maternal side of her family has lived here for at least seven generations, much before the state of Israel was created in 1948. Her paternal family are Holocaust survivors, some of whom immigrated to Israel after 1948.
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I have invited friends for dinner. All my Jewish friends who oppose the Israeli occupation are distressed by what they are seeing on social media and what people around them are saying. Many of them are surrounded by pro-Israeli discourse. These friends are horrified and repulsed by how their family, friends and acquaintances are legitimising the violence against Palestinians and dehumanising them.
“The death toll from Gaza just surpassed Israeli deaths. Can we stop now, or is that not enough?” posted an Israeli-American on Instagram. “I do not expect that people will understand that levying collective punishment on Gaza in response to what Hamas did is immoral,” said an Israeli, “but can they at least see that this strategy has not made us safe over the decades?” An Israeli-American friend, who refrains from posting anything on social media, had enough when her friends started posting about how Gazans are ungrateful that Israel provides them with water.
“If you grew up in a f**ing mansion in New Jersey and never had to worry about access to safe and clean drinking water whenever you want – maybe you should take a second to think about your cold and removed statements?”
Other friends are more embedded in leftist circles than they are within Jewish ones on social media. They are infuriated that as “the left” is demanding for the liberation of Palestinians, there appears to be no room for mourning the Israeli civilians killed by Hamas militants.
An Israeli friend says, “I am so fed up with all the sheltered social justice warriors who read Franz Fanon and Edward Said once in their life and think that they have this whole conflict figured out.”
“Hamas’ goal is to replace a Jewish supremacist state with an Islamic theocracy – what is liberatory about that?” said another, referring to people who see Hamas’ actions as justifiable resistance against the Israeli occupation.
Watch: What It’s Like To Be a Palestinian in Israel: Prof Dalal Iriqat
“I am so angry at what I am seeing on social media,” someone says at the dinner table.
A friend screams “I fear the discourse!” hysterically to make us all laugh.
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There is a text message on a group chat, addressed to Israeli and international activists who go to the West Bank to support Palestinian communities which are under attack by Israeli settlers and the army. These activists spend anywhere between a few hours to many weeks in these communities, helping Palestinians push back against the settlers and the army. They use cameras and phones to film settlers when they come into these communities and intimidate or attack Palestinians, argue with them, and call the Israeli police. They film when the Israeli soldiers harass or use violence against Palestinians, hoping that the soldiers would moderate their behaviour because they are on camera, and any illegal behavior or arbitrary action by soldiers will be documented.
I am very alarmed on reading the text message, which says:
“The situation in the West Bank has rapidly intensified. On Thursday evening, after two separate incidents of unprecedented violence and risk towards solidarity activists in the villages of Wadi A-Siq and At-Tuwani, a handful of experienced Israeli activists had a meeting about the current situation and what it means for all of us as solidarity activists.”
The message then describes how in Wadi A-Siq, settlers and soldiers ziptied activists and held them captive for many hours, and took their phones and cameras to destroy evidence. Settlers beating activists is common, but holding activists captive is not – for multiple hours nobody knew the whereabouts of the captive activists. A settler-militia attacked At-Tuwani and opened fire; some activists were present there too. One of the Palestinian activists was shot.
“We thought that at this moment we shouldn’t actively or widely be inviting activists due to the current dangers. The drive down can be dangerous, and in the field, settlers and military (which, especially now, are indistinguishable because settlers are wearing army uniforms) are very clearly ready with their fingers on the trigger.”
Palestinians from this region of the West Bank, which is called Masafar Yatta or South Hebron Hills, were describing the deteriorating situation from the day the war began. But I am still shocked after reading the text messages because these activists making such a decision feels unprecedented.
It is a reaffirmation of how bad things are.
Aman Abhishek is a PhD student in media studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.