Footnotes In Gaza by Joe Sacco: Versions

Joe Sacco, Footnotes In Gaza (London, 2009), pp. 114-115.

Stories (myths, legends and fictions) have different versions. So do news stories, even including eye witness accounts:

Khamis recounts in detail how he saw his brother, Subhi, die in agony from bullet wounds in his stomach;

Subhi, lying on his back on the floor, asked to be taken to the clinic;

Khamis tore down a door and put a mattress on it;

Subhi tried to move himself onto the mattress but gurgled and said that he couldn't;

pointing at his family, he asked Khamis to take care of them, then he died;

Abu Antar and Omm Nafef, also present, confirm Khamis' account of Subhi's death except for one detail;

both say that Khamis was not there;

Abu says that Khamis returned two months later when everything had calmed down;

Omm says that Khamis retuned four months later after the Israelis had left;

Sacco asks in the concluding panel of p. 115, "What are we to make of this?"

We know that:

the massacre happened;
Subhi died from bullet wounds;
there was a single sequence of events even though we do not know all its details;
the past is not in a superimposed quantum state;
it is more likely that the others forgot that Khamis was there than that he imagines that he was there;
we do not know everything.