'My Death Should Not be Passing News'

A promising novelist and an engineer, Noor Aldeen Hajjaj, wrote this piece barely one month before he was killed in Israeli bombing on December 3 in Gaza

- Noor Aldeen Hajjaj

Noor Aldeen Hajjaj

“Like a small obituary in a newspaper that was torn to dust on a rusty shelf in an old grocery store, then eaten up by the windshield of a passing car.” — The ‘intro’ of his Facebook profile 

GOOD evening, world. Internet and phone connections were cut off last night, and what I once considered impossible suddenly became reality, but under different conditions. The postman can’t make his rounds amid the bombing and destruction, and in any case the newspapers he carries bear the same headline each day: “Gaza is being exterminated. Life sets each evening and does not rise again the next day.” Maybe tomorrow’s edition will contain the news of my death.