Hamoud and his kitten. Photo: @gazasoupkitchen
Does a New Year matter when a genocide continues relentlessly for more than a year? The callousness of “Happy New Year!” is worse than looking away. For the entirety of 2024, Israel engaged in the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza. To wish you a Happy New Year feels like a collusion.
I want to wind down this year and to wish you all instead a kind and generous 2025, so that I can take a week or so off, put my phone down, close my laptop, and live in the small moments of life. And even those feel like collusion and callousness..
To step into a new year with heart wide open, broken and tenacious in its conviction that the annihilation of Palestinians must end, I watch videos that Gaza Soup Kitchen post of a child in Gaza called Hamoud. In Arabic, we often add an “i” at the end of names as an endearment, so he’s often referred to as Hamoudi.
Chef Mahmoud Almadhoun began operating Gaza Soup Kitchen in January 2024. On November 30, an Israeli drone attack killed Chef Mahmoud, while he was on his way to deliver produce to patients at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. He was 33 and is survived by his wife and seven children, the youngest of whom was two weeks old when Israel killed her father.
Chef Mahmoud Almadhoun, founder of the Gaza Soup Kitchen, was killed by an Israeli drone strike on November 30, 2024. (Gaza Soup Kitchen / Instagram)
“I believe his killing was not an accident; it was meant to silence the helpers—the humanitarians who stand in the way of Gaza’s complete erasure,” Chef Mahmoud’s brother, Hani, said.
Gaza Soup Kitchen’s three kitchens in both north and south Gaza feed about 800 families a day and providing many with supplies so they can cook for themselves in their own encampments. For many displaced Gaza families, it may be the only source of food they have. Their Instagram post highlights photographs and videos of children playing or picking up food for their families.
They include Hamoudi, who is filmed with his kittens. Sometimes he’s smiling and talkative; occasionally, not so much.
This season, when I see him on my Instagram account, I think of the next year as the year Hamoudi and his kittens grow another year without the sounds and smells of Israel’s annihilation around them; without the need of a soup kitchen that provides food that Israel is starving them from. I look at this sweet boy’s eyes and I see the brown-eyed boys I grew up with in Egypt, those of my extended family, and those of my kin wherever they are.
How dare the world continue to turn as Israel continues to slaughter so many children? And those who help them.
One of the latest videos of Hamoud features his father holding him, and I want 2025 to be the year where no parent in Gaza must try to explain to their child what genocide is.
I began 2024 in daily anticipation of “Hi, everyone. This is Bisan from Gaza and I’m still alive,” the videos from journalist and storyteller Bisan Owda in which she documents her life during a genocide.
And I am ending it in daily anticipation of the twinkle in Hamoudi’s eyes and the dimples when he smiles and talks to the camera.
It is the job of a writer to tell the world what it pretends it doesn’t know. And to wish you a Happy New Year would engage in mass delusion, knowing that “over the last 18 years, no other conflicts have killed a higher number of children in one year,” than Israel’s genocide in Gaza has.
So I wish you a year of fierce love and a defiant joy akin to Hamoudi’s as he holds his kittens.
I wish you a New Year in which you incite love and inspire freedom that when twinned, instigate a tenderness akin to Bisan’s for her people. I wish you a New Year of delight akin to Bisan’s at finding books to replace some of those she had to leave behind.
I wish you a kind and generous 2025.
Via @wizard_bisan1
FEMINIST GIANT essays, The Wonder Chronicles, and Global Roundup will return on January 6. Daily Dose will continue. Thank you for reading and supporting my work.
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Across the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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