Shireen, a witness to Gaza

Shireen hears the sirens, the warplanes flying above her, the explosions and (if they’re nearby) the blast waves and sound of shattered glass. But she doesn’t see the explosions, the burning houses, the dead and wounded in the streets: she experiences the war in total darkness, because she’s blind.

This has been her almost daily situation since 7 October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israeli territory, killing 1,194 people and kidnapping about 150 others, after which Israel began the war in the Gaza Strip. Shireen, a young Palestinian woman, is blind, but, to use a paradoxical image, she is also a large open eye focused on the conditions of people with disabilities living in Gaza these last 20 months: an eye revealing the enormous hardships and terror for people who are deaf, move on wheelchairs, or have cognitive deficits, during a very violent war that strikes civilians above all.

The story of Shireen’s family is the story of the Palestinians after the nakba, the catastrophe (as it is called in Arabic), i.e., the expulsion of about 700,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948 after the creation of the State of Israel. Her grandmother told her about those days and, when Shireen was 15, she too was forced to leave her native village in the Gaza Strip. In 2008, after an Israeli air raid killed some of her family members and her wounds left her blind, she decided to earn a degree in multimedia journalism. So, since 7 October 2023, Shireen has been providing precise and reliable information on how the disabled – about 15% of Gaza’s population - live through the war. Her motto is: “resistance through words.”

You can listen to her reportage on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/watch/?v= 763928649288069) where she says: “Being blind during the bombardments is a nightmare. Blind people navigate with sounds, but with the noise of the bombs you can’t hear any others. Blind people can’t even know if their family are alive after a bombardment, and deaf people are in a similar situation: how can they hear cries for help? How can you communicate in these emergencies?” Moreover, when the sirens sound, people with physical disabilities can’t escape quickly and, even when they reach the shelters, they can’t always enter because they’re on wheelchairs. But perhaps the most vulnerable are people with cognitive deficits: they’re the first to get lost, and their families have a very hard time finding them, if they find them at all. If the condition of the disabled was difficult before 7 October, now, with all-out war, it has become impossible. There’s no water, no electricity, no services, no medicines, and for people with deficits this has turned life into an obstacle course where they always fall.

There’s another video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsnIiRyj-bc) in which an American reporter from ABC asks Shireen about her personal life as a blind journalist during the war, to which she replies “I don’t want to talk about me. I want to talk about the others, about all the disabled people living life on the edge, burdened by hardships and injustice. I want to talk only about them.”

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