‘Survivor’s guilt is overwhelming’: the grief of losing 21 relatives in one airstrike in Gaza

A barrage of messages in the middle of the night broke the news to Ahmed Alnaouq that his family home in Deir al-Balah was not the safest place in Gaza – as he had once thought. It was on that autumn night almost a year ago that he learned that almost his entire family had been wiped out in a single Israeli airstrike.

Thousands of miles away in London, he had woken from his sleep suddenly feeling a deep unease, he says. Moments before, his father, siblings, their children and a cousin were killed – 21 relatives altogether.

“That bomb that day changed my life for ever. I live here [in London] but they’re everything I care about,” says Alnaouq.

Only a cousin and their child survived the strike, which would have been even worse had it taken place a few days earlier. More than 50 relatives had been crowded into the house because of its perceived safety, right in the centre of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza – a long way from Gaza City, which had until then been the focus of Israeli operations. But many of those relatives left just before the strike on 22 October.

Alnaouq’s experience of family members being killed in war predates the past year’s conflict. In the 2014 war in Gaza his brother was killed in another Israeli airstrike. The nature of his grief then, he says, was different. That time, he had only one brother to mourn, but this time he lost his entire family. Whenever he thought of one person, he felt his thoughts drift to another.

Related: ‘I’ve lost 20 relatives. I feel helpless’: Palestinian Americans on how their lives have changed since 7 October

He had also been living in Gaza when his brother was killed, under a siege imposed by Israel that forced him to think about his own survival even as he mourned. This time, from outside Gaza, he felt a guilt that was new to him.

He has channelled that guilt into relentlessly speaking out for Palestinians – especially those in Gaza – primarily through his platform for young Palestinian writers, We Are Not Numbers.

“ I am more focused. The purpose is a hundred times more powerful than ever before. It’s not only about my family but it’s also about everything that’s happening in Palestine because right now everything is magnified,” he said. “Now I see the people I lived with, my family, being bombed and I’m here in London, the UK, in a country that is complicit in one way or another.”

He was sceptical about writing for an international audience, which he felt did not understand Palestinians and saw them purely through the lens of violence, but the platform has flourished.

It has helped develop English-language writers by providing training sessions and partnering them with mentors abroad. Many of those writers work in journalism now, crucial sources of reporting from within Gaza, especially with foreign journalists not allowed in by Israel. Others blog or write poetry that gives an alternative view of daily life in the strip.

The organisation has suffered its own losses – the office space it used for writers to congregate and train in was bombed, while four members and the co-founder were killed in the past year.

But the team also produces more content than ever, publishing daily and trying to pay writers with the help of donations – something they did not do before but are more keen to now that so many are in desperate need.

Alnaouq says at some point the group will have to rethink how it can operate, to support the many writers now dispersed around Gaza, in Egypt, or further abroad. In the meantime, they are preparing to publish two anthologies of the organisation’s work that will come out in the next year, which he hopes will provide an insight into what life in Gaza is like, especially before the war.

“People in the west think that all of our problems started on the 7th of October but to understand Gaza, don’t understand it from the 7th of October – read our stories,” said Alnaouq.

Alnaouq believes they can shed some light on the feeling of desperation that has permeated the Palestinian territory.

News of death from Gaza still comes to Alnaouq. In September he was told of a cousin and her three children being killed. He wonders what has happened to many of the others with whom he has lost contact.

Alnaouq calls Gaza a “litmus test” for the world’s morals, to see whether it will stand up and put an end to the violence.

“The elimination of Hamas does not justify the killing of the entire people of Gaza,” he says. “Every single day, for a year, we have seen things that we can never unsee. We have watched things we can never unwatch, heard stories we cannot unhear,” he says.

“Ever since I have been very, very busy speaking about Palestine and about my family. People from the outside would think that I am more privileged than any other Palestinian and maybe I am because I have my job here, I’m doing okay,” he says.

“But life doesn’t have any meaning – the feeling of survivor’s guilt is overwhelming. Even when I do something good, I win an award, nothing has any meaning, life doesn’t have any meaning. ”