Death, destruction, refugeehood, humanitarian crises – those are the things we’re used to accepting as part of the reality of war… But in Gaza I also saw the death of the human soul. The Gazans are zombies. Death of souls on that scale, psychological wreckage at that level, I’ve never seen anywhere. At a certain point, I went through Rafah, and the streets were filled with refugee tents, and people, and booths, and there were hardly any vehicles, because there’s no fuel, so transportation is via carts and donkeys, and people move between them slowly. It took us two hours to cover a distance that normally would take 10 minutes. And all this time I looked at the faces of the people who were passing by us and I was shocked because they just looked dead.

Arwa Damon, quoted in “As a CNN War Reporter, Arwa Damon Thought She Had Seen Everything. Then She Went to Gaza” by Shany Littman, Haaretz, June 21, 2024.

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