At a historic United Nations General Assembly in New York this week, nine Western nations, including Australia, joined the growing list of countries that now recognise Palestinian statehood.
These proclamations arrived just days after the UN and the International Association of Genocide Scholars both declared, for the first time, that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The UN found that Israel’s escalating forced evictions and deadly pounding of Gaza City from sky and land “deliberately inflicted conditions of life on the Palestinians in Gaza calculated to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in Gaza, which is an underlying act of genocide”.
Through all this, Dr Khamis Elessi — a pain medicine and neurorehabilitation specialist who has continued to care for patients in Gaza’s northern hospitals, a father to seven children, a husband, and my dear friend — has finally, reluctantly, fled his beloved Gaza City.
In early September, Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz said on X that the “gates of hell are opening now” in Gaza. Sure enough, Khamis’ city is now a hellish inferno.
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Khamis left me a lengthy voice message a few days ago. He spoke slowly, his words occasionally cracking. He narrated his story for the world to hear. With permission, I share that transcript here.
Dear beloved sister Rachel,
Thank you so much for your kind words, for your empathy, for your unwavering support.
It’s a long, long trek of pain, suffering, bitterness, heartbreak, forced eviction, losses of everything you’ve owned and worked for, for the past 40 years, you and your brothers and sisters. Losing your clinic, losing your loved ones, your friends, your university.
But despite all these losses, I’ve tried my best to remain steadfast here in Gaza City, for the past 715 days, not leaving Gaza for even one single day. I had many good offers to leave Gaza, but I refused and I remained, serving thousands and thousands of people and needy patients.
The situation was really, really hard over the past 715 days here in Gaza. But over the last three weeks, our options have become numbered. Before, we had other options — to move from Area A, to Area B, to Area C, then back to Area B or A — because in Gaza City we still had some standing homes, standing buildings.
But now options are very limited and there is nowhere to go. They have added new tools for barbaric massacres, using automated tanks that will keep walking by themselves and then backed by 3,000 to 5,000 kilograms of lethal ammunition amongst buildings, towers. And they blow it from the sky, demolishing tens of homes in one or two seconds.
And I tried to hold to my remaining strength but unfortunately, for the past three weeks and particularly in the past one week, our area Tal al-Hawa, which is the most modern, the most advanced area in Gaza City, was targeted severely from different directions, using all these lethal weapons at the same time. F16 bombings on towers and tall buildings, detonation of tanks amongst residential blocks, and shooting of quadcopters or helicopters on people.
Khamis posted on Facebook a series of devastating photos of his forced eviction. The convoy of vehicles piled high with the family’s furniture — mattresses, couches, chairs, cooking equipment, clothes. Khamis and I had once giggled at a horse trotting down bustling Salah al-Din Road on a leash through the window of a moving car (“See this?!” he had laughed. “This is Gaza!”). In his photos, a donkey lies overcome on the ground, unable to lift its head any longer to pull along its owner’s possessions packed onto a cart, while a young man pleads with it to get up.
Khamis’ two youngest sons and daughter had once performed an energetic Arabic hip-hop routine to their international visitors in their family home, as we sat egging them on from plush crimson couches over sugared sage tea. In his photos, his drawn, pale children hang out the windows of a car, part of the convoy transporting those same crimson couches to a destination unknown.
Dr Khamis Elessi’s family leaving Gaza City with all their possessions (Image: Supplied)
And behind them, where Gaza City’s streets once overflowed with gangs of kids, urban roosters strutting in the shadows of relic buildings from ancient empires, beach dwellers snacking on upside-down maklouba and queues for late-night cheesy knafeh, high-rise homes crumple in seconds.
On October 16, 2023, Khamis published a letter in The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious health and medical journals, titled “Save Gaza residents from imminent catastrophe”.
He had ended the letter with a grave prophecy: “If the massacre continues on its current path, we will be dangerously close to witnessing a large-scale genocide of civilians and patients. When have such illegal and immoral acts ever been justified?”
Khamis spoke on in his voice message.
Due to this, I decided to leave Gaza to survive this onslaught, to save my family — or the remaining of my family. Because last week, I lost my only aunt with her children and grandchildren, 53 individuals of that family, four generations of that family, completely gone. And now we cannot retrieve her body or the body of her kids or their children.
Despite the extremely expensive transport — can you imagine just for the van or truck, you have to pay around US$2,000 just to transport your things.
And despite that to rent any place, even if it’s a garage, you have to pay US$2,000 per month as well. So just for transportation and immediate rental, you need US$4,000, which cannot be afforded by the vast majority of people in Gaza.
And despite the immense suffering along the way, to cross 5km or 10km only from our area to the middle zone, it takes eight or 10 hours.
Despite 715 days of being steadfast in Gaza and working with people and trying to save as many lives as possible,
Finally, I decided to leave Gaza City.
Thank you so much.
