Khan Younes, Gaza – A dear companion doesn’t have to be human to be deeply missed when lost.
Sometimes, it’s a phone – a loyal witness to your joys and sorrows, your moments of sweetness and darkest chapters of pain.
In the harshness of life in the world’s largest open-air prison, it becomes more than a device. It’s an extension of yourself; your portal to the world, your way of reaching loved ones scattered across the prison or outside it.
Through its lens, you sometimes capture joy and beauty, but more often, it only captures falling rockets or the rubble of houses covering the corpses of their residents.
But what are you left with when that loyal companion is disappeared by the genocidal chaos?
My phone succumbed to its injuries
My phone succumbed to its injuries.
I can’t believe I’m describing it this way, with the same phrase I use when reporting on thousands of my people killed after being denied urgent medical treatment, punished simply for surviving Israeli bombs.
But in its own way, my phone endured its share of this prolonged Israeli cruelty, the technocide of power-starvation, corrosion by dust and sand, suffocation in overheated tents, and the constant torment of poor connection.
It tried to hold on, but everyone has a limit of endurance. It fell the day we left our damaged home for our 14th displacement amid chaotic stampeding crowds.
Somehow it survived the heavy blow, but it only lasted 70 days after its screen cracked, its body blistered, until its wounds spread too far to bear.
And then it went dark for good.
Oddly, I felt consoled. Not because it wasn’t painful, but because I wasn’t alone. I’ve seen the same happen to others: Friends, relatives watching their phones slowly perish, just like the people they loved.
Strangely, we find comfort in these small shared losses. Our loved ones have perished, and our wellbeing is shattering, and yet we expect our phones not to. The real miracle is that they lasted this long at all.
Smartphone addiction is thrown around as a buzzword. But in Gaza, if you’re lucky enough to still have one, it’s not an addiction, it is survival.
It’s an escape. A small, glowing portal you cling to. It helps you slip briefly into the past, scrolling through memories, staring at the faces of loved ones who are now names on graves or names you still whisper in hope.
Your phone’s emotionless memory still holds their beautiful smiles. It connects you to people you can’t reach, voices you can’t otherwise hear. It dulls the pain not by healing it, but by distracting you.
Like a hunger you can’t satisfy, so you scroll through reels of mouth-watering food, mocking your emptiness.
You watch strangers at family dinners while your table is buried under rubble. You wonder, how dare they post such scenes, knowing that children are being starved to death a few kilometres away? And yet you keep scrolling, because for a moment, it’s a brutal soothing sedative.
‘Are you alive?’
When you’re someone who reports daily on the ongoing genocide to the world, finding a new companion becomes an inevitable must. Yet the quest is disastrous in Gaza.
You might think it’s impossible to find one here, where life has become ruins and even bread is scarce, but surprisingly, there are plenty of options, even the latest high-end brands that somehow found their way through the blockade.
But this is Gaza, where a bag of flour costs $700, so the cost of a phone is on a whole different level.
Even the lowest-quality phones in makeshift shops sell for more than what it costs to build the shop itself, inflated by genocidal conditions.
And it doesn’t stop there. You must pay in cash, in a place where almost nothing is free except the air you breathe.
An iPhone might cost $1,000 elsewhere, but here it costs $4,200.
So you turn to cheaper options, hoping for something more affordable, but the calculations remain the same.
But that’s not me – because either way, by spending such unthinkable amounts, you’re solidifying the very reality your captors are trying to impose, and doing it with your own money.
You realise that you’re feeding into their design. We’re already draining whatever’s left in our pockets just for flour during this genocidal siege, and we don’t know how long it will last.
So you cling to what you have, to avoid paying your soul at a GHF centre for deadly “aid” you’ll never get.
For a while now, I’ve felt paralysed, a helplessness especially familiar during June’s two-week total communication blackout imposed by Israel – during which my phone finally died in total silence.
When the captor cuts yet another lifeline, it’s more than just being unable to check on loved ones. It means ambulances can’t be called. It means a wounded person might die in the dark, unheard.
It’s like someone is out there, cruelly deciding when you’re allowed to contact the world or to be contacted, to receive the now-typical: “Are you alive?”
There’s a cruel irony in Israel issuing expulsion orders online even as it cuts off the networks people in Gaza need to receive them. You only find out when you see thousands flooding the streets, the earth trembling beneath their feet from Israeli attacks.
The hand that controls your digital lifeline is the same one that’s been blockading and colonising your land for years.
And you realise, with certainty, that if they could block the very air you breathe, they would not hesitate.
So, you rise
There are still moments when, instinctively, I reach out to call someone or check something – but my hand touches nothing.
My companion is gone. I remain phoneless, helpless under blockade, both digital and physical.
And then, you start to compare your shackles to the abundance your captors enjoy, genociding you with full access to every technological privilege, every luxury.
You, on the other hand, are being hunted down with the world’s most advanced weapons, under the watchful eye and silent complicity of the tech giants whose tools are backing your erasure.
While they use satellites and precision-guided missiles, you just want to tell the world you’re still here.
How vital your lost companion was. It wasn’t just a phone. It was your sword, your shield, your witness.
And in the face of this tyranny, surrendering is something you cannot afford. So, you rise.
You whisper, “Rest in power, my companion,” because we refuse to be slaughtered in silence.
We will keep telling our truth, even if all we have left is a scrap of paper and a drop of ink.
