“Before God, we in Gaza are either martyrs or witnesses to liberation and we all wait to learn where we will fall. We are all waiting, O God, Your vow is true,” Hiba Abu Nada, a 32-year-old Palestinian poet-novelist, wrote on Facebook on October 20 evening.
Her wait ended soon—perhaps in a few minutes, perhaps in a few hours. This was her last social media post. She died, along with her family, in the Israeli bombardment at the Manara neighbourhood of Khan Yunis in Gaza.
Nada held a master’s degree in clinical nutrition. Her debut novel, Oxygen Is Not for the Dead, won the second prize at the Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity in 2017. Palestinian political scientist Abdalhadi Alijla described her as “one of the most talented Gaza feminist poets and novelists”.
Since the beginning of the war, Nada used social media to document the unfolding of the catastrophe and put things into context. “All previous wars are being squeezed into this war,” she wrote on October 9, when Israel’s war on Gaza was only in its third day. “Gaza from north to south is under fire in a random and tragic manner, a state of mass slaughter and senseless assassination of everything.”
That day, she also shared the photo of a young man with a dead child on his lap. She wrote, “There is no time for big funerals and proper farewells. There is not much time. There is a rabid missile coming. We will be content with a quick kiss on the forehead, a quick farewell, and waiting for the new death.”
As the war progressed, it became too difficult to come to terms with. Anything and everything was a target. But she could not lose hope. Or, was it at the end of hope that she started dreaming?
“Gaza did everything she could to confront this oppression. She surpassed imagination, rose above the limits of the possible and impossible, smashed all the statues and prohibitions, invented a steadfastness that will be taught in history, ascribed to Gaza, and when the lies are shed, the politicians and their hypocrisy fall away, and porcelain humanity collapses in on itself: Gaza will remain an incomprehensible, impossible legend, a world record that cities, civilizations, armies might only attain in an era of prophets and miracles,” she wrote.
She believed, “Before God and before ourselves, we are people with a rightful claim” and that there is nothing to regret or grieve. Even when fighter planes flew above them, Nada found inspiration to continue the fight from the belief that “God is higher than they are, and higher than they are.”
But the magnitude of the horror only kept growing, as people in family photos started disappearing together. A day before she was killed, she wrote in a post, “The entire Zahra neighborhood in Gaza is under threat… all twenty-four towers being bombarded now, an entire city martyred, tower by tower, O God, O God!”
She knew every word she spoke or wrote could be her last. So, she made her last wish known: “If we die, know that we are content and steadfast, and convey on our behalf that we are the people of truth.”
