Editor's Note: This story contains graphic descriptions of violence and sounds of war.
It has been almost two years since Israel began a bombing campaign in Gaza after the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023. That attack killed nearly 1,200 people in Israel, injured thousands more and led Hamas to take 251 people hostage. Since then, more than 65,000 Gazans have been killed in the war. Independent surveys estimate the actual death toll is much higher. Israel’s bombing has also destroyed much of the territory, where more than 2 million people still live.
In the midst of that wreckage, three Milwaukee residents have made the trip to the Palestinian territories to offer help where they could and check in on loved ones. Along the way, they recorded audio diaries of their journeys documenting what they witnessed firsthand.
Aziz Rahman: 'It's just like an assembly line of death'
“The hospital I went to when I was in Gaza is truly the last functioning hospital in Gaza," says Aziz Rahman. “Obviously there are other hospitals and field hospitals, but they are not functioning at the capacity that a major hospital for a country should be running at.”
Rahman says this has to do with Israel blocking medical supplies to other hospitals to the north.
Rahman is a doctor who works in interventional radiology out of Milwaukee. He often gets dispatched all over the state. This past June, he volunteered to spend two weeks volunteering at Nasser hospital in Gaza through Rahma Medical Mission.
He says even getting to Gaza was a struggle. There were multiple checkpoints, some more aggressive than others, he was interviewed and some within his group were interrogated by Israeli soldiers. He was originally scheduled to come in with 22 other healthcare providers but only six of them were allowed in.
Once he got to Nasser Hospital, it was hard to believe what he was seeing. The hospital was always busy, making it not just hard to sleep, but to find a moment to rest. He calls the experience more mentally exhausting than anything. “Trauma is hectic and exhausting,” he says.
“I have so many reflections I would love to share but the common theme is people are hungry here,” Rahman says. “There’s no food. And everyone’s depressed. And at the end of the day they just rely on God to keep them going. It’s been the most amazing experience of my life … I’m just really pensive right now, it’s the night time, around 11 p.m. Long day today just helping different specialties out, trying to figure out how I can help best.”
As rough as the nights were, the days were worse.
“As you can imagine, I was excited to start the day and suddenly the alarm started ringing, which means that there's another mass casualty event as scheduled for the opening of the aid … it’s very not sustainable,” says Rahman in an audio message.
He’s talking about the humanitarian drop-off aid sites, which some human rights organizations have called “killing fields.” Run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was created by Israel with U.S. support, the sites have been responsible for killing 1,400 and injuring more than 4,000 people seeking food.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my existence … It was absolute chaos,” Rahman says. “Hundreds of people coming in. Families were bringing bodies in, putting bodies on the floor. All head shots from the Israeli soldiers. Yeah, they’re like direct shots. There’s no rational, moral, ethical explanation for this. It’s just disgusting. And it’s real!”
Rahman calls the aid drop-off sites a farce. And he knew he would be confronted with scenes like this. But he wanted to help. He wanted to be able to use his skillset to help people during this time. He says these two weeks in Gaza gave him that. Along with nightmares. Just a few days later, there was another mass casualty event at a distribution site.
“It's just like an assembly line of death,” Rahman says in a video from an outdoor triage unit. “And while all this is happening, you just look above and you hear this drone buzzing, tanks shooting, machine guns gunning, snipers sniping in the distance. And what comes in after those? Civilians, little children, women, young men. I mean, it just doesn't make any sense … Every aspect of this is just destruction, annihilation, execution, genocide. At the end of the day, and only 30, 50 years later, is the world finally going to wake up and say, 'Yeah, that was genocide.'”
Israel denies genocide. And many media organizations, like NPR, don't label what’s happening. However, a U.N. human rights inquiry just determined this is in fact, genocide.
Heba: 'Life here in the occupied West Bank will continue to get more difficult'
“It is Friday, Aug. 15 and I am here in Al-Bireh at my grandparents' home,” says Heba, an organizer from Milwaukee. “Their family has been in the same house for decades, which is a huge privilege and we’re here sharing lunch with my aunts today.”
Heba has been visiting her family in the Israeli-occupied West Bank ever since her childhood. She says a lot of life happens in front of the house: traffic passes by, kids run to the store down the block for treats. It’s a place of comfort. But tonight, she won’t be able to stay.
“Every single night for the last two months at least, the Israeli occupation forces have been roaming the streets of Al-Bireh sometimes coming to raid homes and kidnapping people, sometimes firing tear gas at folks,” says Heba. “All in the name of intimidation and control.”
She says it wasn’t always like this in the West Bank. But the occupation has ramped up over the past few years. She sees it when she talks about it with her family.
“I would say a lot of it is in people's personalities and how they're understanding the circumstances that they're living in,” Heba says in an audio diary. “I think there's an underlying fear that I've heard from folks, and perhaps a reluctant recognition that life here in the occupied West Bank will continue to get more difficult as more time passes.”
Just as multiple countries recently called for a Palestinian state, Israel called for the annexation of the entire West Bank. Basically making it a permanent part of Israel. Since 1967, Israel has maintained a military occupation of this land, which has involved arrests, checkpoints, home invasions and settlements.
The settlements for Israelis are illegal under international law, which prohibits an occupying power, like Israel from transferring its population to the occupied area. In this case, the West Bank. Roughly 700,000 Israeli settlers live here today.
Heba says the inequality is felt everywhere. Even when it comes to access to precious resources, like water.
“We were staying at my uncle's home and they get access to water one day per week for 12 hours a day,” shares Heba. “So 12 hours of water access for the whole week. And what they end up doing, and this is what every household in Palestine does, they have tanks on the roofs of their homes, or the roofs of their apartment buildings and they fill up when that 12 hours of access comes. And in some places maybe they get more time to fill their tanks, and in other places they get less time."
This is more pressing than ever because as Heba was visiting the West Bank experienced an unprecedented heat wave.
“It's becoming impossible to live summers here without fans or AC units,” Heba shares from her uncle’s house. “Yet at the same time, when everyone's using them, the power goes out from overloaded electrical grids. That's what happened to us on one of these exceptionally hot nights just a few nights ago. Even as the heat was the only thing on our tongues, Gaza was in our hearts and our minds who are suffering under the exact same heat, but without water, shelter, relative safety or food even.”
Heba was granted anonymity due to her concerns of retaliation against her and her family.
Libre Sankara: 'A beautiful and painful experience'
“I initially came in to do logistics for this medical solidarity organization, like coordinating movements between where we’re staying and hospitals,” says Libre Sankara.
Sankara is an activist and educator originally from Milwaukee. For the past 17 months, he’s lived in Gaza City giving regular updates from the ground over Instagram.
While he started working with Glia, a Canadian-based organization, he’s also worked in a community kitchen and helped distribute drinkable water, which he says is hard to find since the natural aquifers were contaminated.
“I've also volunteered as an English teacher at a temporary learning space because all schools in Gaza have been destroyed,” shares Sankara.
In almost all of the diaries he sent, you can hear the drones flying above him. Sometimes explosions are going off in the distance. Some sound much closer than others.
He thinks a lot about Milwaukee and still keeps in touch with friends. In one of the voice notes, he wished people in Milwaukee understood that what’s happening in Gaza has a direct impact here.
“When I think about what's happening here, all the deaths that I've seen, when I wake up to bombs, like this morning at 6:47 a.m. and I can see the plume from a building,” says Sankara. “And I remember that we didn’t grow up with much, but [the U.S.] government says you can't have free education, you can't have health care, you can't get better streets. Milwaukee has these wild potholes, that are huge, right? But you can't have good public transportation. You can't have good infrastructure …. and then I wake up to bombings. Millions and billions of U.S. military spending. And I think this is what [the U.S. government] values.”
Something that jumps out of his audio is the dichotomy of his experiences. There’s beauty and pain. You can see it in the relationships he’s made and the people he’s lost. The places he’s seen crumble, and the natural beauty that still exists. Like El Mina, Gaza’s seaport.
“Being at Al Mina is always a beautiful moment to sit with the sea,” says Sankara sitting by the water of the seaport. “If you have some good company, arabic coffee and sunflower seeds you just sit and you can stare and it can be beautiful. And it’s also a reminder of what once was and was taken away…so it’s a bit of everything and brings up a bunch of mixed emotions. Now it's full of tents and forcibly displaced Palestinians. And going into the sea is prohibited by the Israelis. And it’s crazy…it’s the summer time, everyone should be allowed to enjoy [the water]. And some people do, as they should. Who controls the sea? No one. The sea belongs to itself. So, ugh, yeah, being next to the water is always a beautiful and painful experience.”
Beauty and pain.
Sanakara doesn’t know how long he’ll stay in Gaza providing updates on what’s happening on the ground. But it doesn’t sound like Milwaukee is for him anymore.
'When we talk about fighting for liberation' and what comes next
For Aziz Rahman, even though he was gone for only two weeks, he’s not sure how much of himself returned.
“After a long plane ride back home, I landed in O'Hare,” Rahman shares in an audio diary he recorded when he returned to Milwaukee. “My beautiful family was waiting for me. My two daughters, beautifully dressed up in a nice white dress … my little girl, 6 years old, had a little sign that said, ‘Welcome home, Baba.’”
Rahman also has an 8-month-old son. He wondered if he might forget him over those two weeks. Of course, he didn’t.
Rahman says, “And it made me happy and filled me with joy and happiness and hope, but also made me sad because my baby was fatter. His arms and his legs were chunkier, and I wished I could have given some of that to the babies in Gaza who are literally starving. And my kids jumping up with joy contrasted with the kids in Gaza who could barely smile, could barely frown, could barely cry because there was no energy on their face, really hit me hard.”
Heba says she won’t soon forget the indignities from the trip. But it’s the tender moments with family that she replays.
“Every single day we were at a different relative's home, eating food that they had lovingly and considerately prepared for us, including in ways that accommodated my food allergies,” Heba recalls. “I also got to pick figs from my family's trees on more than one occasion, which is a tradition and a memory that is like stamped into my spirit. That is something we always do when we get to go to Palestine during the summer times.”
During the trip, she also went to weddings and baby showers and saw kids she hadn’t seen in years grow up — something she was grateful they could do.
“I went into this visit with a perspective of wanting to see for myself, and to understand how the conditions of occupation have worsened,” she says. “But there's also a lot that remains the same in our people. It's a love for life that can't be stomped out by the occupation, and that's ultimately what we're fighting for when we talk about fighting for liberation. It's the rights of every person to live freely and in dignity and that's ultimately what every single person on the face of this earth wants, even if they've never had to face a reality that strips him of those rights and makes them want for them.”
And that’s where this story was supposed to end. Until Libre Sankara recently posted a video. In it you can hear gun fire and bombings, a woman wailing as Israeli ground forces move into Gaza City.
Sankara says, “Hey everyone, this is Libre. I’m a Boricua in Gaza City where just this morning the zionist occupation forces dropped pamphlets that said everyone staying in Gaza City is a terrorist and we know that’s not true…”
This video is unlike anything he’s shared so far. His face is panicked. And his voice is shaking.
“This is our last message. We have to prepare to evacuate. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know if we’re going to reach our destination safely, but this is our last communication for now…”
As he signs off something happens. An explosion goes off incredibly close.
“Siempre palante and take care my people” are the last words we hear before his screen goes dark.
I didn’t know what to make of this video. Or what happened to Sankara. I didn’t hear from him after reaching out. Then finally, the next morning, he posted that he was safe. But forced to evacuate where he was staying.
Waiting to hear back from him is what I imagine a lot of other people have felt over the past two years, feeling so close because of social media, bearing witness but ultimately feeling powerless. Just waiting for the dust to settle.
That’s how it felt listening to these audio diaries from these three as they traveled to Gaza and the West Bank. The messages carried anger, fear, grief and hope. Aziz reconnecting with Amir, one of the kids he performed emergency surgery on, saving his life. Heba carrying on family traditions and making new ones. Even Libre’s sign-off: “Siempre palante” meaning keep going, keep fighting.
