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On April 4, the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha posted a video of an obliterated urban landscape. Suddenly, there are bombs: Smoke erupts from the base of the buildings, and two large objects are ejected from the rooftops into the sky. Arms and legs seem to undulate in the air — they appear to be human bodies — before they crash down onto the pyre. “This is scary more than ever,” Abu Toha wrote on Instagram. “In the air strikes, two people flew even above the clouds of death.” In the background, the girl videotaping is crying as she holds the phone. She knows that those two people, perhaps briefly alive in the sky, have died, that Israel is bombing an already annihilated place, and that eventually those bombs may come for them all.
That there are no longer words to capture the horrors taking place in the Gaza Strip has long been said and felt, but then a video like Abu Toha’s appears, clarifying how extreme and otherworldly this catastrophe has become. In the 1980s, the American philosopher Edith Wyschogrod recognized that the Holocaust and Hiroshima and other crises in which huge numbers of people had died required a new language. In her 1985 book, Spirit in Ashes, she called them “death events.”
