My sister’s body jumped up in the sky when the bombing happened. She “flew” over two high buildings and a street. Her husband, may God have mercy on him, was found two days later, in a neighboring alley.
At the beginning of the war, and after a strike hit our neighbors’ home, the residents of the neighborhood found the body of woman lying on her bed. She was living on the fifth floor in a building next to the Blind Martyr’s Home. According to the explanation of the those who saw her, “the woman was carried by the angels and taken to a safe place; to her bed where she slept now and forever peacefully”.
I wonder! Is it appropriate to use the term “flew” in this context, too or not!
But the powerful explosions we saw in this war make me feel that bodies try to protect themselves. They “fly” so that they can escape from being burnt.
The smell of explosions mixes with the scent of burnt blood and molten iron. The noise of it feels as though the sky has split open in rage, shaking the ground beneath our feet and deafening our ears. We can hear nothing but groaning that sticks into our heads.
God did not create us so that our bodies get burnt by explosions, shredded by pieces of iron melting in our flesh and bones. We were not born to be trapped beneath massive concrete pillars crushing our chests until we die.
In a therapy session, a father who was the only survivor of his small family, told me that after their building was shelled, he kept talking to his child who was trapped under the rubble for more than half an hour. The child was whispering in pain, fading amidst the groaning of iron and dust until he finally surrendered and gave his tiny soul to The Creator.
The civil defense teams failed to save the other members of the family later. They remained, like hundreds caught beneath the rubble in silence. The smell of death was all over in the air.
Here, under this surface lie the martyrs, named from number 1 to number 52. This is how one family changed the address of the children of his family; all under this surface which is no longer there.
“No one died. These are souls that simply changed their addresses.”
Yesterday, I saw footage of bodies flying high up after the strikes hit the city. Mountains of fire rising high above the tallest towers. Clouds of thick smoke choking the horizon with a dark red color as if the sky was bleeding.
Why did bodies flee upward?! It looked that at the ultimate moment of terror they were racing with the flames that were chasing them from the ground.
Their fear pumped a strange energy into their limbs, as though they are trying to adapt with their panic, to escape their fate, and to feel for a moment at least that they are free.
Now, and after nearly two years of experience with the “different techniques of death”, we can tell that neither hospitals nor civil defense equipment can rescue us or pull our bodies from beneath this city which has all turned into heaps of rubble.
I really wonder: Why doesn’t the world have less painful tools to kill us with instead of the ones that are tearing us apart?! I mean simpler tools that would allow us to die quietly, without being burnt, without our bodies being torn or becoming lumps of charred flesh. Can you imagine that every twenty kilograms of flesh in a black bag is a martyr!
Why should we escape our fates to the sky or in a neighboring street?!
“Here, we do what those ascending to God do. We forget the pain”.
“Oh God! How did they fly up!” A woman screams as she watches the bodies with eyes open wide in terror?! How did that happen?! How did the bodies flee the growing circle of flames, as if they are waving to the sky and seeking to enter Heaven once and for all!
Dr. Said Muhammad Al-Kahlout
Psychologist and Writer
Gaza, Palestine
April 5, 2025
