Anas, my neighbor

On the night of October 23, 2023, Anas al-Sharif took a photo of the moon over Gaza and wrote: “Tonight’s moon with the dust from the bombing.” Like his friendly smile, the photo was proof of his humanity in the face of Israel’s monstrosity. He momentarily set aside his rightful wariness as bombs tore through the places he knew and killed the people that were his own and lifted his head to watch how the dust and smoke from the strikes — that heavy, criminal legacy that doesn’t dissipate — obscured the moon in Gaza’s sky. That moment seemed like a brief escape from the massacre. Reading his words now, I find no truer description of his departure.

I didn’t come to know Anas through the news, nor did I only hear of his father, Sheikh Jamal, when he was martyred in an Israeli crime. I’ve known them since I was born. They were our neighbors in the Jabalia camp in northern Gaza, with only a short row of houses separating our home from theirs.

Fifteen years ago, Sheikh Jamal ran a small falafel shop famous for its unique recipe, so much so that people came to him from neighboring alleys. It was a blend so perfect that people put up with the embarrassment of walking past the falafel stands in their own neighborhoods while carrying “Al-Sharif Falafel.” If I happened to find his shop closed, I would return home and tell my family disappointedly, “Al-Sharif is shut. I got falafel and msabbaha from another place.”

The image I had of Sheikh Jamal kept evolving as I was growing up, and, in my memory, his figure ascended from one level to another over those years. He eventually left the falafel shop after becoming a community mediator thanks to his good reputation in the camp. He would move from alley to alley every day to resolve family disputes. Sheikh Jamal wrote his own life story, and then Israel’s genocidal war wrote a second story for him after he became a political extension of his son Anas — the story of the martyr killed by the Occupation when it bombed his house on December 11, 2023 to punish and subjugate his son.

My memories of Anas, like those of his father and our neighbors, grew alongside him. I saw a young Anas standing at his father’s side in the falafel shop. I remember the image of the affable son he personified. Then, little by little, I began to see Anas chasing a dream that was possible before the Occupation made it impossible. Anas, passionate about photography, ran the Shamal Online network with his friends to cover breaking news in Gaza. I always saw him with his camera bag on his back, moving from one place to another on his motorcycle. As the photos and videos show, smiling came easily to Anas, his face lit up with a smile the moment your eyes met his.

The moment I read the news, I don't know why I was overcome with the urge to tell the world: I lost Anas, our neighbors’ son. Why did this impulse take hold of me? Was I doing him an injustice, or was I expressing a deeper, more connected sense of pride? Why did I feel the desire to preserve a living image of Anas, a vibrant, layered image of Anas, to hold on to the place he inhabited in the lives of his family, his friends, and in mine, before the genocidal war? Perhaps because the Gaza I knew and now resist forgetting is embodied in this particular image, not the Gaza being reshaped by the genocide.

When people asked me about Anas, I would answer proudly: “Anas is my neighbor.” Everything that followed was a reflection of the genocide and an extension of Israeli crimes and violence against him and against all the people of Gaza. My neighbor Anas was not one to have the word “massacre” besiege his tongue when he talked about his people, and my neighbor Anas did not dream of his death. But he was unjustly killed after a criminal, nuclear state, equipped with all the means of killing and destruction and backed by all the countries of the world, paved for him a long road of fear, a road whose end was even more unjust.

With every second that passed in this genocidal war for Anas, our neighbors’ son, and our people in Gaza, he and they have lived whole lives of violence and deprivation. It did not fall on him alone, but on us as well. Just as he is a victim of this brutish violence that struck him and thousands others, so too are we. The loss here is not personal, but a profound collective fracture.

I’m proud of Anas the journalist. Yet, I feel that the image of him in people's minds is the opposite of the Anas I know. It is deeply unfair to him, as it seems that death was the threshold he had to cross to complete the symbol of the journalist. Did we find glory in Anas’s death rather than in having defended him, in having prevented the injustice that befell him? What good is solidarity that does not deter injustice and killing, but rather sees glory promised once we become martyrs and orphans?

In the face of the unending loss caused by Israel's ongoing crime, I feel guilty whenever I try to stand and speak of a martyr. The images of all those that this genocidal war has taken from me crowd my mind: my family, my relatives, my friends, my neighbors. Each one asks me, “What about me?” It scares me, so I run away, and I say, “The time will come.” But I felt that I had to say something, to speak against the transgression against my memory, to show the dimensions of Israel's ongoing crime against us, and to restore the stories that make up Gaza and its people as I know them. With every passing second, I see images and videos of a Gaza I no longer recognize: a Gaza the Occupation is reshaping and remaking into the legacy of its crimes and the epitome of the world's moral stance.