Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco

also viewable on Substack:

https://open.substack.com/pub/palestinebookshelf/p/footnotes-in-gaza-by-joe-sacco

Copy of the summary:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KiBSLYqj5qd2TXU4cE9pLfRGg3Pdis7rd5fwQxwx-Tw/edit?pli=1&tab=t.4gebhobkhrcu

MAIN THESIS

• The Khan Younis and Rafah killings of November 1956 were not minor incidents; Sacco treats them as events that "planted hatred in hearts" and help explain later Palestinian grief and anger.

• History routinely reduces such massacres to footnotes even when they are among the largest killings of Palestinians on Palestinian soil.

• Past and present in Gaza form a "remorseless continuum": investigating 1956 cannot be separated from house demolitions, blockade, and factional violence that Sacco witnessed while reporting in 2002–2003.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

• The killings occurred during the Suez Crisis, when Israeli forces occupied Egyptian-ruled Gaza.

• United Nations figures cited in the book: 275 Palestinians killed in Khan Younis on 3 November 1956; 111 killed in Rafah on 12 November 1956 during a "screening" operation for guerrillas.

• Field research took place on two trips to Gaza between November 2002 and March 2003, amid the Second Intifada, widespread home demolitions in Rafah and Khan Younis, suicide bombings, and the U.S. buildup to the Iraq War.

EVIDENCE AND RESEARCH

• Primary source: oral testimony from Palestinian eyewitnesses, compared across interviews because fifty years had passed and memory blurs.

• Documentary record is thin: Egyptian military files closed; some UN records hard to reach; "unsavory orders" often kept off the books.

• Sacco hired two Israeli researchers to search IDF Archives, Israel State Archives, Knesset Archives, press archives, and the *Kol HaAm* Communist Party newspaper. Translations and a list of Israeli historians consulted appear in the appendices.

• Visual reconstruction used UNRWA photo archives in Gaza City plus physical descriptions from Palestinians; Sacco warns that he is "set designer and director" of every 1940s–1950s scene and that drawing itself refracts the past.

• Israeli military comments on contemporary demolitions are in Appendix 2. Sacco hoped former Israeli soldiers from 1956 might still come forward.

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