For Gaza

A lamentation and a prayer

This is an English translation of a piece I originally wrote in Afrikaans. If you are able to read Afrikaans, I suggest you read the original instead. (I’m an interpreter, not a translator, and this was translated more with urgency than meticulousness.)

It’s hard for me to think about anything other than Gaza this morning. A few hours ago, still in bed and half asleep, I read that the Madleen was just intercepted by Israel. The Madleen, if you didn’t know, is a yacht that attempted to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. Obviously, one tiny boat’s cargo was never going to make much of a dent for two million starving people, but Greta Thunberg was on board, along with several other well-known activists. The point of their journey was its symbolic impact. The point was to draw the gaze of a distracted and desensitized public back to a tragedy that is still unfolding, a tragedy that should never, ever have reached this point.

Israel dismissed the Madleen as a “selfie yacht,” a trivial stunt. (Yet still went out of their way to stop it.) At the time of writing this, we don’t yet know if the 12 volunteers aboard are safe.

Here at home it’s been raining for days on end. Our driveway looks like a mosh pit; two cars have gotten stuck this morning (one still is). Engines are revving, instructions flung back and forth (“left, left! Okay no, right! RIGHT!”), ropes tied, stones packed and repacked under tires. I watch as my holy basil and rosemary, grown meticulously from cuttings, stand shivering beside the bakkie’s rear wheels. Each time the bakkie loses grip it slides inexorably backwards, inching ever closer to them. I wince, go back inside to avoid watching the inevitable unfold.

Meanwhile in Gaza, 71,000 children under the age of five are suffering from acute malnutrition. If nothing changes, by next year they will all starve to death.

Outside, the skidding bakkie continues unabated. I hear a thud – it probably slid into one of our house’s support poles. I reheat my lukewarm coffee and check my emails. Someone has responded to a job application I submitted two months ago and have long forgotten. It’s good news: If I pass their editing test, the job is mine.

And in Gaza, more than 50,000 children have died since October 2023, and the death toll is accelerating.

It’s nearly noon. I haven’t eaten yet and have had far too much coffee. Our kitchen looks like a battlefield; it’s been a wild weekend. I look at the stack of unwashed dishes and decide I’d rather stay hungry for another hour, I don’t have it in me to face that pile right now. Instead, I crawl back into bed with my laptop on my knees and turn the heater on.

Since March of 2025, an average of 30 children are killed in Gaza every day.

A friend WhatsApps to ask if I want to join her walking group. My brother sends a photo of himself and his girlfriend cuddled in bed, pizza in hand, Lord of the Rings playing on the laptop. A sunbird chirps from a tree outside my window, cheerfully shaking its waterlogged feathers.

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The day after tomorrow my mom will be flying to Egypt, and the next day my sister will join her from Rwanda. Along with roughly 3,000 others from all over the world, they’ll walk across the Sinai desert toward Gaza, demanding that aid be allowed in. They’ll camp at the gates for several days – peaceful, yet persistent. Apolitical but urgent. (Because this is fucking urgent.) These are ordinary people – people like my 58-year-old Afrikaans mother, like my sister, herself a mother of four – who have had to raise their own funds to join this march. Ordinary people with no idea what might await them, because how do you foresee the unforeseeable?

Part of me wonders whether it’s worth putting one’s life on the line like this when Israel simply continues to swat away every humanitarian effort with a mere flick of the hand. How is this possibly going to help? What can a few thousand mothers and sisters and sons and brothers achieve that Amnesty International and UNICEF haven’t been able to?

And yet. If governments won’t act, if the powerful keep averting their gaze, then ordinary people must pick up the slack. Because who else? How else?

Yesterday on the phone, my mother informed me that I’m the executor of her will – just in case. And if anything were to happen, she said, we shouldn’t waste money on an expensive funeral for her.

Is today one of the last normal days of my life? Ten days from now, will my sister’s children still have a mother? Surely they will, I assure myself. It’s dangerous, but not that dangerous. Then the fear creeps back in and I think to myself: fuck, maybe I should have gone instead. I don’t have kids.

But what calls to me is not the actual march to Gaza’s gates. What calls to me is to write, as one writes an impossible poem. To carry this the way you carry a child grown too big for your arms, perched uncomfortably on one hip, arm numbing, heart full. To pour these endless cups of coffee and restless energy and tears – good god I cry a lot these days – into some sort of lamentation, some kind of magic spell to accompany my mother and my sister and every other brave, ordinary person marching to Palestine.

Words are nothing. Words are as spitting into the wind.

Words are everything. Nothing has ever been transformed without words, without stories.

Here are my words, beloved burning earth. Here are my words, Israeli hostages, Palestinian children, refugees, fighters, grief-stricken Middle East. Here are my words, right-wing Instagram acquaintances, denialists, whatabouters. Here are my words, and they count for almost nothing; they are but a single drop in an ocean of horror. But they are all I have:

Until everyone is free, no one is free.* Yes, everyone. This is not about picking sides, this is about compassion. As long as children lie dying under torn-apart buildings in Gaza, we all lie dying with them. Palestine, you are the pulsating core, the most visible wound right now in a world full of wounds, and we will not let you bleed alone, because to let you bleed alone would be to turn our backs on our own humanity.

There are many of us, ordinary people all over the world with overdrawn bank accounts and overdrawn hearts, with muddy driveways and dirty dishes and mere fistfuls of words. We are here. We are angry, we are grieving. We are relentless.

Palestine, we stand with you.

*quote attributed to Martin Luther King Jr.