A ‘HUMANITY VIDEO-CALL’ WITH KHALED FROM GAZA
IS HE LEGIT?
Fanrivista spoke with Khaled Adnan Alzaq, a young man from Gaza studying computer engineering who was forced by the lack of any income to use social media in order to raise some funds for his family, starting with diapers for his little brother.
Before the genocidal campaign, when life in Gaza was busy and “generally normal”, despite the occupation, he considered social networks mainly as a “distraction”. Instagram was also the way we got to know him.
Maybe Khaled is wrong: most Palestinians, with their immense resilience, are the only tool and weapon that can help us understand how to break a globalized system of oppression, which has its stronghold in a rogue, theo-ethnocratic state —although other rogue states, despotic theocracies and dogmatic tyrannies exist elsewhere... And while we understand how to break that system, we can start to study new ways of conceiving coexistence and justice. But without justice, without addressing the systemic injustice that has fueled much of the violence in West Asia for decades, and if we only look out for number one, there will never be peace, only the expansion of bloodshed towards new shores.
IS THIS MADNESS REAL OR IS IT JUST A NIGHTMARE?
Before 7/10 “there were many small wars for something like two or three weeks”, Khaled explains, but immediately after that date they understood this war was different: “we realized it was a ‘big bomb’”. And yet, he and his large family thought they would leave their home, in the east of Gaza, only for a couple of weeks or months. They were pushed by Israel towards the south because it was “safe”, but it was definitely not, as now everybody knows, except for the genocide deniers. His family was displaced multiple times, to the point that Khaled does not remember the exact number of forced transfers: “I think we were displaced ten or twelve times” he said to us before beginning to condense his three-year odyssey into about an hour’s talk.
Every time they had to find a spot to build a tent and start a new chapter of “tent life”, meaning paying $1000 only to rent a spot of bare land and gather the materials to build the unstable shelter, paying another $1000-$2000 to rent a small truck or a van to move from place to place at each displacement amidst chaos and numerous dangers, like small tanks full of TNT, burning in the heat of the summer, freezing in the winter, and losing their new precarious belongings when the rain falls hard after waking up submerged in water in the middle of the night.
In the meantime Israel started the ‘starvation plan’, tightening the blockade and the restrictions on movement imposed on Gaza well before 7/10 to an unimaginable degree. Flour prices reached $100 per kg (including 30%-55% fees to obtain scarce cash) and people were almost “eating each other”, walking and sleeping in the open for hours to reach distribution points after sudden and suspicious news of a precious food truck coming. Not only was the truck precious but also dangerous: they had to save themselves from the crush of the crowd, the vehicle’s wheels, the tank fire and the robbers on the way home. One such place was near the Netzarim corridor, which according to his account was also functioning during the operations of the infamous “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”. Khaled went there many times in the hope of getting some “flour, not fruit or vegetables, but I was not lucky (...) there were so many people, I thought they were [deliberately] moving us. It felt like we were rats observed in a laboratory”. It felt like a sadistic experiment... The dreams they had before the war, dreams of studying and getting a regular job, were replaced by the “dream of a chicken meal”.
Another dream was going back to the North, to the remains of their home. They were able to do so after the ceasefire signed in January 2025. They worked hard to clean and rebuild some semblance of a regular life only to find themselves displaced again by a new evacuation order, which left them again with no chance of getting their belongings and directed them towards unknown destinations.
Khaled’s health problems made living in a tent impossible. Eventually he managed to rent a mostly destroyed place to live outside the city center in a neighborhood that was once full of life, and that now looks like a place devastated by multiple earthquakes. He showed us the place during what he kindly called the “humanity call” that we had with him: “in general this is what the 30% remaining to us looks like”, that is to say the territory within the ‘Yellow Line’, the new expanding border set by Israel that is gradually shrinking the already unlivable space for Gazans, because “the other 70% is completely erased”.
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| Khaled's view. |
The so-called ceasefire signed in October 2025 is just a distraction for Khaled, a way “to calm down the people” protesting for Palestine: “more than 1000 people died during the ceasefire, mostly innocent women and children. They can bomb you even if you have no connection with the resistance or similar things, and then only some posts on social media will remain of you”. But, hopefully, Khaled is wrong about this as well: innocents killed might not be known to the rest of the world; for some they are merely dreadful statistics used to debate the proportionality of a rogue nuclear power’s ‘right to self-defense’, but for others they represent the moral obligation to act in any meaningful way possible, even with the smallest action, as it ought to be...
GAZA IS LIKE A MICROSCOPE TO OBSERVE SOCIETY’S TROUBLES
What is happening in Gaza and in Palestine is like a magnifying lens. Looking through it, we can observe the problems afflicting our society in ‘zoomed-in’ detail, and Khaled’s odyssey confirms it. The basic right of having a roof over our heads is at risk everywhere, but that roof might literally fall on the heads of Gazans. He and his family had to pay $1000 just to build a tent, despite the now permanent unemployment, which is another huge issue all over the world, with a handful of people owning more than half of the world population’s wealth combined. The chemical components of tons of explosives that reduced buildings to debris, and the remains of structures themselves, combined with ‘human pollution’ coming from improvised and broken sewage systems, are a constant threat to any form of life, which is why the Gaza genocide also encompasses an ecocide. The populism and the arrogance that are part of fascism —fascism in a broad sense, not only the historical one— are now on the rise everywhere. The fascism that brought immense suffering upon Gaza is even glorified or, at the very least, dressed up as the ‘right to self-defense’ from an unlawfully occupied territory. What about the rights of the occupied? What about the rights of children and civilians who have nothing to do with wars or military resistance? They were not even called ‘collateral damage’ when fanatic leaders, at the very beginning of the genocidal war, quoted the Old Testament to justify annihilation, or when they claimed publicly that “there is an entire nation that is responsible, the rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved is absolutely not true”. So, collective punishment is the answer because in Gaza there are no innocent people, including newborns in incubators and unborn children. Indeed, everyone was deemed “human animals” by internationally wanted criminals, and most of the world is not vegan... The post-WWII rule of law was replaced by a medieval way of conducting hostilities with hi-tech weaponry because now ‘might is right’, because there is no other logic, no capacity for arguing or debating, just the law of the strongest. That is why, even outside historic Palestine, we can watch politicians denying what they claimed the day before, without fear of journalists reminding them of their previous statements and asking uncomfortable questions, without the public trying to hold them accountable. Before the complete collapse of our society and planet we need to ‘zoom out’ from the lunacy inflicted on that tiny strip of land. Through the ‘microscope’ of Gaza we have watched the sense of being human fading away in great detail. Now enough is enough, and it was enough already in 2023. To begin with, we must demand accountability for those sadistic messianic war criminals, while in the meantime we need to self-manage as many aspects of our lives as possible, because only by experimenting together with new ways of living, alternative ways of thinking about what politics means, can we snap out of this madness and start to get back some of the now lost basic rights that took centuries for humankind to achieve.
Paolo Maria Addabbo
Many voices and stories want and deserve to be heard, especially the voices of regular people in Gaza and in Palestine, but only a few organizations and news outlets are willing and interested in listening to and sharing them. More often than not, those media organizations are not the mainstream ones, hence they are more precarious, like Fanrivista, The General Press Fanzine. If you found this content useful, please, support our independent journalism: there are far more important causes to support than Fanrivista (for example supporting people like Khaled), but if you have some spare change for a coffee, consider buying us one virtually. You can also support us by following our ‘anti-social media’ profiles, sharing our content, or boycotting mainstream social media and connecting with us through our Fediverse profiles.
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