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Contribution short abstract

Gaza marks an ultimate collapse of mobility regimes. Through the case of Intissar Al-Sa’affin, I argue the digital becomes a prosthetic mobility infrastructure: videocalls enable modalities of fragmented presence-absence, reshaping embodied grief and the possibility of “being there” amid death.

Contribution long abstract

Mobility is not simply a regime of circulation of bodies across space: it is shaped by relations of power, infrastructures, and permissions that decide who and if one can move, when, and at what cost. This proposal engages with the roundtable’s third axis by shifting our understanding of mobility away from origin and destination, toward a process of embodied remaining, in a context where it being made impossible.

Drawing on ethnographic fragments from Palestinian diasporic and displaced experiences, I argue that the genocide in Gaza constitutes a configuration of total enclosure and ultimate disruption of mobility resources, regimes, and infrastructures. Under siege, the impossibility of “physically being there” becomes most tangible in the event of death: the funeral, the farewell, the last encounter. In this context, the systematic restriction of mobility produces forms of distance that exceed geographical separation and become affective, temporal, and sensory; where the inability to move is also the inability to access death rituals, praxis of kinship and care, and forms of collective mourning.

In this long state of genocide-driven collapse, the digital emerges as an interface through which modes/modalities of embodied presence are reconfigured. Through the case of Intissar Al-Sa’affin, a Gazan mother who received news of her son’s killing via her phone and attended his farewell through a videocall, I explore how grief becomes mediated by screens, and how care is enacted through a “grammar of holding”. I propose the concept of fragmented presence-absence that implements through partial, mediated, affective forms of being-with.