Khan Younis, February 2024

‘We will wipe this thing called Hamas, ISIS-Gaza, off the face of the earth. It will cease to exist.’ — Yoav Gallant, Israel Minister of Defence

At one minute and fifty-one seconds
In the drone footage you’re alive, a man
Walking up a hill, swinging his legs and arms
With a will and intentions, and, in principle,
Human rights under international law,
Including the Right to Life; and only
The streak of light descending on your shoulder
Alerts witnesses that all that’s about to end.

And within the space of the same second,
The missile from the drone hovering
Invisibly above you, operated
By a man in an Air Force Command Centre
So far away he cannot see the blast,
Which he watches instead through a helmet
Enclosing his face, explodes in the space
Formerly occupied by your body.

And now you don’t exist. You are not dead,
For there is nothing left of you to be dead.
You were more than killed. You were erased
From existence. If the incinerated
Scraps of what you once were could still be found,
Only a United Nations pathologist
Could identify them as being human.
But until then, you never existed.

The orchards you planted, the homes you built,
The wells from which you drank, the children
You raised, the wife you loved, and the graves
Of your grandparents have all vanished now.
The land you lived on for thousands of years
Has been bulldozed with the bones of the dead.
From now on, your family, like the people
You thought you belonged to, never existed.

— Simon Elmer