Jason Burke
The Observer / September 29, 2024
It began with the Hamas attack a year ago, it continues with a rain of Israeli strikes on Lebanon, but for many caught up in the conflict, it has shattered time and space
Even the day before, the only people anywhere in the world who knew exactly what was planned could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Israeli intelligence services had been deceived, or had failed to comprehend. Those who would take part, the militants of Hamas and some allied groups, did not yet know what they had been training for. To keep the secret, Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, had confided in three or four key lieutenants. Only they knew what was to come, and where, and when.
So on that Friday evening, in Rafah and Khan Younis, Tel Aviv and Sderot, in the kibbutzim of southern Israel, in Beit Lahia and Deir al Balah, life went on as usual. Only at 6.29 the next morning, when thousands of rockets launched from Gaza towards Israel across the lightening sky did anyone begin to suspect that this 7 October would be very different. Still, few anticipated the catastrophe that it would bring, nor the year of crisis it would provoke.
This weekend the regional war that so many have feared for so long is apparently closer than ever. More than 1,200, mostly civilians, died on 7 October. Of the 250 abducted that day by Hamas, half were released in a short-lived ceasefire in November and half of the remainder are thought to be dead. No one knows how many died in Friday’s massive strike in southern Beirut. More than 41,000 have been killed in Gaza, mostly civilians, one in 55 of the pre-war population. More than 700 have died in Lebanon in the recent wave of Israeli attacks, including the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah.
When the sheer scale and brutality of the Hamas attack into Israel on 7 October became clear over the following days, it was obvious that Israel’s response would be as unprecedented in scale and violence as the event that provoked it. From London, the big pessimistic picture seemed easy enough to paint: an ever accelerating cycle of attack and retaliation that would eventually spread across the Middle East.
Since then, we have seen the Israeli offensive in Gaza; a war of attrition on Israel’s contested northern border that has left hundreds dead; Israel’s recent strikes against Hezbollah and its leaders in Lebanon; a large missile and drone attack on Israel by Iran; three US servicemen killed in Jordan by Iran-backed Shia militia in southern Syria; a special forces raid on north-west Syria by Israel and multiple air strikes; US and British airstrikes in Yemen in response to Houthi attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea; a Hamas leader assassinated (presumably) by the Mossad in Tehran; and appalling bloodshed in the West Bank, while Jordan has only narrowly escaped jihadi attacks as levels of radicalisation rise.
At the moment, with an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon looming and the Iran-backed Islamist militant organisation retaliating insofar as it can, we are hearing a lot about the importance of avoiding “an all-out war”. Given this welter of violence across thousands of miles, you would be forgiven for thinking one is already here.
It is entirely understandable that we seek to impose definitions on this conflict. We still have an understanding of war that is anachronistic: of finite contests of strength on restricted battlefields. This was given new life by the war in Ukraine, which has seen tanks, artillery and infantry fighting in scenes we have not witnessed in Europe since 1945. But current conflicts that have received less attention, such as that in Sudan, or recent ones that have been forgotten with astonishing rapidity, such as the Syrian civil war, suggest that in reality today’s conflicts are very different. They do not move up and then down a predictable scale of violence. They are neither “all out” or its opposite, whatever that may be, but a continuing and dynamic stream of varying levels of violence, surging in one location, ebbing in another. They do not so much end as subside for long enough to be ignored by all but those immediately affected.
Another neat and nonsensical phrase was used earlier in the conflict that began on 7 October, when many spoke of planning for “the day after”.
This was rooted in an early expectation that the war would be short and would end with a definite moment when reconstruction and rehabilitation could begin. It was also a consequence of the equally unrealistic conviction that Israel’s government would allow some kind of new administrative structure in Gaza after removing Hamas from power, possibly involving Arab states if not the Palestinian Authority. After six months of conflict, the phrase was heard less, and is now heard barely at all, again with good reason.
Last week, a father of three in Gaza, an administrator with the relief agency UNRWA and a sensitive, clever man, described how his very gentle young son has decided to be “a soldier” when he grows up. This is a profession for which the boy would likely be singularly unsuited, but his logic is that he needs to be able to defend his home and so never be forced to leave his toys again. The child is in Cairo, having made it out of Gaza with his mother and siblings months ago, and will never return to his home and toys, which were destroyed in an airstrike at the start of the war. He may never even return to Gaza. He is alive though, and so are his close family.
Many others remain only in the memories of the bereaved. For none of them will there ever be a “day after”. Nor for the 80,000 or so who have been wounded, often seriously. Or for the relatives of those who have simply disappeared. These number in the thousands – adults and children, possibly dead, dumped in a mass grave or under the rubble, perhaps simply lost, amnesiac, detained by Israeli security forces, otherwise unfindable. There will be no “day after” here either.
The effort to mark time, literally, is not restricted to those in Gaza who, in interview after interview, have spoken of how they had lost track of days, weeks or months and simply wanted the war to end.
British-registered cargo ship Rubymar sinking after it was targeted by Yemen’s Houthi forces in the Red Sea in March. Photograph: Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images
For families of hostages held by Hamas, the days their loved ones have been in Gaza are numbered closely, but, relatives pointed out, this communicated nothing of the lived experience of their anguish. Released hostages themselves talk of how they lost track of time. Reservists mobilised to fight in Gaza described hours on sentry duty, days of waiting, weeks of tedious patrolling, minutes of great tension, seconds of extreme violence. Above all, as one said, time in Gaza “lost its usual sense”. Many Israelis talk about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on an individual, familial or even national scale. Some darkly joke that they are looking forward to having PTSD, because currently they are still in the trauma phase. They are not yet in the “post”, the after.
In the detention centres where Palestinians have been held in Israel, frequently subjected to appalling conditions, time means little in a legal sense as any limits to incarceration seem arbitrary, nor in a subjective sense, as those held experience the same stretching and concertina effect as others caught up in the conflict elsewhere. A relative insisted in an interview on describing the exact time passed since the detention of her son in hours, not days or weeks or months. But a man picked up in a raid in Tulkarm described how, during days blindfolded, he lost all sense of the hours passing.
Such subjectivity is not limited just to calculating the time passing in this conflict. The same is true of space, when interviewees spoke of the extent of the war.
Of course, lines can be drawn on maps. It is only a 40-minute drive south from where young Israeli hipsters enjoy breakfast in the sun in central Tel Aviv streets to the site of the Nova festival, where hundreds of similarly aged young Israelis were gunned down as they partied, or indeed to parts of Gaza where the UN has identified pockets of famine. Drive north and it is only an hour or so to Haifa, targeted by Hezbollah missiles, and then the northern border, where 70,000 were evacuated for fear of a Hezbollah version of the 7 October attack and have remained displaced. Beirut, if the borders were open, is only a short and spectacular drive further on.
But the space that matters most for many Israelis cannot be plotted on a map. Lots of those civilians killed on 7 October died in their security rooms. These are not reinforced bunkers, but a designated place within a home, often a bedroom, with minimal additional protection where you shelter for danger to pass or for security forces to come to rescue you. On 7 October, it was not the security forces who entered these most intimate of spaces, but Hamas militants. This, in a country created in the belief that it would provide a persecuted people with a place where they would be safe and where faith in the army’s ability to protect is fundamental, meant more than the seizure of any strategic site by any enemy.
In the occupied West Bank, where closures and other restrictions imposed by the Israeli authorities have shuttered the lives of millions, Palestinian villagers described looking across a valley to their olive trees and knowing that, despite the short distance, they cannot walk across the rocky ground to bring in their harvest. In Nablus, young men carrying assault rifles talked of dying as martyrs and how they had never seen the sea, 42km away. In Tulkarm, where tarpaulins cast narrow streets into shade to provide cover for gunmen from Israeli drones, men talked of former places of work in Israel just a few kilometres away that are now totally inaccessible and worried about feeding their families.
One particular aspect of this conflict that was radically different to other wars – at least for a reporter – was that the principal theatre of the violence, from 8 October onwards, was closed to the media. Other conflicts have been almost impossible to reach, or been entirely forgotten for other reasons, but few have been of such immediate importance and interest to so many people and so inaccessible. For the first few weeks of the conflict, TV crews broadcast from what became known among media professionals as the “hill of shame” – a mound well inside Israel which had an unobstructed if distant view of the northern edge of Gaza, and so, as the days passed, of increasingly significant destruction there.
Hundreds of messages and calls to and from Gaza could eventually allow an idea of what was happening to be painstakingly built up: the rolling waves of bombardment, the shattering of all the elements of a previous life, the schools turned into overcrowded camps for the displaced, the lack of food, the ever present fear. A Red Cross doctor described performing dozens of amputations in a day, badly burned children dying with insufficient anaesthetics and the horror of triage in overwhelmed emergency rooms. UN officials described the difficulties they faced bringing in aid.
But this dislocation – to report a war at such distance – brought odd opportunities. A reporter in Jerusalem could spend hours making calls to Gaza from a hotel room, and then walk through the Old City to the Western Wall, the holiest available prayer site anywhere for Jews, to report on a service and rally in support of hostages in Gaza. On a fine evening, if visibility was good and deadlines permitted, it was possible to walk further, on to a spur from which the ridge beyond the River Jordan could be seen, the distant light of cities winking in the dusk.
Recent days have underlined the inadequacy of our vocabulary for this moment in the conflict. Sinwar is still alive, though has not surfaced for many months from the extensive tunnel network he built under Gaza with funds that could have been used for schools and hospitals, and knowing that if the Israelis attacked he would be safe while civilians above would suffer. Benjamin Netanyahu has thundered belligerent defiance at the UN, ignoring the increasingly pathetic pleas of his most powerful ally to make some kind of peace. In Beirut, an entire block has been levelled and the leader of Hezbollah, a key Iranian asset, is dead. It is impossible to say where all this leads, though we can be sure of one thing: the fact there is no “all-out war” makes little difference to those under the bombs and that, for them at least, nor will there be any “day after”.
Jason Burke is the International security correspondent of The Guardian
