A music teacher in Gaza has found a way to help others around him cope with the relentless and terrifying sounds and horrific impact of Israel’s genocidal war.
The nonstop buzz of Israeli drones overhead long predates the constant bursts of gunfire and explosions since the start of Israel’s war on the besieged enclave.
“In Gaza, there is no escape from the reality of war,” said Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim al-Khalili, reporting from Gaza City, where exploding buildings and chaos reign and desperate people attempt to escape gunfire at food distribution sites.
Added to these horrors is the ever-present sound of Israeli drones, he said, pausing to listen to the sound of a drone flying above.
Al-Khalili said drones had hovered over Gaza for years before the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks on southern Israel that led to Israel’s war.
Many Palestinians living in Gaza City find the sound of them unbearable, he said, explaining that “it’s not just surveillance. It’s psychological warfare – a noise meant to unnerve, to break people down.”
Even before the current war, a report published by Save the Children in 2022 found that four out of five children in the Gaza Strip suffered from depression, sadness and fear caused by the punishing Israeli blockade on the territory.
However, music teacher Ahmed Abu Amsha has found a creative way to help those feeling distressed by the threatening buzzing above, by turning this sound meant to torment into something positive: a song.
“We had this idea come from what we live, what we suffer here,” said Abu Amsha. “When we have [drone] activity here, the kids ask me ‘Mr, We are tired from the annoying sound,’ [but] I told them ‘No, we have to sing with it.’”
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“We have to turn it into something good, and [so] we sing,” said Abu Amsha, adding that the group often records videos of themselves as they sing to post onto the social media platform Instagram. “The idea from these video songs, it’s to turn the sound of the war into music and make it something beautiful.”
The videos shared on Abu Amsha’s Instagram account, which have been viewed by thousands of people, aren’t about creating art, but about refusing to “let a machine – built to watch and intimidate – define what it means to live” in Gaza, said al-Khalili. It’s a form of resistance.
Israel has killed more than 63,005 people and wounded nearly 160,000 in its war on Gaza since October 7, 2023.
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