Nayrouz Qarmout is a Palestinian writer. She was born in the Syrian capital, Damascus, on 14 April 1984. A Palestinian refugee from her village, Deir Sneid (territories of 1948), she lived in the refugee camp of Yarmouk till she was 10, finishing there her primary school. She finished her studies in Gaza, where she is living today, as she returned to Palestine at the end of 1994, after the Oslo Peace Agreement.

ANF reached her in Gaza, where she lives. She has lived through the Gaza siege in 2014, writing a diary and sending it out her way to “feel I was still alive”, she said. Today she is witnessing yet another massacre. 

In a whatsapp message last night she confirmed that Israeli bombing had reached West Gaza, where she lives. 

In a previous message yesterday morning, she had written: "It’s crazy what is happening, I fell asleep from fatigue this afternoon, we can’t sleep at night, bombing all the time streets houses families under rubble. But we have to resist, I hope the ceasefire comes soon."

The following is a text Nayrouz Qamrout had sent ANF yesterday afternoon.

The Sheikh Jarrah Intifada

In its identity, the land gathers its people at prayer time, a worship that mixes national and religious ritual. Sheikh Jarrah has revealed the issues at the heart of Palestine; it has seeped into Haifa, Lydda, Majd al-Krum, Rahat, Beersheba, and Jaffa as they’ve risen to the rescue of Gaza, whose blood is squeezed into the spirit of Jerusalem. Camps, villages, and cities across the West Bank scream as conflict breaks out in Huwara, Jalamah, and Bab al-Zawiya. Crowds advance to the borders in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Iraq rises; Cairo returns to Egypt.

Yes, parties set off, unshackling themselves, when popular will digs its heels into the earth. Let brave youth be part of the dawn of the immediate future.

Effective revolutionary values shake off the call of a time that has garnered little sympathy, or which cannot justify a people’s existence on their own land.

A land torn by settlement and the wall, whose people have lost any shred of conscientiousness from an occupier that practices the most severe forms of discrimination, displacement and racial persecution.

On May 15, 2021, the components of Palestinian identity, in its national, political, and geographical forms, are wrapped up in popular uprisings. They choose their means in response to provocation in the field, defending their personhood and freedoms.

Continuing the Sheikh Jarrah uprising—or intifada—underlines a stage of revolutionary and democratic construction for the Palestinian people, a connection of old and new with steadfast historical narrative; it enumerates massacres in chapters that speak of the pain that buried the blood of victims in the memory of a people who will never die.

Gaza, 16 May 2021