The IDF Killed My Entire Family

The famine in Gaza is being intensified by Israel, as armed Israeli troops open fire on starving civilians queuing for food, turning aid depots into death traps. In the UK, Keir Starmer considers imposing sanctions, while continuing arms sales to Israel.

Ahmed Alnaouq is a Palestinian journalist and author. In October 2023, while he was in England, an Israeli airstrike hit his home in central Gaza, killing 21 of his immediate family, including his father, two brothers, three sisters and their children.

In this conversation, Alnaouq tells Ash Sarkar about his family, and their lives growing up together in Gaza. He explains how his recent book ‘We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth’ came about, partly because telling stories about the Palestinian people he has known and loved has helped him to process grief.

Would the genocide be happening, if the Palestinian people were conceived as being fully human, or is the violence made possible because Palestinians are presented as sub-human: just ‘numbers’ in a news headline? What ideology is fuelling the violence? And what can be drawn from remembering the South African people’s struggle to overcome apartheid?