“This call is being recorded,” an automated Hebrew voice recording recited when I recently tried to reach Abu Hamza, a friend in Gaza. He had just been released from Israel’s now notorious Sde Teiman prison. He heard the voice recording too. “Every time I speak on the phone, the recording comes on. But I don’t care,” he said.
“How are you?” I asked, painfully aware of how coldly formulaic my query sounded given what I already knew of the unspeakable ordeal he had been through. What do you ask someone somehow surviving amid a genocide? How do you ‘check in’ on someone twice displaced, whose home is destroyed, who now lives in a tent, and who has witnessed massacre after massacre, including the killing of his own family members?
“Glad to be alive,” he answered. “I just returned from hell.” ….more