In October, shortly after the Israel-Hamas War began, I checked in with many people I’d met while covering the region as a journalist over the past 30 years. I was fearful for all my friends, but especially concerned about the fate of Raji el-Jaru. Raji is a 31-year-old Palestinian rock musician whom I’d come to know on my many reporting trips, most recently in 2021, while doing a story for Vanity Fair on the resolve and uncanny resourcefulness of the young people of Gaza, who comprise two thirds of the embattled enclave’s population. I tried to reach out to Raji, but I got no answer via email, and his WhatsApp account didn’t appear to be working. I feared the worst.
When I think back on it, one of my happiest professional memories from the past few years involved that young guitarist. I recall sitting cross-legged in a spacious, rather beautiful second-story music-shop-cum-practice-room in the heart of Gaza City. For an hour or two, I had remained there, my attention rapt, my spirit exhilarated, listening to Osprey V, a homegrown rock band comprised of Raji—the group’s frontman—and his four friends and family members.
The music shop was called El-Jaru; Raji’s father owned the quirky electronics store on the ground floor. The musicians’ hangout was a noisy, funky, magical one: a gathering place where Gazan kids and wannabe musicians came and played Dean and Martin guitars, ouds, synthesizers, and drum kits, all shipped into the territory despite the blockade. It made me happy, back in 2021, standing there admiring the talent, verve, and soulfulness of these players. El-Jaru was a boisterous, uplifting place. At one point, during a break, I marveled at a kid in a corner playing the theme song to The Godfather on a violin; another sat nearby, banging on the drums. He told me that every time he got depressed, he went to El-Jaru just to try out the skins.
It was a stifling summer evening, but the fierce heat was dissipating as night came down. Osprey V was jamming on electric and acoustic guitars, drums, and a beatbox. They sang in flawless English, with American accents: One of them had graduated from Syracuse University; the rest had never left the Gaza Strip. They’d learned the language at school and over the internet. They were a collection of 20- and 30-something lawyers, engineers, and humanitarian workers—highly educated, like so many of their Palestinian peers. They had formed in 2015 with a united passion for music. And as I got to know them over several visits, I came to understand that music had become their lone outlet for transcending the daily anguish of living on a tiny stretch of land—war-torn, isolated, and deprived of many human essentials, such as clean water, reliable electricity, and the freedom to travel abroad.
Raji el-Jaru was talkative, likable, and a rarity in a conflict zone, at least in my experience: a guy with a genuinely innocent, trusting spirit, who was always upbeat, no matter the circumstances. He laughs a lot, despite all the misery. Though his music was often edgy (he’d been a Metallica freak as a kid and memorized the lyrics to the songs he loved), he reminded me more of a hippie from another era, given his rosy, almost carefree outlook. During my last visit, he and the group had played songs by Linkin Park and Pink Floyd, along with their own compositions, many of which reminded me of ’90s angst rock—Audioslave, Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers. They were good, and I sang along with them. Raji had a stirring voice, evocative and clear.
Raji el-Jaru plays a guitar at his family’s music shop in Gaza City in 2017.MAHMUD HAMS/AFP/Getty Images.
Afterward, pumped up, I had gone with a friend of mine, the award-winning poet Mosab Abu Toha, to get lemon ice at Gaza’s most famous ice cream parlor, which seemed like a little miracle in a place with almost daily power outages. Accompanying us was a farmer I’d reported on for the magazine, a man who, in a recent bombing, had lost all of his equipment—including 48 solar panels (which powered his irrigation system) and 8,200 meters of hydroponic pipes—which he’d borrowed $120,000 to purchase. And yet, he, too, seemed to relish the energy of the evening. It was a Thursday night, the start of the Muslim weekend. And looking out at the crowds of teenagers, babies, grandparents, donkey carts, and merchants, I felt something akin to hope for Gaza.
I loathe Hamas, but I love Gaza. I loved it from my very first trip there as a young reporter in 1990, immersing myself in the Arab world and meeting with everyone from artists to computer geeks to the great human rights lawyer Raji Sourani. I found the resilience of the people of Gaza to be extraordinary, living as they did in such constricted circumstances: 2.2 million Palestinians on a strip of land measuring seven-by-25 miles. I envied their close family ties—grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins gathering together for meals. (During one of my first trips, after a huge Friday extended-family lunch of musakhan—roast chicken with sumac—the grandma insisted on washing my hair, matted with Gaza’s dust, using the family’s precious water supply, stored in plastic jugs. To this family, the comfort of a guest was more important than their own needs.)
I admired their determination to educate their kids at the highest possible academic levels, despite years of Israeli occupation; four wars; severe restrictions and mandates dictated by Israel and Egypt; and the scourge of Hamas, some of whose leaders had siphoned off millions meant for the population itself. I had nothing but respect for those who pursued careers as doctors and scientists, entrepreneurs and engineers, actors and playwrights. Even in the most desperate of the displacement centers, such as Beach Camp (which has now been destroyed), I found families who had been deeply scarred by the decades of repression and generational trauma, but who still found joy in their daily lives. As one of them told me, “People always say—how could you have grown up in a refugee camp? But I loved my camp. It made me what I am.”
So on October 7, after Hamas’s gruesome attacks on the citizens of Israel, followed by Israel’s relentless bombardments in response, my initial thoughts in those first days were with all the young people I had interviewed on my last trip: the pretty young sisters; both dentists, with whom I’d sat on the beach one night, laughing as the Mediterranean rolled in and out, engulfing our ankles; the working mothers who had shared the same anxieties and regrets I did about working and mothering; and so many others I’d encountered. But most of all, I thought of Raji and Osprey V.
