Ashkelon, September 10 – A local resident said Monday he can no longer keep the extra Gaza dead that activists, NGOs, and a few ambitious journal correspondence letters insisted must exist, and that he has therefore begun sliding them out from beneath the living room sofa one by one.
“I did my part,” said Eitan Berkowitz, 47, gesturing at a sagging sectional that has not sat flush with the floor since late 2024. “Hamas’s own ministry just put the total at seventy-three thousand. Israel more or less shrugged and said that sounds about right. Somebody still has to store the rest. Apparently that somebody is me.”
Berkowitz said the discrepancy arrived in waves. First came the early projections of two hundred thousand. Then the “not implausible” figures. Then the studies that treated Hamas’s count as a floor rather than a ceiling. Friends forwarded threads. Relatives forwarded threads. An online acquaintance in Berkeley forwarded a thread with the subject line “WAKE UP.” The bodies, he said, started appearing behind the television stand shortly afterward.
“I tried the utility closet first,” he said. “Then the space behind the water heater. Then under the kids’ bunk bed, which was a mistake. The couch was the only thing with enough surface area. You lift one cushion, you get a femur. You lift the other, you get three policy papers and a femur.”
His wife, Michal, said the arrangement has affected ordinary household life. Guests can no longer sit. The vacuum no longer fits. Their youngest asked why the living room smells like a press release.
“I told her it’s humidity,” Michal said. “She is nine. She knows what humidity is.”
Berkowitz emphasized that no one denies the war’s lethality. He is tired of being assigned the leftovers. “If the number is seventy-three thousand, fine. Tragic, awful, argue about combatants versus civilians until the heat death of the universe. But I am not running a warehouse for fudging the gap between that and whatever number looked good on a slide in Geneva.”
He has begun returning the surplus. Monday morning he left two dozen on the sidewalk for trash collection. By afternoon the pile was gone and three new ones were under the ottoman.
“I don’t even know how they get back in,” he said. “I lock the door. I check the windows. I look under the couch before I sit down, like a person who has learned. And still.”
He asked that anyone still circulating the higher totals please collect their inventory. “I have a living room,” he said. “I would like to use it as its name implies.”
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