For just over a month last year, Musheir El-Farra, a 62-year-old civil engineer, was trapped thousands of miles away from his Sheffield home in an active war zone. The border with Egypt was only a little over six miles away; in a very different world, he could have walked out in about an hour and a half. Instead, he had to wait, while the city where he was born shattered into rubble around him, until the Israeli government decided it was willing to let him and his 21-year-old son leave the Gaza strip.
Every three or four days, the British Consulate dutifully informed Musheir that it was not yet time. “They kept sending us stupid messages, saying they had not heard anything, that the border was still closed. My son was laughing every time they sent it.” Following the Hamas-led attacks against Israel last autumn, civilian movement in or out of the Gaza strip was completely shut down. After about a month, Musheir says, he started hearing that Canadian citizens were being allowed out, then Australians, then finally Brits. “We went to the border, our names were there and we just left.”
It was an anticlimactic end to a horrific ordeal. Musheir had travelled to Khan Yunis, the second biggest city in the Gaza strip and the place where he was born and raised, in early September to finish a film he’d been making about the lives of local fishermen and women. By the time he returned to Sheffield, it was 11th November. When I ask him if he finished the film, he says he actually got as far as arranging its premiere, which he’d hoped around 250 people would attend. Unfortunately, it was scheduled for the 7th October, the day Hamas and a number of other Palestinian militant groups attacked Israel from the Gaza strip, taking around 250 civilians and soldiers hostage and triggering the current ongoing war. “So, of course,” Musheir says wryly, “it didn’t happen.”
I’d imagined it might be difficult for Musheir to talk about what he witnessed in the Gaza strip, which included the dead bodies of his relatives. In reality, it pours out of him in meticulous detail, sometimes so quickly that I struggle to keep up. He borrows my notebook at one point to draw a map of the Gaza valley, dutifully spells out Arabic street names which were bombed and reels off the names of “beloved cousins” who died. He even provides approximate distances, in metres, for how narrowly certain bombs missed him (100 metres) or how long the queue for a single loaf of bread became after the Israeli government cut off supplies (400 metres within two weeks).
This appears to be his way of coping, documenting and cataloguing the horror at a granular level. “I went after every bombing to film,” he says, uploading video after video of himself to Facebook. In them, he stands in front of mountains of rubble, detailing how many buildings were destroyed and how many bodies recovered. It was a project he says began after he narrowly avoided being killed while travelling to visit his sister’s home. “I got out of the taxi and it was total devastation, I saw children being taken from the rubble and so many houses had caught on fire in the explosion. The level of fire was unbelievable to see.” He wanted to make the outside world see it too.
This is why, rather than put the experience “on the back burner,” as he has advised his son to do to protect his mental health, Musheir is more than happy to speak to The Tribune. As the famous adage goes, history is written by the victors. Until fairly recently, the history of the Gaza strip, as it was told by much of the UK’s media and politicians, was overwhelmingly the one penned by the Israeli government. Musheir and other Palestinians like him are determined to counter that narrative — it cheers him to see, both in Sheffield and the rest of the UK, that the tide is beginning to turn.
He flicks through photo after photo of destroyed buildings on his phone, some of which he took himself and others that were sent to him after he was able to leave Khan Yunis. One shows his ruined family home, which was thankfully empty at the time it was struck. Another, which seems to inspire particular anger given he returns to it more than once, is a photo of the ruins of Barqouq castle, which dated back to 1387 and was decimated in early March. What seems to hurt him most is the senselessness of this attack. “Why destroy a castle?” he asks.
But he doesn’t only want to focus on the misery. “This is the beauty of the Palestinian people,” he says, showing me a video of a children’s entertainer in the middle of a crowd of kids. “They have unbelievable resilience.” This video, he tells me, was shot just six hours after a “horrific massacre”. The man at its centre, who is trying to distract the local children, was a recent refugee from Gaza and a professional clown. He’d had to leave his gear behind when fleeing his home, but he was at least able to paint his face.
At one point, Musheir abruptly apologises. He has been showing me a video that pans over the destruction caused by yet another bombing and the slumped figure of a dead body has briefly appeared on screen. It’s an acknowledgement of the vast difference between us, between him and most other people living in Sheffield. For him and millions of other Palestinians, the sight of a dead body is no longer an unusual event.
Before he moved to the UK for his masters degree, no one had ever told Musheir that growing up under military occupation might have harmed his mental health. “If you live in Palestine, everybody is having the same experience so it doesn’t feel special or different,” he says. In the videos he uploaded to Facebook, he reels off casualties with the sombre but professional tone of a newsreader; it was very obvious to him at the time that the experiences of his childhood meant being trapped there affected him very differently to his son. “He’s never experienced something like that and he was very afraid. I put on a brave face and tried to show him I was not scared at all to make him calm down.” He has talked to his son a lot, he says, about PTSD and how to avoid it. “I told him when we returned ‘you have to really switch it off’ and he’s doing well now, but I don’t know if it will hit him later.”
Surely, I ask him, as so many people died around him, he must have been a little afraid that he might be next? He muses on the question. Certainly, he says, it was jarring to be woken up by the sound of rockets — he mimes the whistling sound of them flying past and then the muffled explosion as they hit their target. “Every night you wonder, when will it come to you?” The consolation, as he quickly learned, is that “if you can hear it, it won’t hit you”. The bombs you can hear are the ones on their way past — the bomb that kills you will hit before you have a chance to notice it.
When I ask Musheir what it was like growing up in Khan Yunis, he describes two versions of the city. One is the site of the most “cherished memories” of his childhood, of his sporting days winning bronze and silver medals in basketball and table tennis tournaments, and of long nights on the beach with his family. “We had one of the most gorgeous sandy beaches in the world at the time,” he says. The other version of Khan Yunis is full of armoured vehicles, soldiers marching through the streets and protests against the occupation, which began in 1967 when he was still a young child.
The day that particularly stands out to him is the 30th March 1976 — a pivotal event in the conflict now known as “Land Day,” which took place when he was just 15. The Israeli government had announced plans to seize a huge swathe of Palestinian territory, sparking protests across the region. Some of Musheir’s fellow students ignored the warning of their headmaster and “went out and threw stones at the soldiers on the streets”. He was not among them — his father was in prison at the time, so he’d promised his mother he wouldn’t do anything that would get their family in more trouble — but then Israeli soldiers came to the school and carted off around 36 students, including him, for questioning. While he was released the following lunchtime, the injustice clearly still stings. “I was arrested for nothing,” he says bitterly.
He’s keen to point out that the suffering of the Palestinian people does not begin and end when the bombs start flying. According to Musheir, the ease with which the Israeli government can control their lives is a painful source of humiliation, one that is particularly obvious at the border. Even when Israel is not actively at war, “there’s always lots of procedures, lots of strip searches, long queues. I’ve never known getting in or out to be easy.” It is, he feels, a process that has been made deliberately torturous — meaning the five-hour journey from Cairo in Egypt to Khan Yunis usually takes him two days — to keep Palestinians in a downtrodden and submissive state. “If you spend one day travelling like that, you really feel a lot of humiliation.”
And that’s when the border is open. In addition to closing “intermittently” for short periods, it was almost “completely sealed off” from 2015 to 2017, when UN data shows it was open for an average of just three days each month. This period tragically coincided with the death of Musheir’s mother, which meant both he and his sister, who was visiting him, were unable to be with her in her final hours. “She was taken to hospital, the same hospital where I was born, with internal bleeding. She was 85 and the doctors said ‘that’s it, she has got days left’,” he recalls. “She was calling for me and my sister but we could not reach her, for nine days she was saying ‘Musheir’. She died calling our names, it was one of the most painful experiences of my life.”
The helplessness he felt during this traumatic time is likely another reason Musheir was determined to find something useful to do while trapped in Khan Yunis. It did not take long for a problem in need of a fix to present itself. On 13th October, Israel dropped paper notices onto the homes of more than 1 million residents living in the north of the Gaza strip, instructing them to evacuate. Their only option was to head south. “We started seeing an influx of hundreds of thousands of people to Khan Yunis,” Musheir says. “There were people sleeping on the pavements.” He appealed to his friends back in Sheffield to help raise money to buy these refugees food, clothes and blankets — and he says more than 3,700 people received their support.
It was not only food that was hard to come by — the Israeli government also shut off supplies of fuel, electricity and water. In one of his Facebook videos, posted on 27th October, Musheir claimed his home only received three hours of water every four days. “We are really privileged,” he remarks in the video — hundreds of thousands were living in areas without even this limited supply. In the words of Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant on 9th October, the point of such measures was to impose a “complete siege” on the area they claimed was under the control of their enemy, Hamas. “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly,” Gallant said.
In Musheir’s view, Israel was determined to punish the entire population of the Gaza strip in revenge for the attacks by Hamas. In the early hours of 25th October, for example, he says he “suddenly heard two F16 rockets break the sound barrier” and strike a block of flats where some of his extended family lived. “That strike killed 18 of my relatives, none of them were related to Hamas.” While he lists other attacks that were supposedly aimed at killing a single Hamas operative but wiped out a number of civilians in the process, he claims this one was “totally unexplained”.
“In my view,” he tells me, more than once, “this is a war crime, it’s collective punishment of all these people.” It’s hugely important to him that I include this quote — it is only his opinion, he stresses, as if throwing me a bone. He would rather not be quoted at all, he says, than have me tell his story without it. “I don’t like interviews that just present this as a humanitarian crisis. There’s politics here.” It seems to frustrate him a little that he has to tip-toe and couch things as only his opinion when criticising Israel or be labelled antisemitic — he has, he insists, absolutely nothing against the Jewish people — when Israeli ministers like Amichai Eliyahu make statements to the press suggesting Israel might drop nuclear bombs on Gaza and insisting “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians”. (In response to the remark about nuclear war, Eliyahu was reprimanded by Benjamin Netanyahu and suspended from cabinet meetings.)
Since returning to Sheffield, Musheir adds, the feeling of helplessness has been killing him. “I do a lot of work to raise awareness and support work on the ground,” he says, “but my people are being wiped out under the eyes of the world and I can do nothing.” What consoles him, he adds, is the unbelievable support the Palestinian cause has received from the people of this city. “Sheffield is the leading pro-Palestinian city in the UK, I would say this very proudly.” While support for Palestine is on the rise everywhere in the UK, “from Milton Keynes to Doncaster,” it has been a popular cause here for decades, with the Sheffield Palestine Solidarity Campaign forming in 1987. “Being around my pro-Palestinian friends is really making me feel like Sheffield is a true home, a second home to me.”
It also gives him hope, he says, that he may see peace in Gaza — “a peace that is based in justice, not an empty peace” — within his lifetime. This, to him, would require a “correction of the historical injustice” and allowing Palestinians to live in their homeland without military occupation or fear. “If this means living together with the Israelis in one state, which has no religious or ethnic background, and with equal rights, then so be it.”
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