Nadia Zuaiter can track the devastation that’s unfolding in the Gaza Strip through increasingly desperate messages from family members who are trapped there.
At first, she said, she wrote to make sure everyone was OK, and they asked if she knew what would happen next: Was it safe to move south? Was there any news about an invasion?
But as the bombing by the Israeli military has escalated, fewer messages have arrived, and at times they’ve stopped altogether, as Israel took out local communications services. At least 47 members of Zuaiter’s extended family have been killed, she said. Food and water are running short. One aunt is rationing insulin. Her newly married cousin, pregnant and volunteering in a south Gaza hospital, wrote that she expects to die. She just hopes it will be quick.
“Numbness. It leads to them having hopelessness,” said Zuaiter, who works as a bookkeeper in Lone Tree. “There’s no point to be hopeful, for them.”
As the latest surge of violence in Gaza enters its fifth week, Coloradans with ties to the Palestinian territories say they are both mourning relatives killed in Israeli airstrikes and shouldering a difficult burden — forced, at times, to justify their grief amid the fraught American politics surrounding the conflict. With many elected officials and community leaders openly siding with or deferring to Israel’s response, their experiences feel overlooked, abandoned or even degraded.
Israel began its most recent military campaign in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack, which killed some 1,200 Israelis and resulted in about 240 people being taken as hostages, many of them still being held. In the weeks since Israel declared war on Hamas, which has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union, it has launched repeated airstrikes and, more recently, sent ground incursions into Gaza.
More than 9,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, while hospitals are running short of fuel and medical supplies. Surgeries sometimes are performed without anesthesia.
Colorado has deep connections to this latest outbreak of violence, from residents whose family members have died in the attacks on Gaza to people with family ties to hostages taken by Hamas. Palestinian-Americans who spoke to The Denver Post say they have lost dozens of relatives in the bombing in the last four weeks. Hundreds of Palestinian families live in Colorado, according to state Rep. Iman Jodeh, an Aurora Democrat who is Palestinian-American.
After decades of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, they can feel the wheel of generational trauma turning again, as they wonder how many more people will die.
Some of Zuaiter’s family fled south when the conflict worsened, but the bombs were falling there, too. Others have remained in the north end of Gaza, unwilling to become refugees and unconvinced they’d find safety even if they did.
“Where would they go?” she asked. “There really is nowhere.”
On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the military’s ground advance into the outskirts of Gaza City, saying they were “at the height of the battle” as they target Hamas. But with innocent civilians getting killed, United Nations officials, activist groups and a small but growing number of American lawmakers have called for a ceasefire.
“Despair that I’ve never heard before”
Before the recent escalation, Reema Wahdan, a Colorado native whose parents immigrated to the United States, had heard about violence affecting her family members and their neighbors in the Palestinian territories.
But this time, she said, it feels more intense.
“It’s that despair that I’ve never heard before,” she said of conversations with family. “You would think it’s isolated, but it’s every day, every hour, every minute. These are the screams of family members being torn apart, children losing their parents, grandparents. … Arms of their family tree — just eradicated in a minute.”
She can’t get the sounds she’s heard, or images she’s seen, out of her head. She recalled being on the phone with a friend in Gaza when an Israeli airstrike hit. It was the background sound that followed that shook her: a young girl’s piercing cry for her mom, filled with fear, as people around her were killed or buried under the rubble of buildings.
“I can’t shake it. I can’t. I can’t erase it from my mind,” Wahdan said. “None of us can. None of us can go to sleep and not think of these families, of how they’re writing the names of their children on their arms and legs in anticipation of death,” a practice that media outlets have reported.
Zuaiter and her family in the United States have watched and endured images broadcast from Gaza. She watches, she said, so that she can share — even distantly — the suffering of her extended family members who lived and died there.
She said her 98-year-old grandmother, who lives in Houston, talks to the TV in an attempt to comfort the dust-covered victims shown as they’re pulled from rubble or rushed through hospital corridors. It’s just like 1948, she told Zuaiter, when her own father was killed in the war that established the state of Israel.
Though her grandmother has carried those memories for seven decades, Zuaiter said she did not understand their full weight until now. She sees the messages from relatives grow more anxious. Her three adult children are angry. She feels numb and disillusioned, she said.
“I didn’t know I carried this until I started seeing my grandmother going through this, how multi-generational trauma is circular,” Zuaiter said. “… The stories that my grandmother told me, it’s happening now. It’s like it’s been hardwired into your psyche.”
Watching what’s happening is difficult, too, for Denver’s Abdullah Elagha — but even more so for his parents, who now live in the United States but are watching from afar as the homes and streets so familiar to them are destroyed. But he said they’re relieved, in a way, that Elagha’s grandparents aren’t alive to see the latest violence.
“As brutal as this occupation has been … what we’re seeing right now really is beyond words,” he said. “It’s hard to wrap your head around, even when you have all the facts and all the information.”
Elagha was born in Libya. His family was part of the Palestinian diaspora after the 1948 and 1967 wars. They moved back to Gaza a few years after he was born, he said, but the conditions were unbearable. So they left for America. Many of his relatives stayed in Gaza.
On Oct. 25, Elagha learned that three more family members had been killed in Gaza. That brought his family’s growing total to 32, including children.
“It’s been hard for a long time,” Elagha said of living conditions in Gaza. With a population of 2 million living in a land area slightly smaller than the city and county of Denver, it’s highly impoverished. Security measures and border fencing installed over time by Israel have restricted movement, a dynamic that Human Rights Watch has described as an “open-air prison.”
“It didn’t just start being hard after Oct. 7,” Elagha said.
Worries about safety and calls for a ceasefire
While the events of the last month have reopened old wounds, the American political debate has made some Palestinians feel unsafe here. Elagha said the polarizing rhetoric has contributed to a rise in hate-fueled incidents against Palestinians and Muslims across the U.S. in recent weeks.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights group, has noted an uptick of reported bias incidents since Oct. 7. (A rise in antisemitism has also been documented in the United States by the Anti-Defamation League.)
Wahdan’s family business has been targeted with threats, as have others owned by Palestinian Americans. Someone shot a bullet through her living room window, she said.
Mosques in Colorado also have been threatened and had to increase security. At a pro-Palestine rally in downtown Denver last month, organizers captured video of someone in an apartment building throwing eggs at the marchers below.
“This really reminds me of post-9/11 America, where Arabs and Muslims in general were truly vilified,” said Elagha, who is a member of one of the groups that organized recent demonstrations in Denver. “In everyday conversation, it was so normal to hate us. It was so normal to lust for our blood. And it was a terrifying time to be in America. It feels the same right now.”
Jodeh, the state representative from Aurora, has family in the West Bank, the other Palestinian territory. She said Palestinians here feel unheard and dehumanized, and they sometimes face pushback when they speak out to save lives in Gaza.
It can put Democrats like her at odds with political allies, including some statewide and local elected officials who have declared unwavering support for Israel without mentioning Palestinians’ suffering in Gaza.
“I feel like I’ve had to temper what my community needs and wants me to say,” she said. “Because I’m in this balance of — I’m the elected (official), but how do I say these things diplomatically, threading the needle so I can maintain relationships but advocate for my people, advocate for our history (and) our heritage; making people understand this is an illegal occupation and that all of this cannot — cannot — be distilled down to a tweet.”
Many activists, including Elagha, want a ceasefire. Calls for American political leaders to publicly support one have met resistance, though several members of Congress are circulating a resolution. Jodeh said she’s talked to White House officials about the impact of President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s military campaign.
At least two members of Colorado’s congressional delegation — Reps. Diana DeGette and Jason Crow, both Democrats — have called for a “humanitarian pause” in hostilities, though DeGette was careful to stipulate that “all remaining hostages should be released” by Hamas as part of any pause.
Zuaiter is trying to look beyond the politics. She was last in Gaza in 2001, when she took her three children to meet her cousins and visit her father.
She remembers her cousins and aunts gathering in her father’s apartment. She remembers the women in the family — linked by blood but shaped by different realities — bonding over the shared trauma of having lost children. She was the same age as some of her cousins, she said, but they seemed 20 years older.
Her father’s apartment is gone now, bombed in a previous war. The family chose not to rebuild it.
Zuaiter said she’s become disillusioned with governments — American, Palestinian and Israeli alike. Like her family in Gaza, she said she isn’t thinking about a long-term solution. Her focus is on stopping the bloodshed now.
“I don’t want to go into the politics, the history,” she said. “This is the situation now.”
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