On the Edge of the Abyss

January 2024 · The Gaza border

The skies over Israel had known no rest since that day in October.

Nuni was already in the ground. So was Omer, but in a temporary grave, far from home: Kfar Aza was still too dangerous, and there was no permission to bury anyone there. There was life before the seventh of October, and life after it. In between, there was nothing.

Alex had got onto one of the first flights out of Athens, the day after the massacre, with hundreds of other Israelis who had dropped everything in the middle of their lives to go and report for duty. In the old army bag were boots, a charger and two T-shirts. The red scarf stayed on the wall of the flat. "You don't take Hapoel to war," he said, when he saw Emily looking at him. She didn't ask. She just didn't understand why his voice broke on that, of all things.

He was no longer a soldier, but the Golani reserves didn't ask. At the end of October his company went into the Strip, and he hadn't come out of it, not really, for three months.

Now, as January opened its cold gates, he stood in the base showers, the scalding water running over his aching body and failing to wash away what he saw behind his eyelids. Another night without sleep. Another night in which the scars from his regular service mixed with the new things. His hands shook on the soap. Every slammed door, every shout, took him back to the darkest place there is.

The league had come back at the end of November, to empty stands. Alex hadn't watched a single match. For the first time since he was a boy he didn't know Hapoel's result, and it didn't bother him. That was what frightened him.

But he couldn't fall apart. Natalie needed him. Natalie, who had survived what can't be survived.

Outside, the whole country had mobilised. Mountains of donations arrived at the bases: socks, cigarettes, quiches in foil trays with notes from children. Evacuees from the north and from the Gaza border slept in hotels at the Dead Sea and in Eilat, and Tel Aviv opened its homes to them. World leaders, shocked by the massacre, still let Israel strike with all its force. But the numbers from Gaza rose every day, and every day more voices around the world asked: how long?

January 2024 · Tel Aviv

Natalie woke in a cold sweat. The same dream again. The smoke again. Roni's voice again, still reporting into the microphone.

She swung her legs off the bed, and the cold parquet stung the soles of her feet. The room spun for a moment, a side effect of the new pills. She went to the window and looked at Tel Aviv waking up. People going to work, buying coffee, hurrying for the bus. As if it were allowed.

She had rented this studio in December: a room and a half on the third floor, no lift. At her mother's she couldn't scream. Here she could. Sometimes she did, in the middle of the night, into the pillow.

On the first Friday of January, Vitaly knocked on the door. Since he had left home in March 2022 she had barely spoken to him. This time she opened it. He had brought a pot of soup and a bag of mandarins, and he sat on the only chair in the room and said nothing about Putin, about the war, about anything. As he left he said, in the doorway: "Natasha." No one had called her that for four years. She didn't correct him.

Maya, from Nirim, whose kibbutz was still evacuated, sent her a heart every morning. Natalie didn't answer, but she didn't mute her either.

How was she supposed to be normal after what had happened? How was she supposed to see an Arab in the street and not tremble? How was she supposed not to hate?

January 2024 · Gaza City

Mehran woke to the sound of the bombing. Again. Always.

They no longer lived in Shati. In November a shell had hit their building in the camp, and the three-room flat, with its dark floor and the table where Ahmed used to teach, had become a hole in the air. They left with whatever they could carry and moved to Uncle Khaled's house, deeper in the city. In May 2021 Khaled and his daughters had fled to them. Now the wheel had turned.

The south wall of the house had cracked yesterday, and now every plane that passed overhead threatened to bring the roof down on the girls sleeping on the floor. Two families in one house, nine people in three rooms. Sama wasn't small any more, but she still fell asleep with the teddy bear. Hiba was reading the same book by candlelight for the third time.

Most of the neighbourhood had gone south back in October, when Israel ordered the residents of the northern Strip to evacuate. Ahmed refused. "You don't leave twice," he said, and he meant his grandfather, who left Jaffa in 1948 and never came back. Jaffa. Mehran had only ever seen it in pictures, but he knew the sea there was the same colour.

Fatma was still working at al-Shifa, in corridors that had become a refugee camp. She came home at night too quiet, her hands smelling of disinfectant and smoke.

Hunger gnawed at his stomach, and still Mehran couldn't eat. Jana and Reem split one pitta a day between them and laughed so that he wouldn't worry. And he thought about the hostages, somewhere here, under the same ground, hungry too. How do you eat when death hovers over everyone's head?

Math Gaza had been silent since October. The last video, a quadratic equation, had gone up on the evening of 6 October, and the comments under it were left unanswered. There was no power, no network, and he had no heart to film himself. But the lessons kept coming to him at night, on their own. Ahmed saw him writing formulas on the cardboard of an aid box, and took out of his old bag a notebook with a faded cover.

"Write from the back," he said. "The front is mine."

Mehran didn't ask what was at the front. He turned the notebook over and started on the last page.

February 2024 · Inside the Strip

The fighting went on for months, and no end was in sight. Round after round of negotiations burned out, like hope. More than a hundred hostages were still in Gaza.

Alex went out on night missions with his heart pounding so hard he was sure everyone could hear it. Every time he passed a ruined building he thought of Mehran. Of his last message, "I'm sorry. We are not them", which had been waiting on the phone since October without a reply, because Alex still didn't know what you answer to that. And of everyone hiding in those ruins with their pain. In every scream he heard Natalie. He was torn between duty and humanity, between justice and mercy, between the urge for revenge and compassion.

And one night, without thinking too much, he sprayed the Hapoel ultras' emblem on a burnt wall. Red on grey. He had left the scarf in Athens. The emblem he had carried in his hands.

Only when he walked away did he understand what he'd done. He, who had always said that Hapoel was the left, was brotherhood, was everything that stood against wars like this one – he had marked territory in Gaza. But his little sister had been saved by a miracle, and good friends had not come back from that day. The pain had beaten the belief.

And maybe the belief itself had already broken: the belief that Arabs and Jews could live side by side, in two states, as neighbours. It had slipped away from him, and in its place was a crisis of identity that kept hardening.

March 2024 · Budapest, on the phone

When the company came out to rest on the Israeli side, he called Emily straight away.

She had gone back to Budapest in November, to her mother, because alone in Athens she couldn't breathe. The first minutes of the call were full of feeling. She cried, he laughed a tired laugh, and there was a moment when it seemed nothing had changed.

But behind her, Hungarian television was talking. On the screen, a city of ash. Buildings turned into layers of concrete. Children covered in dust, with eyes looking for someone. And the numbers: more than thirty thousand dead, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza, which didn't distinguish between fighters and civilians. Israel said thousands of them were militants. The world had stopped listening to the details.

And the man she loved was there, part of it. She opposed this war with all her heart, and she loved him with all her heart, and the two things didn't fit together in one body.

When the first wave of worry had passed, the call cooled. Short sentences. Silences. "I have to go," he said in the end. "Me too," she answered. And neither of them went anywhere.

1 April 2024 · Gaza City

On 18 March the IDF went into al-Shifa again. Israel said Hamas operatives had regrouped inside the hospital, and hundreds were detained. Two weeks later, when the forces pulled out, the World Health Organization described the place as "an empty shell".

Fatma stood in front of the gate and didn't go in. She had worked there for twenty years.

"From now on I work wherever there are people," she said when she got home, and put a first-aid bag on the table. "A school, a tent, a kitchen. It doesn't matter."

Mehran looked at her, and for the first time he saw that she was old.

13–14 April 2024 · The night of Iran

April arrived like a wounded animal.

On Saturday night, 13 April, Iran launched its first direct attack on Israel from its own soil: more than three hundred aircraft – explosive drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles – in revenge for the killing of senior Revolutionary Guards commanders in Damascus earlier that month. The drones flew for hours, and the world watched them approach on live maps.

Alex was already deep in the base's concrete shelter when the sirens began. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling, which trembled like a racing pulse.

"This isn't real," he whispered into the thick air. "This can't be real."

Around him sat soldiers packed close, smelling of sweat and concrete. Someone read from a phone: Arrow, David's Sling, Iron Dome, American, British, French, Jordanian jets. No one knew how it would end.

It ended faster than they thought. Most of the missiles and drones were shot down before they arrived. In the morning there was talk of ninety-nine per cent interception, of light damage at the Nevatim airbase, and of a seven-year-old Bedouin girl badly hurt by shrapnel. History wrote itself in lines of fire across the sky, and then turned off the light and went to sleep.

That night · Tel Aviv

Natalie was walking home from Irina's when her phone started to beep: Home Front Command alerts, maps, arrows. The streets emptied all at once. Her own street was quiet, but she went down to the public shelter anyway. Her body no longer asked her.

In the shelter someone turned up a live broadcast from Jerusalem. That sound, the long shriek of the siren, came out of a stranger's phone and threw her back to the war room, to the smoke. Her heart almost stopped. She curled up in a corner like a little girl, hands pressed over her ears. It didn't help. The sound went through her bones. The trauma lived in her body like an animal, and it didn't need ears to hear.

It had happened once before, a week earlier. They were all walking back together from a hostage families' rally at Kaplan, the air full of tyre smoke, and between them, oddly, there was lightness, almost release. Near a little kiosk a boy of about fifteen laughed, too loudly, some stupid remark about somebody's clothes.

And Natalie was already in front of him. Eyes blazing, hands shaking, screaming as if someone had crossed a line there was no coming back from. The boy didn't understand what had hit him. Only when her friends grabbed her from behind and dragged her away did she calm down. And even then her eyes kept searching for a threat that wasn't there.

They walked on, and the silence between them was thick. This was no longer the "tough Natalie" they knew. It was a wild force that burst out of her without warning.

That night · Gaza City

Mehran sat with the whole household in the crowded room, in front of a small television running on a buzzing generator. On Al Jazeera there were streaks of fire in the sky over Jerusalem, interceptions above the Dome of the Rock.

"Now it really starts," said Khaled's wife. "Now it's a world war."

On that same screen he had once watched Hapoel Tel Aviv, in the days when the world was still whole. Now, instead of the green of the grass and the red of the stands, there was only fire and steel. No goals. Only the dead.

Before dawn · Three places

As night came down on the broken world, all three of them were awake. Alex at the base, between walls that dried out his breath. Natalie in the small studio in Tel Aviv, where memories hung on the walls like faded pictures. Mehran in Khaled's crowded house, where present and future had melted into one nightmare.

Alex picked up the phone and called Emily. What could he tell her? How do you explain that the sky has fallen? He heard her voice, distant and warm, and the words stuck in his throat. His silence said more than a thousand words.

And Emily, who knew him so well, felt for the first time that she was losing him. Not to death. To something worse: to a trauma eating him from the inside.

She understood, in that moment, that it was over between them. Not because she didn't love him. Because sometimes love isn't enough when the world is falling apart. She chose to swallow it and say nothing. Not to add more weight to shoulders that were already broken.

And Natalie opened, for the first time, the little bag of medical cannabis she had been prescribed. She had resisted it for months. She didn't want to be dependent, didn't want to admit the pain was bigger than her. Now she had no choice.

She lit it. The whitish smoke curled through the air, entered her lungs warm and sweetish, and the world slowly grew softer. The edges less sharp. The pain receding to a murmur.

For a moment, just a moment, she didn't see them. For a moment there was a small island of quiet in the middle of the storm.