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00:00 I am Pragya and I bring to you excerpts from the year-ender issue titled "We Bear Witness".
00:06 The issue is dedicated to the people of Gaza and what they went through.
00:10 This translation of the author's original social media post in Arabic
00:21 has been done by the volunteers at Gaza Passages.
00:24 A promising novelist and an engineer, Noor Aldin Hajjaj wrote this piece barely one month
00:31 before he was killed in Israeli bombing on December 3rd in Gaza.
00:36 Like a small obituary in a newspaper that was torn to dust on a rusty shelf in an old grocery store,
00:43 then eaten up by the windshield of a passing car.
00:47 The intro of his Facebook profile.
00:50 "Good evening world, internet and phone connections were cut off last night and what I once considered
00:56 impossible suddenly became reality, but under different conditions."
01:01 The postman can't make his rounds amid the bombing and destruction and in any case the
01:07 newspapers he carries bears the same headline each day.
01:12 Gaza is being exterminated.
01:14 Light sets each evening and does not rise again the next day.
01:18 Maybe tomorrow's edition will contain the news of my death.
01:22 This is what was on my mind at the moment communications were disconnected and we found
01:29 ourselves cut off from the world and the world cut off from us and what was happening to us.
01:35 The bombing became more intense and we placed our hands on our hearts because this was what
01:40 we feared and here it was getting closer.
01:44 We were going to die in silence without the world knowing anything to the point we couldn't
01:50 even record our last moments or shout out our last words.
01:54 I live in a small neighborhood called Al-Shazaya which is on the eastern edge of Gaza city.
02:02 Every night the sound of explosions is constant, explosions of different kinds coming from
02:08 different directions and with every explosion that rocks our house and our hearts we hold
02:14 on tight to one another knowing that at some point there will be an explosion we won't
02:20 hear because it will have already blown us up.
02:24 This is why I'm writing now.
02:26 It might be my last message that makes it out to the free world flying with the doves
02:31 of peace to tell them that we love life or at least what life we have managed to live.
02:37 In Gaza all paths before us are blocked and instead we are just one tweet or breaking
02:44 news story away from death.
02:46 Anyway, I'll begin.
02:48 My name is Noor Aldin Hajjad.
02:51 I'm a Palestinian writer.
02:53 I am 27 year old and I have many dreams.
02:57 I'm not a number and I do not consent to my death being passing news.
03:03 Say too that I love life, happiness, freedom, children's laughter, the sea, coffee, writing,
03:11 faroes, everything that is joyful though these things will all disappear in the space of
03:17 a moment.
03:18 One of my dreams is for my books and my writings to travel the world, for my pen to have wings
03:25 that no unstamped passport or visa rejection can hold back.
03:29 Another dream of mine is to have a small family, to have a little son who looks like me and
03:36 I tell him a bedtime story as I rock him in my arms.
03:40 My greatest dream is that my country will have peace, that children will smile more
03:46 brightly than the sun, that we will plant flowers in every place a bomb once fell and
03:52 that we will trace our freedom on every wall that has been destroyed, that war will finally
03:59 leave us alone so we can for once again live our lives.
04:04 For this and more, read the year-ender issue of Outlook.