"We are the Living Dead of Gaza"

Every day since October 7, Zainab AI Ghonaimy has woken up in her home in the besieged Gaza City and the first thing she has done is check her Internet connection. It has become an essential means of survival for Zainab, who has been using it to broadcast her daily journal to the world.

- Zainab Al Ghonaimy

It is the only way for the 70-year-old lawyer, researcher and director of the Centre For Women's Legal Research, Counselling And Protection to connect with her daughter Farah Barqawi in Brooklyn and tell her she's alright. The internet is the only way she can inform the world about the "living dead" of Gaza. The following are edited excerpts from Zainab's war journal made available online by her daughter in collaboration with the Regional Coalition for Women Human Rights Defenders in the Middle East and North Africa.

DAY 11: The eleventh night of this devastating war is over, but the sun still hasn’t woken up well which gives a feeling that the heavy night is never ending.

I no longer love the night, although I used to wait for it to come with love, when it is calm for the soul and the sun is with those we love. As for now, the darkness of the night is dark, there is no string of light except the light bombs thrown by Israeli planes to determine the target on which bombs and missiles will be fired.

I don’t like night anymore because it fills me with fear and reminds me of my mother’s stories about the terrifying ghoul that walks through the alleys at night and devours everything that is alive and moving but never gets satisfied. The ghoul of this war so far has thousands of children, women and the rest elders and men. 

Fear does not allow anyone to move and they are packed in tight hiding places, either in their house or the new shelter they migrated to. They suppress their desire to pee in order not to move and children and the elderly among them pee inadvertently on their clothes. On these cruel nights, the extinct dragon you see in horror movies is back. We hear his frightening sound and we see the fire blowing out of his multiple heads left and right, blowing up buildings.