849: The Narrator

Chana Joffe-Walt

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Chana Joffe-Walt, sitting in for Ira Glass. This all started with a phone call, a call that eventually led to this episode. So that's where I'm going to start. I was talking to a journalist in Gaza on the phone.

Chana Joffe-Walt

This was back in April. I'd been speaking to people in Gaza for months by then, but nobody where Maram was, in the middle area, Deir Balah. Maram Hamaid, she's a reporter for Al Jazeera English. We were chatting. I was asking some pretty basic questions about what she was experiencing, what she was seeing, what the day had been like. She got interrupted.

Maram and I kept talking-- or trying to.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Banias then takes the phone from her mom-- having told me what they are hearing, begins pointing out what they're seeing, saying, look at this-- as if I can also see, even though we're not on a video call. She says, here we have the window, as you can see. Here's the curtains. There are flowers. We don't have any sofas, just-- Mom, how do you say it?

Chana Joffe-Walt

Maram told me later she was so surprised at Banias's performance in this call. That was the word she used. Apparently, Banias was marching around with the phone in front of her, telling people, I need the room, please, jumping on the mattress, standing on the table, pointing, saying, here's my brother, Iyas.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Gaza is full of kids. About half the population is under 18 years old, and about half of that group is under 10 years old, like Banias. A huge way in which children in this war are different from kids in other war zones is that children in Gaza are not allowed to leave. They're not displaced to some other spot away from the fighting. They're displaced inside Gaza. They're stuck in the violence and stuck with their families, in crowded rooms or tents, doing the things that kids everywhere do, building their inner world, trying to make sense of the world around them. I was calling Maram that day to ask about the situation in Deir Balah, and Banias took the phone and said, no, no, no, don't ask her. Ask me.

Chana Joffe-Walt

We talked for a while and then said goodbye. That was the end of April. And then, in July, I saw Maram's name on my phone.

Chana Joffe-Walt

It was Banias. She wanted to talk, tell me about her day. Then, another day.

Through the summer, into the fall, Banias called me, and I called her. Maram, her mother, gave permission for these phone calls, but it was always just Banias on the line, telling me about herself and her life. I wanted to know what it's like to be a kid in this war. And here was this kid who wanted to talk.

Banias was a natural narrator of her own life. She was constantly directing my attention. These are my friends. This is my school stationery, as you can see. Do you want to know what we're doing right now? I'll tell you.

Unfortunately for me, she also had zero interest in satisfying my journalistic agenda. If I asked Banias a question she was not interested in, she'd yawn dramatically, stage yawn. [YAWNS] It's getting late. I'm so tired. Let's look over here.

I had been reading and thinking about what was happening in Gaza all the time, talking to people there. Every call with Banias was something I hadn't heard that was completely different from when adults tell the story.

So that is today's episode. We're calling it "The Narrator." We're going to listen to this kid in Gaza, a narrator who does not ask permission to narrate. She takes the phone with a soaring confidence that what she has to tell you is interesting and important, and I agree with her. Stay with us.

Chana Joffe-Walt

It's This American Life. My calls with Banias were sporadic. Sometimes we talked once a week. Sometimes a month would go by. Usually, we talked at the end of the day, her time, while she was sitting on a mattress inside the house, fidgeting. There were always lots of people and activity in the background, but Banias never explained much about who was there or what they were doing. She told me about what she was doing, what she wanted me to know and sometimes see.

She's in a pink shirt that says "Dream." Huge eyes, dark hair, and pigtails with two loose curls very purposefully framing her face.

Chana Joffe-Walt

When Banias and I first started talking on the phone, my questions were pretty basic. What do you do all day? She was in a house with 80 people, which is unusual in Gaza right now to live in a house. Most people are in tents or schools or other temporary shelters. Banias and her mom, dad, and baby brother were on the ground floor of this house, sharing that floor with about 20 relatives. There was one bedroom.

She slept on a mattress on the floor, alongside her parents, brother, grandpa, uncle, and aunt. Everyone else slept in the living area. If Banias wanted any time in the tiny bathroom, she got up early in the morning. Then she ate breakfast. And then what?

Chana Joffe-Walt

At this point, July, Banias had not been in an actual class in an actual school building for nine months. But she played school every day with three other girls, two younger and one older. There were other kids in the building, but everyone else was just OK, or a boy, or a baby.

When aid organizations go into other war zones, one of the first things they do for kids is set up schools, because children need a sense of routine and a sense that life is moving forward toward a future. There's no safe place in Gaza to set up schools like that, so Banias and her friends in the building created that for themselves. They played school for hours. There were lectures. There were assignments. There were exams.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Dana is generous with her iPad. So this is another part of Banias's day-- games on the iPad. When the war started, her mother's screen time rules went out the window. But also, Israel cut off electricity to Gaza. There's just generators and solar panels, so screen time is limited anyway.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Banias was re-enacting her old life, where she had teachers and exams and went out to cafes. There was one they used to go to every Saturday.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I was never sure what motivated Banias to want to talk to me. She seemed to like telling me about her day, practicing her English. She had an ongoing fascination with the time difference between us. She always wanted to check in on that.

Chana Joffe-Walt

She'd call when she felt annoyed that Dana got to be the teacher that day yet again.

Chana Joffe-Walt

And she'd call when she was bored. She'd call because I was an adult who would pay attention to her. Banias had to create activity-- interest-- out of such little material. Sometimes I got the impression I was there to help with that. Like, one night she was on the phone with me, and another phone rang. And like a character in a play, she went, oh, look, the phone is ringing.

[PHONE RINGING]

Chana Joffe-Walt

So Banias had her own reasons to call me. When I called her, it was for different reasons. I'd call her because I'd read about a bombing campaign or fighting near where she was. Was she OK? And what was she thinking about all the violence around her? What is this like for an eight-year-old?

In the middle of the summer, there was a series of intense airstrikes near Banias. I was curious if she'd heard them or seen them, but I also wanted to follow her lead and what she wanted to talk about.

Chana Joffe-Walt

OK, I thought. Here it is. She's about to tell me something big about what it's like to be a kid playing hide-and-seek with bombs going off nearby. Banias told me, so we were playing, and we ran to the backyard.

Chana Joffe-Walt

That's it. That's her whole story. The strange thing that happened when they ran outside is they saw insects, a kind of insect they'd never seen before. Not the bombing-- bugs.

Children are not known for their sense of scale or the longevity of their attention. And maybe it wasn't surprising that pretty much every time I asked about the war, Banias didn't really want to engage. She didn't exactly ignore me, but it didn't seem to be the main thing she was thinking about.

Like, when an airstrike broke the windows in her house, she wanted to tell me about a prank she played on Dana. In mid-August, when ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas seemed to be unraveling yet again, and all the adults I was talking to in Gaza were deeply dispirited, here was Banias.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I heard that yawn-- noting it. Discussion of the war-- over. There was one moment when Banias was forced to engage. She couldn't avoid it. Banias's family had been sheltering in Deir Balah for almost a year, when, suddenly, at the end of August, they got an evacuation order. Israel posted a map on social media designating certain blocks in Deir Balah unsafe.

And I saw that Maram, Banias's mother, had written something for Al Jazeera about the order. I had hardly spoken to Maram for months, but I had followed her reporting on bombings and food shortages. This article, though, was personal. She wrote about her confusion about what to do next. "I've never felt so worthless as a human being," she wrote.

"A single Facebook post from an Israeli military spokesperson can upend our lives in an instant. Have you ever felt like a toy being played with left and right, east and west, pushed from one place to another, south to Khan Younis, out of Rafah, back to Khan Younis, then to Nuseirat, only to be driven out again? People are literally running through the streets like mad, clutching what little they have left. We have nothing left. Our hearts are broken, and our minds are frayed.

I look around at the few possessions I've managed to gather over the past 10 months-- a stove, cups, plates, pots, winter clothes, summer clothes, mattresses, blankets, batteries, light bulbs, big bottles of drinking water, tubs to wash clothes in. If I leave everything, there's no way to replace it. There are no markets, no supplies, no money to spare. We're running and running aimlessly. People screaming, suffering, and dying while the world watches," end quote. And then my phone rang.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I was eager to ask Banias about the news of the evacuation, but what she wanted to talk about was a fight she had that day with another kid in the building, a girl. Banias calls her "the girl with the bad personality." That girl told Banias today that one of her pictures was no good.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Did she not know about the evacuation order? She must, right? I didn't want to scare her.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Banias was ready to leave because it meant she could get away from the girl with the bad personality. Almost a million kids in Gaza have made a move like this since Israel invaded, many of them multiple times. So it was interesting to hear how a child was thinking about it.

Banias was ready to flee the home she'd lived in for 10 months at that point, to move into a tent because she got into a fight with an annoying girl that day, because that is what just happened-- and because Banias is eight. She told me her friend Dana is leaving, too.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I almost couldn't bear hearing this. Banias's visceral, immediate panic was so uncomfortable, hearing her mother pierce the carefully constructed artifice she'd presented to me. And it was disorienting. It made me think of all the things I didn't know.

Chana Joffe-Walt

An incomplete list of things Banias does not have control over-- can she go home? No. Is there food? Not enough. Is there school? No. Is there safety here? No. Banias lives in what has become the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.

Disease in Gaza is widespread. Children face acute malnutrition. Kids are getting horrible skin infections. Polio has reappeared in a 10-month-old baby. Children are losing their limbs, their parents, and they are being killed, constantly. More than 13,000 children have been killed so far, including at least 710 babies, some of them born and then killed since the war began.

Maram told me Banias has seen dead children. She's seen their small bodies wrapped in white cloth by the hospital. I asked Maram later, what do you think Banias gets out of talking to me? She told me, you're a bubble for her.

Every time you call, she treats it like an important meeting, tries to find a private space away from all of us. Everyone around Banias is in the midst of this chaos, she said. You're not here. You're not experiencing any of this.

Banias was telling me a version of life where she has ultimate authority, where she gets to be the narrator. Who doesn't want that? I was coming to her to understand the war, but she was coming to me to not talk about the war, until one day, she did. That's coming up from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Chana Joffe-Walt

It's This American Life. I'm Chana Joffe-Walt, sitting in for Ira Glass. Our show today, "The Narrator," an eight-year-old in Gaza, tells us about her life in the middle of a war.

This war started in 2023. Hamas attacked Israel, killed about 1,200 people, and took 251 people hostage. Since then, Israel has launched a 14-month ground invasion and bombing campaign in Gaza. More than 44,000 Palestinians have been killed, and more than 13,000 of those dead are children.

Banias and her family never moved into a tent. After the Israeli army issued that evacuation order for Deir Balah, her parents agonized over when and if they should flee for days. The dangers of moving into a tent could be worse than tanks outside their house. They decided to stay put. It was early October. The family was coming up on a year of war and displacement, and Banias had an announcement.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I realized as we were talking, this was October 2. The day before, Iran had launched 180 missiles at Israel.

Chana Joffe-Walt

This threw me, hearing Banias talk about killing Israelis. No Israelis were killed from these missiles. One Palestinian man was, near Jericho. It's one of those empty truisms about war, that kids in a war learn to hate the other side, a true thing about war that also can feel a little abstract.

But here it was, showing up, randomly folded into the rest of Banias's narration to her playing with me, messing with me, that the home she was sheltering in was bombed-- which it could have been, but wasn't. I asked Maram if I could talk with her about this day. I told her what Banias had told me.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Maram told me she does not tell Banias to hate Israel or celebrate when Israel is attacked. Banias's dad, she says, also doesn't do this. But Maram was not surprised to hear Banias was saying this. She remembers feeling the same way when she was a kid growing up in Gaza.

Maram was 10 years old when she first experienced Israeli bombing after the Second Intifada broke out. She remembers crying when she saw her first dead body and collapsing when she saw footage of a 12-year-old Palestinian kid, Mohammed al-Durrah, killed while hiding next to his father. Banias was born in 2016. Her first war was when she was four years old.

Chana Joffe-Walt

There's something I've been thinking about when it comes to kids in wars, but kids in Gaza in particular. It's something a psychologist told me, Dr. Iman Farajallah, who studies the effect of war and occupation on Palestinian kids. She told me it really gets under her skin when people at the UN or healthcare professionals or whatever say kids in Gaza are suffering from PTSD.

Post-traumatic stress means the traumatic event is over. For kids in Gaza, the trauma is continuous. There is no post. There's no opportunity for recovery. Instead, there is just coping. Dr. Farajallah says, you'll see kids cope in all different ways. Some kids act out. Some can't leave their parents' side. Other kids get obsessed with soccer or drawing. Or children try to shape their world in other ways.

For instance, Maram told me when Banias was six years old, there was an Israeli military operation in Gaza, lots of fighting. And Banias was sitting on the window, watching ambulances rush people to the hospital, blowing bubbles out the window. Maram asked her, what are you doing? And Banias said, I'm trying to change the mood.

Chana Joffe-Walt

That was basically the end of my conversation with Maram. As she did the first time around, Banias decided it was time for us to move on. My calls with Banias have grown more infrequent. The last time she called, I was in my office heading into a meeting. I was going to just say a quick hello, make sure she was OK.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I paused, looked at my watch, saw my coworkers heading to the meeting room, and decided to go ahead with her agenda.

She's under the covers with her phone and her laptop in purple pajamas. She's sitting on her mattress on the floor. And she's pointing the phone at her screen, so we can watch together.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Of course, Banias is a vocal movie watcher.

Chana Joffe-Walt

She has a running commentary on the characters, repeats English words that are new to her, explains the movie.

Chana Joffe-Walt

McCaulley Caulkin-- who I'd forgotten is also eight years old in this movie-- is walking home, crosses a driveway, just as the two burglars, Joe Pesci and the other guy, pull out in their van, screech to a halt, and McCaulley Caulkin does his blonde surprise face.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Two days earlier, Israeli airstrikes hit Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir Balah, right near Banias's apartment. The hospital was surrounded by tents filled with displaced people sleeping. The airstrikes caused a fire that ripped through those tents. I'd seen Maram sharing images and videos of people sleeping in the tents burned alive.

I wondered if Banias had seen those images, but I didn't ask. Instead, we watched this Christmas movie. We watched Kevin trick the burglars into thinking his family is home by staging a fake party in his house.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Any war is a series of plot points. Even in an ongoing war, a never-ending and no-longer-new war, we track its progress by the worst moments. I kept calling Banias with this expectation, waiting for the story of the war as I was understanding it, to somehow intersect with her life as she was experiencing it.

I kept imagining, dreading, that one of those moments will break through, that something bad will happen to Banias. One of those horrible plot points will become her plot point.

But something bad is happening to Banias. This is the plot point for her. She's sitting under the covers with no electricity, no heat, winter approaching. Banias has not been in school for over a year. She has no home. She has a cough, and there is no medicine.

Her friends have scattered. Some of them are dead. Her relatives are all over. Some of them are dead. She's eating canned beans, instead of burgers. She's finding glass in her brother's head. This is her life. This is the story she has to narrate.

We have a couple minutes left in this episode, and I have a small update. Recently, Banias's family moved-- not far-- an apartment a couple miles from Deir Balah, where they've been staying. The new place is less crowded. There's more privacy for her family. It has trees outside and a refrigerator-- that doesn't work, but still. The apartment is quiet, temporary.

And it's not home. Banias knows she can't go home to the north of Gaza, where she's from. She knows her home was destroyed. She's seen pictures of her neighborhood exploded, on fire. And she's seen video of the empty space where her house was, the small mountains of rubble.

The gray couch with yellow cushions that she sat on after school, the chandelier her mother chose, the mirror by the door, the teacups and trays filled with treats, her new reimagined big girl bedroom with an Elsa bedspread, her desk, the pink moon they hung on the ceiling-- all of that is somewhere in that pile of rubble. All of that is there in the north of Gaza, their life.

But the north of Gaza has been transformed. There were about a million people living in northern Gaza when the war started, over 270,000 homes. Everyone was told to leave, to go south. Most people did. And now those people are separated from the north of Gaza by a wide militarized zone that they cannot cross.

Israel has been building and fortifying this military zone for the last few months. It cuts right across Gaza, splits Gaza in two, completely separating the north of Gaza, where Banias is from, from the south of Gaza, where she's been displaced to. This military zone is called the Netzarim Corridor. It has a constant military presence, and it's big, around 20 square miles. It takes up more than 12% of the entire territory of Gaza.

In order to build it, Israel cleared out a wide stretch of land, demolished hundreds of buildings, from the Israeli border all the way to the ocean. And in that space, Israel installed checkpoints and paved roads and flags and water lines and cell phone towers. It looks like something you'd put in place if you're planning to stay a while.

A former chief of staff of the Israeli military has called the emptying out of the north of Gaza an ethnic cleansing. He said, quote, "the land is being cleared of Arabs." Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, Amnesty International have all called what is happening in Gaza an ethnic cleansing, or a genocide.

Israel denies this, and the Israeli military sent me a statement calling the charge of ethnic cleansing entirely baseless. It says it's working to dismantle Hamas's military infrastructure and is adhering to its obligations under international law.

The people who remained in the north and never left are under siege, with increasingly limited food and medical care. The UN says children are, quote, "as ever, the first and most to suffer."

So this latest move for Banias's parents, it feels like a new phase. It's a move from "I can't believe it's gone on this long" to "this is going to keep going on." For Banias, it's more of the same, more temporary, more displacement, displacement that looks pretty likely to last most, if not all, of her childhood.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Today's episode was produced by Valerie Kipnis and edited by Laura Starecheski. The people who put together today's show are Jendayi Bonds, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Henry Larson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, Nadia Reiman, Anthony Roman, Ryan Rumery, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor, David Kestenbaum. Executive editor, Emanuele Berry. Welcome to the world, Elias Berryman-Chace.

Special thanks this week to Hany Hawasly, Bethel Habte, Khalil Sayegh, Nabil Shawkat, Mona Chalabi, Rachel Lissy, Rebecca Vitali-DeCola, Claire Garmirian, and Becky Smith with Save the Children, Shaina Lowe and Camilla Lodi with the Norwegian Refugee Council, Tania Hary with Gisha, Amy Walters and the wonderful Al Jazeera podcast The Take, Corey Scher with the City University of New York, Jamon Van Den Hoek with Oregon State University and the UN Satellite Center.

Dr. Iman Farajallah's book that focuses on the experiences of children in Gaza in particular is called My Life is a War. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

To become a This American Life partner, which gets you bonus content, ad-free listening, and hundreds of our favorite episodes of the show right in your podcast feed, go to thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes. I'm Chana Joffe-Walt. Ira will be back next week with more stories of This American Life.