Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk
“If I die, I want a loud death,” Hassouna wrote on social media. “I don’t want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time, and a timeless image that cannot be buried by time or place.”
If you can read those words without tears, you are stronger than I.
(Guardian-UK, 4-19-25) “As a young photojournalist living in Gaza, Fatima Hassouna knew that death was always at her doorstep. As she spent the past 18 months of war documenting airstrikes, the demolition of her home, the endless displacement and the killing of 11 family members, all she demanded was that she not be allowed to go quietly.
“On Wednesday, just days before her wedding, 25-year-old Hassouna was killed in an Israeli airstrike that hit her home in northern Gaza. Ten members of her family, including her pregnant sister, were also killed.”
That’s the cost of ‘putting your soul on your hand, and walking’ during an Israeli sponsored genocide
Fatima is now the twenty-second member of her family to pay a price no civilized nation should be allowed to charge.
The Israeli response is as always: “it was a targeted strike on a Hamas member involved in attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians.” Genocide needs no limits or excuses for killing everyone in its path, as they have done in Gaza. That’s as accurate a definition of the word as can be found.
I hope the United States, as a willing bipartisan co-conspirator in this crime against humanity, is found equally guilty in the soon-to-be-shown documentary of Fatima Hassouna’s all too short life and agreeably (for her) loud death.
The documentary carries the same title as this too-brief essay:
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk.
(Guardian) “Twenty-four hours before she was killed, it was announced that a documentary focusing on Hassouna’s life in Gaza since the Israeli offensive began would be debuted at a French independent film festival that runs parallel to Cannes.
“Made by the Iranian director, Sepideh Farsi, the film, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, tells the story of Gaza’s ordeal and the daily life of Palestinians through filmed video conversations between Hassouna and Farsi. As Farsi described it, Hassouna became “my eyes in Gaza … fiery and full of life. I filmed her laughs, her tears, her hopes and her depression.
“She was such a light, so talented. When you see the film you’ll understand. “I had talked to her a few hours before, to tell her that the film was in Cannes and to invite her.”
Cannes will now have to make it though a celebration made hollow by her absence.
Farsi said she had lived in fear for Hassouna’s life but added: “I told myself I had no right to fear for her, if she herself was not afraid. I clung to her strength, to her unwavering faith.”
Haidar al-Ghazali, a Palestinian poet in Gaza, said in a post on Instagram that before she was killed, Hassouna had asked him to write a poem for her when she died. Speaking of her arrival into a kinder afterlife, it read:
“Today’s sun won’t bring harm. The plants in the pots will arrange themselves for a gentle visitor. It will be bright enough to help mothers to dry their laundry quickly, and cool enough for the children to play all day. Today’s sun will not be harsh on anyone.”
Even so, Netanyahu will go to dinner tonight, perhaps taste a fine wine, and congratulate himself on a day’s work done. How he will sleep, is a matter only for him to know.
‘Never Again’ has become a tarnished motto in the eyes of the world, reserved only for Israelis.
Bon appétit.