In Gaza, deaths by suicide are now being talked about – even in a culture where the act is considered reprehensible

These deaths carry a message of loss of all hope, reports Robert Fisk. And Hamas – as deeply religious as it is deeply corrupted – reacted not with compassion but with great hostility

There were four deaths by suicide in one week in Gaza. (Paddy Dowling/EAA)

Time was in the Middle East when a man or woman who became a suicide bomber instantly achieved “martyrdom” in the eyes of their people. That’s still the case if you look at the obituary photographs on the walls of city streets, especially refugee camps. Yet anyone who took their own life out of despair, or depression, was doomed.​

Hellfire awaited them, or so we were to believe. Islam forbids suicide in the Quran (4: 29): “And do not kill yourselves…” it says. Perhaps the outlook of Muslims towards those who die by suicide because they have lost their own sense of resilience – a quality much admired among Palestinians – is going to have to change.

There have been four deaths by suicide in one week in Gaza, and 12 since the beginning of the year. That’s quite a shock in the world’s largest concentration of refugees, where the will to live – and to die at one’s own hand only for “liberation” – has ideological as well as religious status.

Local news sites suggest that 10 Palestinians killed themselves in the Gaza Strip in 2015, 16 the next year, 23 in 2017, 20 in 2018 and 22 last year. The real trauma, however, is that those who made an attempt at suicide for the same period are 543, 610, 543, 484 and 111.

In Britain, we get around the moral element of death by suicide by recording that such acts occur “while the balance of his/her mind was disturbed”. Personally I have also always rather favoured this conclusion, although UK coroners are no longer obliged to use those specific words. The idea that a human’s mental equilibrium might become overwhelmed, with devastating results, is perfectly acceptable.

Of course, there are those who might claim that even a suicide bomber suffers from an unbalanced mind, but that would delete the question of immorality – the very act of murder – of which the killer is guilty.

Back in the Middle East, typically and courageously, the hardy Amira Hass – the only Israeli journalist to live in the West Bank – has been focusing minds upon Gaza’s suicide rates. As she points out this week, Palestinians paid particular attention to 23-year old Sulieman al-Ajouri, who died on the third of this month, for he was one of the activists who funded the "We Want To Live" movement more than a year ago.

We Want To Live is a protest against the bankrupt economy and unemployment (more than 45 per cent, 69 per cent among young people), and was cruelly suppressed by Hamas. As Hass remarks, “every protest movement that seeks social change bears a message of hope and empowerment”. Ajouri’s death thus carries the opposite message: loss of all hope and total helplessness. Hamas, as deeply religious as it is deeply corrupted, reacted not with compassion but with great hostility.

On the day of his funeral, according to the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights – a genuinely respected group based in the West Bank – Hamas arrested nine people, three of them mourners, two of them journalists who had reported on the suicide, and four others, at the home of the Ajouri family.

Like Western coroners, Hamas – for entirely political reasons, of course – do indeed prefer to regard suicide as a mental health rather than a political problem. But everyone in Gaza knew of Ajouri’s death, just as they were well aware of the self-destruction of another young man, Ayman al-Ghoul, on 3 July. And the death of the UNRWA refugee agency employee who died the same day, a week after he attempted to end his life. And of the woman in Rafah who also died by suicide on the same day.

It is easy to blame these deaths on the Israeli-Egyptian blockade on Gaza, which started in 2007 after Hamas took over the Strip in a pitched battle – which in turn followed fair elections which Hamas inconveniently won. But Hamas has had 13 years to improve the lives of the almost two million Palestinians who exist in this vast Gaza prison isolated from the world.

If these young people have lost their taste for life, what about the famous resilience of the Palestinian people? As a director of the Palestinian health ministry, Samah Jabr, said this month, death has now become so natural in the eyes of many in Gaza that it’s now worth more than life itself.

The banalisation of death, of course, accompanies all wars – and Gaza is no different there. According to Human Rights Watch,189 Palestinian demonstrators, including 31 children and three medical workers, were killed by Israeli live fire between the end of March and mid-November last year, and another 37 Palestinians died under Israeli artillery or air attacks in the same period. By the end of 2019, the figures of those killed by Israeli snipers reached 214 deaths, including 46 children. (Three Israelis were killed by Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza in 2019). A 34-year old Palestinian woman from Rafah also died last week from wounds she received during the Israeli shelling of Gaza in 2014.

Hamas’ own judiciary death machine also grinds on; a court this month also convicted two Palestinian brothers convicted of murder – the sixth time the death penalty has been used in Gaza this year. Hass, ever the statistician when it comes to suffering, also records the killing of a young Palestinian woman by her father because she wanted to visit her divorced mother.

And following Ajouri’s death, a survivor of the Sabra and Chatila camps massacre in Beirut in 1982 – yes, almost 40 years ago – said on social media that he too had considered suicide; he had lost all his savings. Haitham Arafat meanwhile, adopted by Yassir Arafat and brought to Gaza in 1994, was actively prevented from making an attempt on his own life.

While death by suicide is still considered a disgrace in Palestinian Muslim society, the apparent willingness of young men and women to present themselves as targets during the March of Return demonstrations does suggest that hopelessness, resentment and injustice – and the need to physically object to the form of oppression visited upon Gaza over so many years – might have provided another, less taboo form of suicide.

No, Palestinians are not alone in their indignities. Lebanese charted many deaths by suicide during the economic collapse of their country. And did not a young Tunisian bathe himself in flames and start a revolution in 2011? Mohamed Bouazizi was, in fact, not the first Tunisian to choose such a route, but these must have been the first political suiciders who never tried to kill anyone else in the process: suicide bombers without a bomb, yet still capable of overthrowing a tyrant.

Perhaps, in Gaza, they’re going to find a new definition for those men and women – and women may account for more than half of the deaths by suicides recorded there – whose battle against their own enforced indignity and hunger was abandoned amid a simple loss of hope. Such violent and premature death outside a national struggle surely deserves a definition.

If you are experiencing feelings of distress and isolation, or are struggling to cope, The Samaritans offers support; you can speak to someone for free over the phone, in confidence, on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email jo@samaritans.org, or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch.

If you are based in the USA, and you or someone you know needs mental health assistance right now, call National Suicide Prevention Helpline on 1-800-273-TALK (8255). The Helpline is a free, confidential crisis hotline that is available to everyone 24 hours a day, seven days a week.