What is Gaza’s most irreplaceable capital?

It is the people it has lost: doctors, academics, scholars, engineers, journalists, imams, physicians, artists, writers, literary figures, and teachers.

In Gaza, devastation is often measured in concrete—the number of homes flattened, hospitals crippled, universities reduced to rubble. Satellites document the destruction with clinical precision, while reconstruction is discussed in the language of costs, timelines, and materials. Plans for rebuilding revolve around cement, steel, and budgets.

Yet the deepest loss unfolding in Gaza cannot be rebuilt through architecture.

Subscribe now

What is being erased is human in its fullest sense, and that loss will last far longer than the genocide itself.

When Gaza bleeds, it is not only stone that cracks. It is minds, skills, memory, and moral infrastructure that are struck. A gradual draining is taking place: the loss of those who carried generations of accumulated knowledge. This includes doctors shaped by siege, professors teaching under impossible conditions, journalists documenting devastation while living inside it, and artists insisting on beauty amid ruin.

This is a destruction that does not end with a ceasefire. It strikes at the very capacities that allow a society to recover and endure.

Knowledge erased

At the entrance of the Islamic University of Gaza—now bombed, charred, and surrounded by tents sheltering displaced families—a haunting question emerges: what does it mean to obliterate a university in a place already deprived of opportunity?

Universities are not merely structures of concrete and steel; they are living ecosystems of thought. When lecture halls, laboratories, and libraries are destroyed, it is not simply infrastructure that disappears. It is the future intellectual capacity of an entire population.

Gaza has lost academics who cannot easily be replaced, including specialists in medicine, engineering, literature, and law who studied abroad and chose to return despite the blockade. They came back to build rather than flee.

Some were killed in airstrikes. Others were forced into displacement, exile, or silence.

Their absence creates a vacuum that no one can easily fill. Knowledge, like trust, takes years—often decades—to grow.

Subscribe now

According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, more than 193 scientists, academics, and researchers have been killed since October 2023, along with more than 830 teachers and educational staff. The destruction of Gaza’s intellectual class has created an atmosphere of fear that pushes scholars and professionals toward exile while hollowing out the institutions meant to sustain society.

Among those killed was Professor Sufian Tayeh, a physicist and president of the Islamic University of Gaza. So too was Dr. Refaat Alareer, an academic, writer, and English-language poet whose work connected Gaza to the world beyond it. Through his teaching, Alareer helped generations of students learn how to narrate their own lives.

Others were engineers and builders of Gaza’s urban landscape, such as Ahmed Shamiya, whose quiet technical expertise sustained daily life under blockade.

Their deaths are not just individual tragedies. They are ruptures in the chain of knowledge that binds generations together.

Healers lost

The same devastation has struck Gaza’s medical community.

The war has not only overwhelmed hospitals; it has decimated the people who kept them alive. Surgeons operating without anaesthesia, paediatricians confronting malnutrition that erases years of progress, nurses sleeping in hospitals while their families are displaced or killed—many of these professionals are now dead, injured, detained, or psychologically shattered.

More than 1,700 healthcare workers—including doctors, nurses, paramedics, and technicians—have been killed. That is an average of more than two medical workers every day.

Among them was Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, a Palestinian orthopaedic surgeon and former head of orthopaedics at Al-Shifa Medical Complex. He was killed while detained in Israeli prisons, marking the loss of one of Gaza’s most experienced surgeons.

Dr. Marwan Al-Sultan, an internal medicine and cardiology consultant and director of the Indonesian Hospital, was another pillar of Gaza’s collapsing health system. Dr. Omar Farwana, a gynaecologist and assistant professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the Islamic University of Gaza who later became its dean, was also killed.

Dr. Medhat Saidam, one of Gaza’s most prominent surgeons and a founding figure of the burns unit at Al-Shifa Medical Complex, was another loss. Young Dr. Maysara Al-Rayyes, who completed his medical degree at King’s College London at the age of 30 before returning to Gaza, was also killed.

Even survival has become unbearable for some of those who remain.

Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar, a paediatrician, lost nine of her children and her husband when an airstrike hit her family home in southern Khan Younis.

At least 350 medical personnel have been detained, with approximately 120 still held in Israeli custody—including Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who refused to abandon his patients during a military assault on Kamal Adwan Hospital.

A doctor is not simply someone with a degree.

A good doctor carries experience: thousands of cases, mistakes learned from, instincts sharpened under pressure. When Gaza loses a senior surgeon or an experienced paediatrician, it loses decades of accumulated human knowledge.

Training a replacement is not a matter of months.

It takes generations.

Voices silenced

Journalists and photojournalists in Gaza have also been deliberately targeted, and their loss carries consequences far beyond individual lives.

These reporters were not transient outsiders. They were deeply rooted witnesses who understood the unspoken realities behind the headlines. They knew the families behind the statistics and the streets behind the destruction.

When a journalist dies, more than a voice is silenced. An archive disappears.

No foreign correspondent can fully replace a local reporter who has spent years documenting the rhythms and wounds of a community.

Without these voices, Gaza risks becoming a place that is discussed but not truly seen.

From Samer Abu Daqqa, Hamza Al-Dahdouh, and Roshdi Sarraj at the beginning of the genocide to Fadi Alwhidi—left paralysed by a bullet to his spine—Gaza’s journalists have faced relentless danger.

Ismail Al-Ghoul was killed while reporting, leaving his daughter Zina fatherless. Rami Al-Rifi suffered a similar fate. Hossam Shabat was killed for documenting the war, while Ahmad Mansour burned alive outside Nasser Hospital. Hassan Eslieh was killed by a direct airstrike while sleeping in a tent near the hospital grounds in Khan Younis.

Yahya Sobeih had celebrated his newborn daughter only hours earlier.

Names such as Anas Al-Sharif, Mohammed Qraiqea, Maryam Abu Daqqa, Saleh Al-Jafarawi, and many others—around 228 journalists in total—have been killed while carrying out their work.

With every journalist lost, a part of Gaza’s memory disappears.

Human ruins

The war has carved a quieter, less visible wound: the loss of teachers, writers, artists, and community leaders—the people who help a society make sense of suffering.

They are the ones who explain trauma to children, who reconstruct language amid rubble, who remind a wounded society that it is more than a humanitarian statistic.

This is why the language of “reconstruction” often feels hollow.

Homes can be rebuilt. People cannot.

Rebuilding buildings without rebuilding the people who give them meaning is not recovery. Even if every structure in Gaza were restored tomorrow, the society inside them would still bear the absence of those who are no longer there.

The damage is not only quantitative; it is qualitative.

Gaza is losing its experienced guides. Young people are growing up without professors to mentor them, without doctors to inspire them, without journalists to teach them how to speak truth under impossible conditions.

This absence will echo forward, shaping the kind of society Gaza is forced to become.

The systematic targeting of civilian professionals—medical workers, academics, journalists—creates a strategy of social collapse. It ensures that even if Gaza survives physically, it will struggle to survive intellectually.

It transforms survival into a prolonged emergency.

What remains is a society forced to mourn not only its dead, but also its unrealised futures.

This is the reconstruction Gaza truly needs: the rebuilding of the human being after the loss of an entire generation of elites.

But rebuilding human capital is not like rebuilding a road or a building. It takes decades, sometimes generations. Some losses cannot be replaced at all.

No reconstruction plan can recreate the people who should still be teaching, healing, building, writing, and guiding.

The deepest wound of this genocide is not only what it has destroyed.

It is what it has made impossible.

And that—more than rubble—is what the world must be forced to see.

Since I was a child at school, Land Day was a date on the calendar that we always celebrated—a moment of commemoration, a lesson in Palestinian history, a reminder of resistance rooted in soil and in Palestinians’ hearts and minds. It marked the 1976 uprising of Palestinians inside Israel against land confiscation. We spoke of it as inheritance, as memory, as principle.

After more than two years of genocide and displacement in Gaza, I now understand what land truly means. For Palestinians, land is never just geography; it is memory made visible, heritage that breathes, and identity that cannot be rewritten. It is the first story we hear and the last truth we hold onto when everything else collapses.

Mahmoud Darwish once wrote, “We have on this earth what makes life worth living.” For years, those words were quoted as poetry. Today, they read like defiance carved into stone. What makes life worth living is not comfort, nor certainty—it is belonging. It is the stubborn insistence that we are of this land and that it is of us, no matter how violently that bond is tested.

Over these past years, displacement has taught us that land is not something you simply own—it is something you live through and within. When homes are erased, land becomes the last witness. When borders close, land becomes the only constant. When people are forced into tents, it is the land that absorbs grief, hunger, and endurance. It holds the weight of footsteps that refuse to disappear. It listens when the world turns away.

Subscribe now

Land Day is not about olive trees alone. It is about the refusal to be uprooted. It is about the quiet, unbreakable decision to remain, even when remaining seems impossible.

Ghassan Kanafani warned that the Palestinian cause is not merely a story of loss, but a struggle against erasure. In his vision, land was never nostalgia—it was responsibility. Something you either defend or lose entirely. After the genocide, that lesson is no longer philosophical. It is immediate, brutal, and undeniable.

What we are living through has made one truth unmistakably clear: the attempt has never been only to control land, but to sever people from it—emotionally, historically, and physically. To make us forget. To make the land feel distant, foreign, unreachable. Genocide accelerates this severance: displacement without return, destruction without rebuilding, death without mourning.

And yet, despite everything, Palestinians remain tethered.

There is something almost sacred in this tethering. It is not fragile. It does not weaken under pressure. It hardens. It sharpens. It becomes clearer with every attempt to erase it. The more destruction unfolds, the more the connection deepens—not as an abstract idea, but as a lived truth that pulses through daily survival.

Land Day now feels less like remembrance and more like testimony. We are no longer only remembering what was taken—we are bearing witness to what is still being taken, and to those who refuse to let go. We testify that land remembers us even when the world does not. That rubble still carries names. That streets flattened into dust still echo with laughter, footsteps, and life.

We testify that displacement does not dissolve attachment—it intensifies it.

Subscribe now

If the lions do not have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunters. It will celebrate those who conquer, who occupy, who erase, while silencing those who endure. This is why storytelling becomes an act of resistance. Not a luxury, not a choice—but a necessity, as Dr. Refaat Alareer said.

Because when we tell the story of our homeland, we are not only preserving memory—we are asserting existence.

We love the story because it is about our homeland. And we love our homeland even more because of the story. The two are inseparable. One feeds the other. One protects the other. In every retelling, we rebuild what has been destroyed. In every word, we return—if not physically, then spiritually, emotionally, collectively.

And this is what frightens those who seek erasure the most: that even in exile, even in displacement, even under unimaginable destruction, the story does not end.

It multiplies.

It passes from one voice to another, from one generation to the next, refusing silence. It lives in the details—the names of villages, the taste of bread, the smell of the sea, the shape of streets that may no longer exist but are still mapped in memory with painful precision.

This is the new meaning of Land Day.

It is no longer confined to a single historical moment. It is not just 1976. It is now. It is every day that a person refuses to forget where they come from. Every day that someone speaks the name of a place that others try to erase. Every day that survival itself becomes a form of resistance.

Land Day has become a language.

A language spoken in resilience, in memory, in refusal. A language that does not require translation because it is understood through experience, through loss, through the unyielding will to remain connected.

After the genocide, Land Day is no longer about land taken in the past. It is about land still being taken—and people still refusing to be uprooted.

It is about the certainty that no matter how much is destroyed, something remains. And that something is enough to begin again.

Because as long as there are those who remember, who speak, who insist, the land is not lost.

It is waiting.

And we are still here.

On the morning of 13 February 2026, more than 30 masked settlers, brandishing machetes and throwing stones, stormed the village of Talfit in the occupied West Bank.

They fired live ammunition at residents, their homes, vehicles, and even the town mosque. Several villagers were beaten and stabbed, and a 19-year-old man was shot in the shoulder.

“It’s the first time such a large attack has happened in the village,” said Yousef Abu Aisheh. During the assault, he sheltered in the centre of his home with his wife and seven young children, who screamed in fear as settlers pelted their windows with rocks.

The Israeli army was called to halt the rampage, but when soldiers arrived, they deployed tear gas at the community instead.

Subscribe now

Such attacks have become increasingly common in the West Bank, particularly in Israeli military-controlled Area C, where settlers have established more than 120 outposts and displaced 78 Palestinian communities. Talfit, however, lies in Area B, under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction and once considered off-limits to Israelis. The assault reflects a broader pattern of settlers expanding their foothold across the West Bank, encouraged by a government moving steadily toward full annexation of the territory.

A new foothold

The settlers who attacked Talfit came from an outpost established on 21 January 2026 on Ras Ein Einiya, a hilltop overlooking Talfit and the Palestinian town of Qusra. Initially consisting of only a few settlers, the camp has tripled in size in less than a month.

The Israeli army dismantled the outpost at first, but settlers soon returned and rebuilt it just 100 meters away. While outposts are illegal under Israeli law, many receive state funding and military protection. Both settlements and outposts are considered illegal under international law.

Under the Oslo Accords, the interim peace agreement signed in the 1990s between the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Israel, the West Bank was divided into Areas A, B, and C. Area A, the most densely populated section, falls under Palestinian civil and security control. Area B is under Palestinian civil authority with shared Israeli-Palestinian security control. Area C, comprising 61% of the territory, remains under full Israeli military control. These divisions were intended to last five years, after which authority would transfer fully to the Palestinian Authority. That transition never occurred.

Subscribe now

According to Dror Etkes, founder of Kerem Navot, an Israeli civil society organisation monitoring land policy and settlement expansion, settlers have established one outpost in Area A and 20 in Area B over the past two years.

“This stems from a decades-long campaign aimed at undermining the Oslo Accords. That’s what [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu sought from the start of his first term,” Etkes said. “What we’re seeing on the ground is a continuation of Netanyahu and settler policies from 30 years ago — Palestinians under Israeli control, without political representation.”

Expansion into Area B

Etkes emphasised that outposts represent only part of the broader expansion into Area B.

“Even when outposts are built in Area C along the border of Area B, violence and restrictions on access often spill into Areas A and B,” he said.

Suha Khteep has experienced this firsthand. Settlers who established an outpost in Area C, about one kilometre from the home her family is building between the villages of Jurish and Aqraba in Area B, have repeatedly blocked the family from reaching their property.

Tensions escalated to the point that on 13 February 2026, the Israeli army declared her home a closed military zone, barring the family from entering to complete construction. Meanwhile, settlers continue to raise the Israeli flag on the Khteep property.

“The settlers told us, ‘This is our land. This is our place. None of these houses belong to you. God gave us this land 3,000 years ago,’” Khteep said.

More than half of the new Area B outposts are located in the so-called “Agreed-Upon Reserve,” where the Palestinian Authority is responsible for planning and construction. In recent years, Israel has increasingly altered Oslo-era arrangements, expanding its authority in the West Bank to assert greater civilian control — steps critics say amount to formal annexation.

Legal shifts

In 2024, the Israeli military granted civilian officials the power to demolish Palestinian construction in the Agreed-Upon Reserve. Last month, the Israeli Cabinet approved measures easing real estate transactions for settlers in the West Bank, including allowing individuals to purchase property directly rather than through registered companies. Another measure makes West Bank land registries — previously classified — publicly accessible, enabling anyone to view land ownership records.

The decision also broadens the military’s authority to carry out demolitions not only in Area C but in Areas A and B if construction is deemed harmful to heritage sites, archaeology, or environmental resources.

These moves have prompted Talfit residents — at least 500 of whom own land at Ras Ein Einiya — to gather their deeds to demonstrate that the outpost stands on their property.

“The presence of this outpost in Area B is a clear, physical sign of the government’s latest efforts,” said Qutabeh Msallam, a Ras Ein Einiya landowner and Talfit resident.

Since the outpost was established, landowners have been unable to access their groves or the spring at Ras Ein Einiya. Water continues to flow to the village, but residents fear settlers may eventually cut off the supply.

“I have fond memories of hiking and climbing the summit as a child,” said Aysar Shaheen, another landowner from Talfit, gesturing toward the hilltop.

Already barred from tending his olive orchards near another settlement, he now worries he could permanently lose ownership of his land at Ras Ein Einiya as well.

“We’re completely surrounded by settlements,” Shaheen said, pointing to colonies on hilltops north, south, east, and west of Talfit that are tightening around the cluster of Area B villages south of Nablus. “Many farmers depend on this land. When you cut off their livelihoods, you’re starving them.”

***

Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based journalist covering West Asia, primarily reporting on Palestine, Israel, the Syrian Golan Heights, and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

This story begins not with missiles or explosions—memories that have haunted my days since I finally fled the war in Gaza for Cairo. Instead, it begins with something entirely mundane: the reluctant decision that it was finally time to get a haircut.

I had delayed it for weeks. Partly because I’ve always dreaded the tedious wait, but also because ordinary moments often carry memories beneath them, waiting quietly until something stirs them. Eventually, avoidance runs out of room, and distance stops protecting you.

Around me, men chat about weekend plans, inflation, and football—conversations that feel trivial to me. For them, this is just what people do while waiting for a haircut. But for me, the wait fills with memories of sitting in frozen silence, unsure if I would make it out alive. I remember stepping into the thick smoke of an airstrike and struggling to lift the lifeless body of a man whose skull had cracked open.

Staying behind

I never wanted to leave Gaza. Even when I had the chance early in the war, when an Egyptian friend offered to help, I refused. I told myself I would stay no matter what.

I was used to the reality that even simple acts—like going to the barber—could be difficult at best and life-threatening at worst. Finding a barber with enough battery power to operate an electric shaver was no small feat. The absence of electricity made haircuts a rare luxury, something that required both luck and patience.

Fortunately, I had both.

Subscribe now

Unlike many who were displaced to the southern reaches of the Gaza Strip, I remained in Deir Al Balah and managed to secure an appointment with my barber, Abu Salma. He was a man of quiet dedication who took his craft seriously, insisting on spending two full hours to ensure a perfect cut. It was an excruciating wait made bearable by his undeniable skill.

His devotion impressed me, though the cigarette smoke that filled the shop felt like a frontal assault on my already fragile commitment to quitting. Still, the memory of that day became something we shared.

At least, for a while.

I used to think he carried that memory too. Now he is gone, and I carry it alone.

The explosion

The haircut had just begun when a rocket struck nearby.

The explosion was close—150 meters away, maybe less. The blast rattled the shop, collapsing parts of the ceiling and sending dust pluming into the air. For a moment, life seemed to pause.

Then Abu Salma and I looked at each other.

We were alive.

When we stepped outside, we immediately sensed something was wrong. Normally in Gaza, when a bombing happens, people run toward the site to help. This time, people were running away. A rumour spread quickly: quadcopters were targeting civilians.

It later proved false. But in that moment, it felt real.

Still, Abu Salma and I ran toward the wreckage.

Subscribe now

Through smoke and debris, we searched for survivors. The first thing I lifted was a couch. Beneath it lay a lifeless body. The man’s skull had cracked open.

As we tried to lift him onto a nearby mattress, his pants slipped down, revealing threadbare boxers. Absurdly, I found myself wondering whether, if he had known that today would be his last day, he might have chosen a different pair. I pushed the thought away in shame. Had I become numb to grief and horror?

Another passerby joined us, and together we carried the man toward an ambulance, shouting for paramedics.

Then a voice cut sharply through the chaos.

“Can’t you see he’s obviously dead? Drop him and find someone still breathing.”

I froze.

I hadn’t been helping. I had simply been refusing to accept death—even while holding it.

We moved on.

Soon we found her: a young girl, maybe five or six years old, standing alone in the smoke. She didn’t cry or call for help. She simply stood there, trembling.

Was it fear? Cold? Shock?

I didn’t know.

She was alive, untouched by the blast except for the soot covering her face. Lucky, I thought at first. But what does luck mean if you lose everything? If the memory of this moment stays with you forever?

By the end of that day, more than twenty people were dead. Most of them were children.

Paramedics worked desperately to resuscitate a young boy whose tongue hung unnaturally from his mouth. Watching them, I realised something: no matter how many times I witnessed scenes like this, I would never become desensitised.

Some horrors refuse to become normal.

Finishing the cut

Eventually, more rescuers arrived, and Abu Salma and I understood that our role was over.

We stepped back, covered in blood that wasn’t ours—a silent reminder of what had just happened.

For a moment we simply stood there, looking at each other, locked in an unspoken contest: who would break the silence first?

He lost.

“So… should we finish the haircut?” he asked.

What else was there to do?

I nodded.

Two hours later, I walked home with neatly trimmed hair and blood still on my hands—an irony only war can produce.

My uncles had already assumed I was dead. They had called friends and checked hospitals. My cousin had confirmed I was near the bombing site when he called around to ask if the barbershop was open.

By the time I walked through the door, they were already mourning me.

I expected relief—maybe even an embrace. Instead, I was scolded.

They weren’t angry that I had nearly died.

They were angry about the stress it had caused my mother.

This bombing took place on February 23, 2024. It targeted a member of the Abu Zaaiter family on Yafa Street in Deir Al Balah. Who knows why the Israelis were after him.

Even then, I still resisted the idea of leaving Gaza.

But two months later, my brother needed emergency surgery, and no ambulance could reach us because so many others needed help. Suddenly, it was no longer just about me.

We scraped together the astronomical “fee” required to cross the border—$5,000 per person. My two younger siblings and I eventually made it out.

Lingering Echoes

Now, two years later, I am back in a barber chair.

The memories return the moment the razor hums near my ear.

But it isn’t just haircuts that trigger them. The sound of a plane overhead, the rumble of cars, even cheers from friends during a football game can send panic through me.

I once believed nothing could scare me anymore.

But horror lingers in the mind long after the bombs stop falling.

Some time ago, I asked a friend to visit Abu Salma’s shop and take photographs so I could include them in this article.

That’s when I learned he had died.

His house was bombed shortly after I left Gaza. He survived the initial strike but later succumbed to his injuries.

I sometimes wonder what passed through his mind in those final moments. Did he think back to that night in the barbershop, when we believed surviving meant we might still have a future after the war? Did he feel that same brief relief—the feeling that he had made it—before realising that he hadn’t?

In the end, it was only me who survived to remember.

May God have mercy on Abu Salma’s soul.

I had hoped only to revisit his shop through a photograph, to preserve a small piece of our shared story. Instead, I was left with the finality of his absence.

Now I wonder whether a simple haircut will ever again be just that. Or whether it will always be tied to the image of a shattered body and the memory of a barber who never lived to see peace.

And if such echoes persist in me—an adult who understands where they come from—what resonance will they leave in the minds of children who are only beginning to form their earliest memories?

What kind of future can grow from foundations of fear and smoke?

Three years suspended in the same place. While everything and everyone around me seems to move forward, I remain here, unable to take even a single step ahead. That is what it feels like, despite all the effort I pour into my studies and into trying to salvage what remains of myself amid chaos and a war that has spared no one.

For years, I dreamed of studying in Europe after graduating from high school. That dream drove me to work relentlessly throughout those years. I longed for a dignified and expansive education, one unconstrained by the limitations of a besieged land, deprived of the resources needed to satisfy my scientific curiosity.

When I graduated from high school with a 92.1 percent average in the scientific stream, my family celebrated with immense pride. I still remember the joy in their faces and my own excitement as I imagined the path ahead.

But that moment also became my first harsh lesson: not everything we strive for comes to us in the way we imagine.

Subscribe now

The circumstances at the time did not allow me to leave Gaza. I fell into deep disappointment. Yet I refused to abandon the dream entirely. Instead, I decided to work as hard as I could at home until an opportunity to study abroad might appear.

I enrolled at Al-Israa University in Gaza, majoring in Artificial Intelligence Engineering.

I attended university for only two weeks before something happened that had never crossed my mind—even in my worst imaginings.

War.

Dreams delayed

October 7, 2023 marked a turning point in the life of every person in Gaza. Each of us carries a different story.

Mine is simple: I believed that all my postponed dreams had slipped through my fingers.

My name is Rawan Marwan Shaat, and during those months I felt as though I had lost myself. My dreams were pushed aside as survival became the only immediate concern. In truth, survival itself was never fully in our hands. There was no choice but luck—or perhaps fate.

My mind was consumed with questions instead.

Why did all of this happen?
Why now, just as I had begun to accept a new and unexpected direction in my life?
Why did everything collapse so suddenly?

Subscribe now

Even surrender was not something I chose. It was imposed upon me.

In the early months of the war, I lived among people who had become my friends during displacement. We stayed together in what we believed was a relatively safer house. Eventually, we were forced to flee as bombardment intensified and residents were ordered to evacuate.

We scattered.

I was displaced eight times. Each time the same scenes repeated themselves: shelling, death, displacement, hunger. I lived through the very scenario I had feared most during the first week of the war—losing my home and living in a tent that showed no mercy, neither in the suffocating heat of summer nor in the bitter cold of winter.

War interrupted

At first, these were simply attempts to survive.

But after some time, I became painfully aware that time itself was slipping away. My life felt as though it were being consumed without purpose. I feared the war might never end, and that I would disappear inside it.

I knew I had to try to reclaim some fragment of myself.

During the war, diseases spread across Gaza, while many patients with genetic illnesses—such as cancer—died because treatment was unavailable and travel for medical care was impossible, while border crossings remained closed. Watching this unfold revived an old dream within me.

Before the war, I had once imagined becoming a researcher in science and medicine. Life’s changing currents had gradually pushed me toward artificial intelligence, but my fascination with genetic engineering had never truly disappeared. That field, however, was impossible to study in Gaza because of the siege and the severe shortage of equipment and resources.

When my desire to search again for the life I wanted returned, I decided to pursue science once more.

I began applying for scholarships.

At first, rejection was all I encountered. I accepted it quietly, knowing I was still inexperienced and had no one to guide me through the process. My applications carried very little hope—pessimism had become my default outlook after months of war and trauma.

During this time, some universities began offering online study programmes.

I refused.

I could not accept that my bachelor’s journey would exist only through a screen. How could I extinguish the passion for a university experience I had not even had the chance to live? My family and many others urged me not to waste my life waiting for what they called “illusory dreams.”

But for me, this was not a matter of fantasy.

It felt like life or death.

Holding on

Refusing an online degree did not mean I stopped learning.

Throughout this time, I continued taking online courses in artificial intelligence, programming, and design. I worked to strengthen my technological background so that one day I could combine it with scientific research.

Eventually, not all the doors remained closed.

I received an unconditional offer from the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom to study Cellular and Molecular Biology with Biotechnology, along with a partial scholarship. I also received conditional offers from the University of Bristol and the University of Manchester, each with partial scholarships.

Yet the war in Gaza has created another obstacle.

Because of the devastating economic conditions here, I cannot cover the remaining tuition and living costs. What should have been the beginning of a new chapter has instead become another struggle: searching for organisations, scholarships, or individuals willing to help students like me continue our education.

Despite everything, I keep trying.

Whenever circumstances allow, I go to a small workspace created for students and remote workers. There, electricity and internet sometimes exist, if luck is on our side and the sky is clear. Electricity now often depends on solar panels.

Every day, I search for new opportunities that might help me escape this senseless chaos.

I write about this unfinished journey to remind myself—and perhaps others—that reality is not always kind, and that we are not always responsible for the paths our lives take.

I do not accept this bitter reality. I also do not know whether clinging to my desire to grow amid ruins is the right choice.

But a dear friend once told me something I still hold onto: that my refusal to accept this reality might one day be what saves me.

So I choose to believe him.

Our attempts to hold on to the dreams of the past are not illusions, as some say. They are a lifeline, reminding us of who we are beyond the boundaries of suffering.

There are questions the mind asks that the soul cannot answer. What kind of life continues after everyone is gone? What does tomorrow look like when yesterday erased an entire family? Noor Al-Din Habib lives inside those questions.

At 21, Noor Al-Din was the middle son — the peacemaker. If he upset his mother, he was always the first to return, sitting beside her until she smiled. She would tell him, “You are the kindest among your brothers.”

On Wednesday night at 10 p.m., their home was struck. His mother was wounded and remained alive until 3 a.m. Noor Al-Din was injured too, unable to move, though he could hear her calling out each of her children’s names: Riwaa, Obaida, Abdullah, Noor Al-Din, Malik, Sajed.

Subscribe now

When relatives tried to comfort her, telling her Noor was beside her, she called again, “Where is Noor Al-Din?” Then she said, “Noor, my love…I swear I love you. Forgive me. Be patient, my son.”

He heard everything. He tried to reach her, but his injuries pinned him in place.

The night they all left

His eldest sister, Israa — a second mother to her siblings — had already been killed a year earlier, on December 17, 2023, along with her husband and three children. Noor Al-Din dug through the rubble alone to find and bury them.

Riwaa was his confidante. He studied with her, teased her cooking, and loved her pizza most of all. She once said she dreamed of being “the sister of a groom one day.”

Obaida, who earned a master’s degree in management while working at an ice cream shop, was deeply attached to their father. He was killed on June 19, 2024.

Abdullah, 23, worked as a nurse at Al-Shifa and Al-Maamadani hospitals. He came home each week covered in blood, describing the wounded he treated. He was saving to get engaged.

Malik, 17, was Noor’s closest companion — more friend than brother. Sajed, 15, the youngest, was spoiled and adored.

Their final night together was December 19, 2024. They sat at home. Abdullah showed photos on Obaida’s laptop. Their mother asked to see Obaida’s pictures because she missed him. “God willing, we will see him soon, up there,” Abdullah said quietly before closing the computer.

Subscribe now

She told Noor to intend to fast the next day and pray. He performed ablution. He remembers nothing after that.

He woke up in Al-Maamadani Hospital, disoriented. “Where is my mother? Where are my siblings?”

“They’re fine,” relatives told him at first.

By morning, his friend Ahmed gave him the truth. “May God have mercy on them.”

“Who?” Noor asked.

“All of them.”

He begged to see their bodies. They refused. “Remember them as you knew them,” they said.

Losing everyone

After leaving the hospital, Noor visited the Eastern Cemetery to say goodbye. Then he moved into his grandfather’s house.

Each morning, he returned to the hospital to clean and disinfect his wounds. His cousin Ismail stayed close, sleeping beside him at night. “You are not alone,” Ismail told him. “Consider me Malik.” Noor replied, “I want to.”

One winter night, doctors discovered Noor had two leg fractures. Surgery was unavailable; he was placed on a waiting list.

The next morning, Ismail left after promising to return every night. Hours later, a call came: Ismail had been killed.

Noor ran to the hospital, ignoring the pain in his broken leg. “How? He was with me… he said he wouldn’t leave me.”

After that, even ordinary things broke him — siblings walking together, someone saying “my mother.” He wondered whether it would have been easier to die with them.

His best friend Ishaq became his final anchor. “Why talk like this? I am here,” Ishaq would tell him. Noor once said, “I lost four siblings, but life compensated me with you.”

On May 28, 2025, Ishaq was killed too.

“I lost everyone I love,” Noor says. “I told myself I would never get attached again.”

Beginning again

In December 2025, relatives encouraged him to get engaged. He refused until his father said, “I want to see you happy.”

On the day of his engagement, January 2, 2026, he woke up wondering who would stand beside him. There was no one from his family left to attend. His fiancée, who had also lost her father, brother, and sister, understood his silence.

Now Noor says he no longer knows what stability feels like. He sleeps in different places, eats mostly canned food, and longs for Riwaa’s cooking and his mother’s sweets.

What can someone build when the people who made the house a home are gone?

For Noor Al-Din, that question does not fade. It is the life he now carries.

***

Sara Serria is a Gaza-based Palestinian writer, translator, and speaker, and a recent graduate of the Islamic University of Gaza. As a human before anything else, her work is rooted in empathy and lived experience. She focuses on documenting the human impact of war, loss, and survival—preserving personal histories and amplifying the voices of those shaped by displacement and grief.

Ramadan has never been simply a date on the calendar. It rearranges time. Nights grow longer and fuller. Homes open to neighbours. Tables stretch with shared meals. Mosques fill as life bends toward prayer and reflection.

But this is not how Ramadan arrives in Gaza this year.

Genocide and violent occupation have erased homes, torn apart gathering places, and turned familiar streets into fields of rubble. The landmarks that once organised daily life are gone. Even memory has changed shape. What once offered comfort now feels heavy, a reminder of everything that has vanished.

Months after a so-called ceasefire that never truly held, Gaza remains suspended in conditions that cannot be described as peace. The patterns of bombing may shift, but their consequences remain permanent. Entire neighbourhoods lie flattened. Roads are fractured. Water systems barely function. Communication cuts out for hours or days at a time.

Subscribe now

What little infrastructure remains stands in a fragile state: damaged, unreliable, yet stubbornly refusing to disappear.

Broken city

Daily life has become a struggle defined by scarcity.

Poverty and unemployment have soared, leaving most families without stable sources of income. Aid arrives irregularly and in limited quantities, forcing Palestinians into endless cycles of waiting, rationing, and improvisation. Planning for the future has become almost impossible. Survival replaces planning; endurance replaces recovery.

Even now, airstrikes, shelling, and gunfire punctuate daily life. Local authorities have documented hundreds of ceasefire violations since the truce took effect, many resulting in civilian casualties.

Movement remains tightly restricted, particularly at border crossings such as Rafah. Fuel, construction materials, and humanitarian supplies are frequently delayed or blocked. Caravans and prefabricated housing units are prevented from entering Gaza. Essential rebuilding materials are labelled “banned.”

Even food and medicine arrive as controlled quantities rather than necessities.

Since the genocide began in 2023, more than a thousand mosques have been destroyed or severely damaged. Entire neighbourhoods no longer contain a single functioning place of worship. Communities do not know where—or whether—they will gather for prayer this Ramadan.

Many congregational prayers will take place in tents, among the ruins of what once stood.

Empty tables

Ramadan usually arrives with sound.

The call to prayer echoes through neighbourhoods. Qur’anic recitation hums late into the night. After sunset, laughter and conversation spill from open windows as families gather for iftar.

This year, much of Gaza stands in silence.

At a time traditionally defined by family gatherings, almost every household has someone missing—a brother, sister, parent, uncle, aunt, or grandparent killed during the genocide. The empty seats around the table speak more loudly than words.

And often, the tables themselves are nearly empty.

Fasting during Ramadan is meant to cultivate empathy with the hungry. In Gaza, hunger is no longer symbolic. It is constant. With supply chains broken and incomes erased, many families approach the holy month unsure whether they will have enough food for iftar at sunset—or even for suhoor before dawn.

Subscribe now

Abstention is no longer a spiritual exercise. It is a daily condition. People no longer prepare for Ramadan. They brace for it.

Difficult questions echo through overcrowded shelters and bombed streets: How long will this continue? Where is the Arab and Islamic world—not in statements, but in action? Where is the international community?

Where, simply, is humanity?

Gaza does not need seasonal gestures or symbolic relief. It needs sustained humanitarian access, accountability for violations of international humanitarian law, the rebuilding of its healthcare system, the rescue of its collapsing education sector, and an economic recovery that restores dignity and self-sufficiency.

Anything less is not recovery. It is managed collapse.

Stubborn light

Yet even amid devastation, Ramadan still finds ways to appear.

Lanterns hang from broken walls and tent poles. Small shops decorate their doors with strands of colored lights that spill softly onto damaged streets. Many people cannot afford to buy anything, but they still walk through these markets simply to look.

Children press their faces against shop windows. Families stroll slowly through the streets, sharing brief smiles and moments of laughter.

The city, though scarred, refuses to surrender entirely to grief.

In one ravaged neighbourhood, where skeletal buildings rise like ghosts from piles of debris, a single white tent glows in the darkness. Strings of golden LEDs hang across its canvas walls, shining like defiant stars against the night.

The lights do not hide the surrounding ruins. Instead, they illuminate them.

There is no roof from which to hang decorations, so the tent itself becomes the lantern. Somewhere nearby, a small generator or salvaged battery hums softly—the fragile heartbeat of a family refusing to let displacement erase the spirit of the month.

Across Gaza, the geography of Ramadan is being redrawn.

Where mosques once stood, strings of LED lights zigzag between wooden poles and palm trees, forming glowing paths over dirt roads lined with tents. Lanterns are no longer purchased in markets. They are created from what remains.

Empty soda cans are carefully cut and shaped into metallic lamps that sway gently in the evening breeze. During the day they catch sunlight; at night they glow faintly in the dark.

These objects are more than decoration. They are declarations of existence—small flames of perseverance that refuse to let darkness claim the final word.

When Ramadan arrives in a city without homes, without mosques, without enough food to break its fast, the question is no longer how its people pray.

The question is how the world continues to watch. Because a holy month meant to embody mercy arriving beneath rubble is not a natural disaster. It is the result of human decisions—policies maintained, suffering prolonged, starvation regulated. And a tragedy not only witnessed by the world, but tolerated by it.

***

Taqwa Ahmed Alwawi, a Palestinian writer, poet, and editor living in Gaza (born 2006), studied English Literature at the Islamic University of Gaza. She is a chronicler and guardian of her community’s memory through her writing, dedicated to amplifying Gaza’s voice and sharing stories often left untold. Her work has appeared in over 30 international platforms. She is an editor at Baladi Magazine.

Taqwa’s Portfolio: https://tqwaportfolio-project.netlify.app/

By Esraa Abo Qamar

For two consecutive years, Ramadan arrived in Gaza under the devastating shadow of genocide. Both times, it felt nothing like the Ramadan we once knew.

I used to love Ramadan more than any other month. Before the war, it transformed the atmosphere of our home. My mother, especially, seemed softer. I would see her calmly reciting the Qur’an, moving peacefully through the kitchen. Even when we cooked, we did so with ease and joy. There was no tension — only anticipation for sunset.

During the genocide, that version of her disappeared.

She became anxious and exhausted, carrying the heavy burden of feeding us when there was almost nothing left to cook. We were living through famine, fasting nearly 15 hours a day. When sunset finally came, there was often little waiting on the table. The long iftar meals we once prepared — rice, chicken, soups, sambosk, pickles, sweets — were replaced by a small pot of thin soup or canned beans cooked over firewood.

Subscribe now

We had no cooking gas. Electricity was cut across the entire strip. We stepped outside in darkness to light wood fires, smoke filling our lungs as we cooked. We broke our fast coughing, sitting in the dark, listening to distant bombing.

My father’s sadness was unmistakable. His favourite part of Ramadan had always been taraweeh prayers at the mosque. But during those two years, he and my brothers could not go. The streets were unsafe at night. Some mosques did not even call the adhan, out of fear. Ramadan felt stripped of its soul.

My little sister insisted on fasting with us, but she missed the sweets the most — especially qatayef, the dessert that made Ramadan magical for her. We missed inviting my grandmother and aunts to share meals. Ramadan is meant to be a month of gathering and laughter. Instead, we were isolated and terrified. Every detail that once made the month special seemed stolen from us.

Market filled with light

This year is different — even if only slightly. After the ceasefire, we are still grieving. The loved ones we lost will not return. The homes that were destroyed are no longer homes. The pain remains. But this Ramadan, we chose to celebrate.

A few days ago, my family and I went to the market to prepare. In Nuseirat, there is a large shopping centre called Al Hyper Mall. I did not expect what I felt when we arrived: excitement.

At the entrance stood a massive glowing lantern, shining brightly as children gathered around it to take photos. Inside, the shelves were full again — meats, fruits, vegetables, dairy products — items we had been deprived of for so long. There were dried fruits, Qamar al-Din, and dates essential for Ramadan. Pickles, sambosk, and qatayef were back in abundance.

The mall was decorated with “Ramadan Kareem” signs, crescent moons, stars, and lanterns hanging from the ceiling. Even the traditional Ramadan drummer — the musaharati who wakes people for suhoor — was displayed. Walking through those aisles felt like stepping briefly into the life we had before the war. I was surprised, and overwhelmingly happy.

Children decorating

The next day, I heard laughter outside — children shouting with joy. When I looked out, I saw our neighbourhood children decorating the street. They had cut colourful plastic bags and tied them to ropes, stretching them from one side of the road to the other. Their decorations were simple, but their excitement was immense.

Nearly every house, even damaged ones, hung lights, lanterns, or crescent moons. We have lost so much — people, homes, safety, stability. But we are desperate for joy. We want any reason to feel alive again, any reason to celebrate this sacred month.

Inside our home, we decorated too. We hung lights. We replaced sofa covers and tablecloths with ones printed with Ramadan phrases, crescents, and lanterns. We bought new plates with Ramadan designs. These small details help us reclaim what we missed.

Perhaps the most beautiful return of all is the adhan. The call to prayer now fills the air again. My father can attend taraweeh prayers and stay late for tahajjud. People walk the streets at night. Roads remain busy until ten in the evening. For so long, simply being outside without fear felt impossible.

Not every area is safe. Some neighbourhoods remain dangerous. The pain has not disappeared. But in many places, mosques are open again. The adhan is loud again. We can walk to taraweeh with a fragile but precious sense of safety.

After two Ramadans of darkness, famine, and fear, this one carries something new: determination.

We are still grieving. We are still rebuilding. But we are choosing joy wherever we can find it. Ramadan was taken from us twice.

This year, we refuse to let it be taken again.

***

Esraa Abo Qamar is a Palestinian writer and English Literature student based in Gaza.

By Ohood Nassar

Under the second phase of the ceasefire announced on January 14, 2026, by U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff on behalf of President Donald Trump, the Rafah Crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip reopened partially on February 2, 2026, on a trial basis.

For Gaza’s population, Rafah is more than a border gate—it is a lifeline. After years of siege and escalating Israeli restrictions, it remains the primary outlet for medical travel, education, and humanitarian relief.

Yet the reopening quickly exposed the limits of the agreement. Although 50 stranded Palestinians were slated to return from Egypt, Israeli authorities allowed only 12—women and children—to cross. The remaining 38 were barred. The message was clear: control over Gaza’s movement remains absolute.

Subscribe now

On the first day of reopening, 57-year-old Huda Abu Abed returned to Khan Younis with her daughter, Rotana, 31. She had travelled to Egypt for a corneal transplant after suffering severe eye damage during the war. She left her children behind in Gaza, a separation she described as psychologically devastating.

Crossing back was no relief. Huda said she lived in constant fear of arrest. At the crossing, she and other travellers were first handled by individuals known locally as “Abu Shabab,” then transferred to Israeli forces for inspection and questioning.

“When they separated me from my daughter, I felt terror,” Huda said. “I thought they might detain me indefinitely.”

Her interrogation lasted three hours. She said Israeli officers pressed her to persuade residents of Khan Younis to leave Gaza, describing the Strip as unlivable after the destruction. According to Huda, they sought her cooperation in encouraging displacement—a demand she rejected with anger and disbelief.

Her phones, medication, and even toys she had brought for her grandchildren were confiscated. After questioning, she and others were transported in a truck flanked by Israeli military vehicles. She described the journey as degrading and deeply frightening.

Return to tents

Huda returned not to a house, but to a tent in Khan Younis.

“Living in a tent is harsh,” she said. “But witnessing destruction in Gaza is still better than being displaced. Gaza is our homeland. We will not leave.”

Her words reflect a wider resolve among civilians who, despite devastation, reject forced migration.

Wi’am Fares, 44, who returned on February 8, recounted a similar ordeal. He endured over two hours of interrogation about his decision to return and about conditions in the tents where his family had been displaced. Soldiers urged him to go back to Egypt and warned that his family could be expelled as well.

“Return depends on the mood of a soldier,” Wi’am said. “We kept asking ourselves: will we ever see Gaza again?”

He described overcrowded conditions for Palestinians stranded in Egypt and the psychological strain of prolonged uncertainty. He called for unrestricted return for all stranded civilians, arguing that arbitrary barriers only deepen suffering and sabotage efforts toward stability.

Lifeline

Rafah remains indispensable for Gaza’s two million residents. Thousands rely on it for medical treatment, study, and trade. But crossing procedures have become increasingly restrictive, subject to Israeli security vetting that turns travel into an unpredictable ordeal.

Human rights reports indicate that such restrictions function not only as security measures but as political leverage—controlling population movement and narrowing civilian options. For patients seeking urgent care, the process often means invasive questioning, confiscation of belongings, and prolonged delays that compound fear and isolation.

Despite intimidation, returnees delivered a unified message.

“The occupation asked me to convince people to leave,” Huda said. “My message is the opposite: remain steadfast.”

Subscribe now

For her and others, return—even to tents amid rubble—represents dignity. The choice is stark but deliberate: hardship at home over displacement abroad.

These testimonies underscore the profound psychological and physical toll imposed by movement restrictions. Military control shapes daily life, and normalcy remains contingent on political calculations.

At the same time, they reaffirm a central reality: for many Gazans, return—however painful—is preferable to exile.

The reopening of Rafah, though symbolically significant, has exposed the fragility of the humanitarian situation and the extent of continued restrictions. It also renews the urgency of international action—not only to ease immediate suffering, but to secure lasting guarantees of freedom of movement and a dignified future for Gaza’s civilians.

***

Ohood Nassar is a journalist and teacher from Gaza. She has written for We Are Not Numbers, New Arab, Al Jazeera, Institute for Palestine Studies, Electronic Intifada, and Prism.

I didn’t suddenly feel like an adult. There was no dramatic moment, no sense of arrival. But something inside me changed—slowly, painfully, and permanently.

A few days ago, a friend mentioned that only twenty days remained until my twentieth birthday. I laughed, unsure how I was supposed to feel. The genocide began when I was seventeen. Then came eighteen. Then nineteen. Now, I am approaching twenty, carrying years that were never truly lived. From January 31, 2006, to January 31, 2026, my age increased—but my life was interrupted. I exist between the person I was before everything collapsed and the person I am still trying to become.

I have changed so much that I sometimes don’t recognise myself. At seventeen, I wanted to understand everything—people, injustice, the world. I chased truth relentlessly. Now, I often retreat from it. Not because I stopped caring, but because awareness came too violently. Knowledge arrived through trauma.

Subscribe now

Growing older frightens me, not because of the number, but because of what it contains. I never imagined that three years of my youth could be erased this way. I once believed turning twenty would bring clarity and direction. Instead, it brings uncertainty. As I approach finishing my bachelor’s degree in August 2026, I face a painful choice: Should I accept scholarships and study abroad, leaving my family behind in constant danger? Or should I stay, choosing responsibility and presence over a long-held dream—to study, even briefly, outside Gaza?

Those who know me know that I am ambitious. I don’t compete with others; I compete with who I used to be. I balance calm with strength, sensitivity with reason. I believe ethics are the foundation of all relationships, which is why I strive to treat people with honesty and respect. I value simplicity and reject pretence. I prefer to live as I am, without masks. I am kind by nature, and I once assumed the best in everyone—but experience taught me that kindness does not require self-erasure, and that boundaries are necessary for self-respect.

I do not settle. I seek growth even when the path is unclear. I stumble, doubt, and break—but I do not give up. Failure, to me, is not an ending but part of learning. Success matters not for recognition, but for knowing I stayed true to myself. I endure with patience, even when grief and fear overwhelm my inner world.

Reshaping

Family remains my anchor, the last reliable source of safety in a life shaped by instability. I cherish those who stand beside me in the hardest moments. This genocide has reshaped me in ways language cannot fully hold. Oh, hurried age - you betrayed me. You placed burdens beyond my capacity and denied me the chance to complete my childhood. Gaza, often called the world’s largest open-air prison, was always a place I loved. But genocide introduced a constant sense of suffocation, as if even love became trapped behind walls.

Loss stopped being rare and became routine. On October 15, 2023, Israeli forces bombed the home of my closest friend, Shimaa Saidam, killing her and most of her family. Soon after, Lina al-Hour and her family were killed on October 27. Mayar Jouda on October 31. Asmaa Jouda on May 24, 2025. On November 1, 2023, missiles destroyed my uncle’s home, killing his wife Neveen, my aunt Asmaa, and my two-month-old cousin Fatima. By the end of that year, my grandfather’s four-story home was flattened. My uncle Abd al-Salam and his children, Huthaifa (13) and Hala (8), were killed. I also lost professors and teachers I deeply respected.

Subscribe now

Loss extended beyond people. It took homes, routines, places, memories, and parts of my identity. My mind became heavy with images and knowledge it was never meant to carry.

And yet, something human survived. I held onto education, reading, and writing—anything that could keep me from collapsing. Writing became both refuge and resistance. I wrote constantly. Through it, I became a writer, poet, and editor. My work reached audiences beyond Gaza. Education became my quiet weapon against erasure.

Nineteen years of survival taught me lessons no classroom could offer. I learned that strength lies in acceptance, that happiness belongs to pure hearts, and that kind people are life’s greatest blessing. I am no longer who I was—not because I weakened, but because I matured. I now choose silence over justification, calm over confrontation, distance over emotional exhaustion. I protect my peace. I no longer wait for apologies or explanations.

Achievements

Achievement now means something different to me. Why don’t we record, as achievements, what we endured during the genocide? The hunger that taught us how to ration hope. The displacement that stripped “home” of its meaning. The fear that followed us into sleep and woke up with us each morning.

Why don’t we honour the nights we survived under bombardment, the hours spent waiting for news that could destroy us, the days when simply staying alive required strength beyond measure?

Why don’t we document how we learned to live with loss as a constant presence? The first day without a friend. The moment we received news of martyrdom. The numbness, the silence, the shock. We learned to memorise final voice notes, photos, and messages. We learned how to carry names that would never answer again.

Why don’t we recognise how we mourned places—the homes where laughter once lived, the mosques, the schools, the universities, the rooms where dreams were first spoken? We learned to grieve memories buried under rubble and to accept that entire chapters of life could disappear overnight.

We carried responsibilities far beyond our age. We became emotional shelters for others while having none ourselves. We learned to hide panic to comfort younger siblings, to appear strong before our parents, and to break down in silence. We endured exhaustion, repeated displacement, and constant uncertainty. We lost people, routines, futures, and versions of ourselves.

We learned under bombardment. We studied while classrooms disappeared and death hovered overhead. Learning became defiance. Education became survival. Every page read and every word written declared that we would not be reduced to victims alone.

Collapse of certainty

We lived through the collapse of certainty. We held onto dreams while genocide tried to erase us—not only physically, but emotionally and culturally. We insisted on hope when despair was logical. We imagined futures even when tomorrow was not guaranteed.

We continued forward without knowing whether morning would come. We built fragile routines inside chaos. We carried grief quietly to survive. We learned patience without limits, endurance without recognition, grit without rest. We grew older than our years and stronger than our circumstances.

These experiences were not chosen. They were imposed by violence. Yet they gave us skills no certificate can measure: patience shaped by loss, strength built through survival, emotional depth forged by grief, and a refusal to lose our humanity.

If achievements were measured honestly, endurance would come first. Survival would be honoured. And remaining human—still able to dream beyond genocide—would be the greatest achievement of all.

Twenty is not an answer. It is the beginning of an unresolved question—and I am ready to live it. Welcome, my twentieth year. Please bring safety and peace with you. They are feelings I have missed more than words can express.

Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi is a Palestinian writer, poet, and editor based in Gaza, dedicated to amplifying Gaza’s voice and bringing to light stories too often left untold. Her work has been featured in leading international platforms. Her portfolio: https://tqwaportfolio-project.netlify.app/

On the same day, I received two pieces of news that could not have felt further apart. First, I heard that the Rafah border would open the following day. Hours later, I learned that twelve people had been killed in a new ceasefire violation. Together, these headlines formed a familiar truth: for Palestinians in Gaza, any moment that resembles relief arrives only after a price has already been paid.

On February 2, I woke up in a peaceful place in Italy. Still, before starting my day, I checked the news from Gaza as I always do. That morning, I stared at the two headlines, unable to process them. I didn’t know how to feel. Confused, I called my family and asked how both things could be true at once: how news could be both hopeful and devastating. One of my eight family members answered quietly, “Sara, it is normal.” And sadly, it is. It has become normal for Israel to twist even moments that might appear to favour us. As if two years of genocide were not enough, even our smallest taste of “freedom” must be shattered.

I no longer live in Gaza – I was evacuated to Italy – but I follow every update as if I were still there, because my family is. Distance means nothing when your heart remains attached to the place that shaped you for 21 years. Every headline carries weight. Even though I am safe, even though I am technically free, the news reminds me that you can leave a place physically while your soul stays behind.

Subscribe now

“Rafah border reopens.” Social media has been filled with this headline. People outside Gaza may read it and feel relieved, but only Palestinians truly understand the untold stories, the unbearable conditions, and the hidden restrictions behind those words.

Happiness, for Palestinians, is always incomplete. It always arrives missing something.

Returning

The first day of Gaza’s prison gates reopening—supposedly in both directions—has just ended. It is 2:20am in Italy, one hour later in Gaza, and I am still glued to the news, searching for any sign of a better future for my family and for Gaza. I watched a video of a woman returning to Gaza after being evacuated for medical treatment, along with fourteen others who had also been receiving care abroad. “Do not leave Gaza. Stay in Gaza,” she cried through tears. Israel had promised that fifty people would be allowed to return. Only fourteen were. In this place, promises are fragile. Israel’s promises rarely meet reality.

No one can judge them, and no one should blame them for choosing to return home. Home is home—especially for those who were injured and forced to leave Gaza for treatment while hospitals were being targeted. At least 115,000 Gazans were evacuated to Egypt in the early months of the genocide. They may have survived, but survival came at a cost—emotionally, physically, and financially. I know families among my relatives who were deeply affected. “The war left us with no choice,” one relative told me during a video call. “I can’t wait to go back. I love Gaza.”

Many people have clung to false hope as this news spread across social media. In reality, this reopening is only a drop in the ocean for more than two million people trapped inside Gaza. Anyone who looks beyond the headline, without filters, will see that this gesture is largely performative. Israel presents it as relief, while the truth on the ground remains painfully unchanged.

Subscribe now

“We were informed today that only five injured people will be allowed to leave Gaza per day,” the director of Al-Shifa Hospital said, his voice filled with shock and grief. His words reflect what we all feel. Five people per day, while tens of thousands are wounded, and the number continues to grow.

Limited freedom

This reopening is extremely limited. Even reaching this announcement has cost us two years of our lives. Rafah border—Ma‘bar Rafah in Arabic—has been Gaza’s only outlet to the world since 2001, after Gaza’s airport was destroyed. It was fully closed 20 months ago, on May 5, 2024. I remember exactly how that felt. I personally lost a scholarship because of it. Families were torn apart. Food barely entered. The injured suffered in silence. And the world moved on.

And now, the world expects Palestinians to feel free.

But how can freedom exist when movement depends on lists and luck?

This is not freedom. It is calmer control.

Still, I hold on to the hope of reuniting with my family and loved ones. I may be free in Italy, but my soul is not. I see the same feeling reflected in my colleagues from Gaza, all of us living in exile. We share news the way children wait for a long-delayed reunion – counting days, clinging to fragments of possibility. “If this process continues at this pace, I will see my family in two years,” one colleague told me yesterday. And sadly, that is the truth.

With every trip I take here in Italy, I feel a quiet guilt. For hours afterwards, my mind wanders. What if life were this easy in Gaza? What if movement were unrestricted? What if every student could study freely? What if every patient received treatment? What if there were no occupation?

So no: this is not freedom. It is a tighter form of control, farther from the world’s eyes. We do not ask for the impossible. We ask for normality. And we hold on to the hope that one day—even delayed, even wounded—that normality will finally find us.

Sara Awad is a Palestinian writer who evacuated to Italy to complete her bachelor’s degree in languages and translation. Her work has appeared in The Intercept, Al Jazeera English, Palestine Deep Dive, TRT World, Drop Site News, The Independent, Truthout, PRISM, and other platforms. Passionate about capturing human experiences and shedding light on untold stories, and focusing on social issues, resilience, identity, and hope amid the ongoing realities of war and occupation.

By Abedalrahman Mohammed

In the midst of a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, another crisis is unfolding quietly but no less devastating: the termination of Palestinian employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) who are currently outside the Gaza Strip after being placed on exceptional leave. Many of these men and women did not choose to leave Gaza — they fled for their lives, sometimes accompanying sick relatives, sometimes escaping bombardment that left them no alternative.

Yet now, they are being told their contracts have been ended immediately, a decision that has sent shockwaves through families already fractured by war and displacement.

UNRWA placed hundreds of its Gaza-based staff on exceptional leave starting in March 2025, a temporary measure meant to protect their jobs while they were unable to work due to the ongoing war and the closure of border crossings. However, in early January 2026, the agency abruptly announced that those contracts would be terminated, effective immediately, citing a severe financial crisis and an inability to sustain salaries and programme commitments.

Subscribe now

The decision affects roughly 600 employees, primarily in the education sector, many of whom are currently in Egypt because they could not safely return to Gaza. Staff learned of the termination through formal letters outlining that their services had ended, and that their final settlements — including end of service compensation and notice pay — would be processed in due course.

Many of the affected employees had hoped that the “exceptional leave” would be temporary — that once crossings opened, even briefly, they could return to their classrooms, clinics, and communities. Instead, they now confront a different form of displacement: economic erasure.

Arbitrary and unjust

The impact of this decision extends far beyond individual employees. These are families — parents, spouses, children — whose livelihoods depended on stable work with UNRWA. The agency is often one of the few employment avenues in Palestinian refugee communities. Losing that work means losing not only a paycheck but also access to medical insurance, educational support for children, and the psychological security that comes with professional identity and routine.

Local human rights groups have condemned the termination as arbitrary, unjust, and a violation of basic rights, noting that the employees were prevented by circumstances beyond their control from returning to Gaza and resuming their duties. They argue that blaming staff for having fled a war zone amounts to punishing them twice: first by the violence that drove them out, and then by stripping them of their means to survive outside it.

The reaction among Palestinian society has been swift and critical. Comments from staff and unions highlight the personal trauma and financial insecurity caused by the decision. “The decision is arbitrary and discriminatory. We did not leave Gaza by choice — we fled for our lives or to accompany sick relatives. Now we are punished for surviving,” said Abu Adi Al-Talla’, spokesperson for UNRWA contract employees.

Palestinian factions and unions condemned the move as unjust and inhumane, warning that dismissals undermine basic employment rights at a critical time when families are struggling to recover from war. “Cuts and contract terminations amount to a ‘stab in the back’ of employees who lost colleagues under bombardment and have served as a safety valve for the agency,” said Ahmed Abu Houli, of the PLO’s Refugee Affairs Department. Hamas, meanwhile, described the decision as an infringement on fundamental employment rights for people who were unable to return due to border closures and war conditions.

Human tragedy

This is not merely an administrative or financial issue; it is a human tragedy unfolding in parallel with the broader crisis in Gaza. UNRWA employees are not faceless bureaucrats — they are teachers who once stood at chalkboards, parents who tucked their children into bed before the war began, and community members who provided stability in an unstable world. Now, many face unemployment in foreign lands, with depleted savings and uncertain futures.

The agency has indicated it will provide statutory compensation, but for many families, such payments — arriving weeks or months later — do not address the immediate needs of daily life. They cannot replace the security of a job, community, and home.

Subscribe now

In a moment when international attention focuses on the physical destruction within Gaza’s borders, the termination of services for these employees exposes a different dimension of the crisis: the systematic unravelling of Palestinian social and economic structures that have been sustained, imperfectly but indispensably, by institutions like UNRWA.

Stripping people of their employment because they had to survive war and protect their families raises profound ethical questions about who bears the burden of conflict and who is protected by international humanitarian systems.

The decision to terminate the contracts of UNRWA staff who fled Gaza under life-threatening conditions is more than a labour dispute — it is a moral crisis. It turns survival into a professional liability, punishes those who were driven by fear for their lives and those of their loved ones, and deepens the economic fracture for families already pushed to the brink. As Gaza’s war continues, so too must the international community grapple with the consequences — seen and unseen — of policies that transform victims of conflict into victims of institutional abandonment.

***

Abedalrahman Mohammed is a Palestinian journalist and translator with over 20 years of experience in the field. He is a professional author producing analytical documentary-style journalism.

Every Friday afternoon, when the week loosens its grip on Gaza, the sand begins to vibrate. In west Gaza, where the land meets the sea, engines roar back to life along the scarred stretch once known as the “Netzarim corridor” and on the sand dunes of al-Zahra.

Motorbikes and off-road vehicles surge forward, cutting through sand dunes that look out toward a sea that is somehow still breathing, still blue. Tires dig in. Sand sprays into the air like fireworks.

For a few fleeting hours, Gaza’s youth move fast. Faster than grief, faster than memory, faster than the suffocating slowness imposed on their lives.

This weekly ritual is not new. Since around 2015, young Palestinians have gathered in the Netzarim area and nearby al-Zahra city to ride, perform stunts, and test their limits.

Subscribe now

But after two years of genocide, displacement, fuel starvation, and an Israeli military presence that rendered the area a killing zone, the return to these dunes is more than a hobby. It is an act of reclamation.

“We love life,” Mahmoud Saqer, 30, one of the riders in the group, tells me. “And this is how we remember that.”

Mahmoud remembers the early days clearly. Back then, al-Zahra was completely alive. Thousands of people would come on Fridays, including riders, families, children, vendors, and spectators. The dunes were wide, the streets intact, and petrol was available.

“Everyone had his own style,” Mahmoud adds. “Some would lift the bike on one wheel. Others would race up steep sand hills. Some would fall, break a bone—we used to joke and call it a ‘quick death’. But no one would give up. We keep trying until we make it.”

The gatherings were communal events. Crowds formed naturally, drawn by the sound of engines and the sight of young men defying gravity. Watching was part of the experience. For riders and spectators alike, it was a release.

Empty horizon

That release became impossible after the genocide started.

During the genocide, Netzarim was transformed into a corridor of death. Israeli occupation forces occupied the area; anyone attempting to cross or even approach it risked being shot on sight. Petrol vanished. What little entered Gaza became impossibly expensive—up to $40 per litre. Motorbikes and off-road vehicles were hidden away.

“We stored all the motorbikes,” Issam Abu Asr, 26, who was displaced after his home in al-Shejaiya neighbourhood was destroyed, tells me. “Not because we forgot our passion, but because a single missile could take it all away.”

Subscribe now

For younger riders like 15-year-old Waleed Alareer, the loss was deeply personal. Before the genocide, he rode along the brightly-lit asphalt roads by the sea, learning balance and control. During the genocide, he could only walk to the closest accessible point, stare at the empty horizon, and imagine the sound of his engine.

“When the IOF soldiers were centring in the Netzarim area, I was reaching to the last point I could reach and standing there and remembering,” he tells me. “About how I used to start my bike and ride from north to south.”

Burning rubber

When the Israeli forces withdrew and riders cautiously returned, the feeling was overwhelming - but incomplete. “I hadn’t ridden in two years,” Mahmoud says. “The first time back, it felt strange. I couldn’t even lift the bike on one wheel.”

Mohammad Al-Zaza, 22, describes the return as an attempt to stitch his scattered memories back together. “We try to remember how it was before,” he says, “but the memories are missing pieces. The streets are destroyed. There’s no lighting. We have to leave at sunset. Before, we stayed until midnight.”

The losses are visible everywhere. Friends who once rode together are gone - killed, displaced, or unable to repair bikes destroyed in the bombing. Al-Zahra City has been wiped off the map. What remains of Netzarim are fragments, now narrow and crowded. Still, they come.

But on Friday afternoons, people gather around the riders again, forming loose circles. Some sit on broken concrete slabs. Others stand barefoot in the sand. Children cheer when a bike catches air. The sea breeze carries the smell of salt and petrol, mixing with the sharp scent of burning rubber.

When engines rev, sand sprays outward in wide arcs. The first acceleration sends dunes trembling. Riders perform wheelies, drift sideways across loose terrain, and charge uphill until gravity nearly wins—until, finally, it doesn’t. “It’s not just for us,” Mahmoud explains. “The people watching—they’re releasing energy too. They watch the bikes, the sea, the flying sand. For a moment, everyone breathes.”

Speed here is contagious. Even standing still, you feel it.

Enforced slowness

In Gaza, slowness is enforced. Waiting—for electricity, for fuel, for permission, for reconstruction, for relief. Occupation stretches time until it becomes a punishment. That is why speed matters. “When I ride fast, adrenaline and happiness hormones are released,” Mohammad says. “It’s indescribable.” Issam puts it differently: “Speed is instinct. It’s inside us. Occupation tried to kill that—especially when fuel was cut—but it didn’t work.”

Even now, petrol remains scarce and exorbitantly priced. Spare parts and engine oil are nearly impossible to obtain. Each ride is calculated, rationed, precious. And yet, the bikes keep moving.

Riders never go alone. They arrive together and leave together, partly for camaraderie, partly for safety. But the emptiness of Netzarim carries risks—criminal gangs, collaborators, and the lingering threat of violence. “We ride as a group,” Issam says. “It’s about spirit and protection.”

The riders coordinate beforehand, message each other, share routes, and document their rides on Instagram and TikTok. Visibility itself becomes a statement: we are here, and we are alive.

Walid laughs when he describes his first ride back. “I was flying with happiness. I couldn’t stop laughing.”

Despite exhaustion, loss, and uncertainty, the dunes offer something rare in Gaza: unfiltered joy. The riders are not naive about what they face. They speak openly about petrol prices, destroyed infrastructure, and the impossibility of returning to what once was. But none of them speak of surrender.

Their message to the world is clear. Pressure the occupation to allow fuel, spare parts, and reconstruction. Support Gaza’s youth, whose talents survive without resources. Above all, understand that joy itself is a form of resistance.

As the sun dips toward the Mediterranean and engines fall silent, the sand settles. The riders pack up, promising to return next Friday. On the dunes of Netzarim - amid ruins, sea air, and flying sand - they choose speed over erasure, and life over everything else.

Ali Skaik is an English Literature student and writer from Gaza City. Every word he writes is a pulse from his life in Gaza. He is a member of WANN and has published work in The Nation, The New Arab, The Intercept and The Electronic Intifada.

Dreaming tastes strange when it comes with guilt. I had long hoped for a scholarship to study abroad, like any other international student - and now it’s real. I have won a place in Italy to complete my bachelor’s degree, just as I always dreamed. But I never imagined my scholarship would arrive in the middle of a genocide. I never thought it would be my ticket to survival.

The process began in the early months of the war when I realised Gaza was no longer the place I had once known. I told my family I wanted to complete my bachelor’s degree abroad, no matter how long it took. Amid starvation, bombs, death, and unimaginable conditions, I held on to my dream.

I spent hours on my phone - no matter how many times the electricity or internet failed - searching for a scholarship that could realise my dream. I applied dozens of times to different countries and programmes and, somehow, I had the strength to keep going, even while sheltering from the war.

Subscribe now

Every email notification was a promise of escape, but it always ended the same way - with a rejection. I remained trapped in Gaza, with no clear way out. But I kept pursuing my dream, even when the world around me was telling me there was no hope.

Then, good news finally arrived: I was granted a scholarship in Italy. I remember vividly where I was when hope finally touched me: sitting in the tent at our displacement site - it was October 2025. I prayed that this time it would be real, that my heart would not break again.

While waiting for my evacuation date, I spent days and nights without sleep. I was torn between chasing my dream and the guilt of leaving my family. It felt unbearably cruel to hold a single ticket to survival while part of a family of eight who had no similar way out. For a month, I waited. For a month, I asked myself the same questions every day: why must I leave Gaza to have a future? Why does life for Palestinians always feel incomplete? Why is our joy always complicated?

Evacuation

Finally, the night of the evacuation arrived. I received a call from the Italian embassy: be ready on 17 November at 4am in Deir al-Balah. I was instructed to only bring my phone and charger, nothing else was allowed.

The dream was finally becoming real, but for a Palestinian, happiness is never pure. All my hopes for the future fell away as I said goodbye to my family: my father, mother, four brothers, and one sister. Tears still fall as I write this. Can you imagine how much I miss them? For me, we are the best family. We endured the war and its unbearable conditions together, hand in hand. We shared the pain with patience and hope. In reality, survival meant nothing without them.

At 6am, I began leaving Gaza. Once on the evacuation bus, I realised that nothing would ever be the same. Not me, not my future. I began to think of those who had destroyed our dreams, forcing us to leave and rebuild our lives elsewhere. Fear, stress, and terror consumed me. I was about to face the people who had tried to destroy us over the past two years. All I could do was sit in silence - powerless - and follow the rules they imposed.

“Sara Awad, Italy.” That was the last thing I heard from the Israeli soldier at the checkpoint. My heart felt so heavy, and survivor’s guilt began to settle deep in my mind and soul. More than ten hours passed on the bus heading to Amman, Jordan. As we crossed our occupied land, I saw it for the first time in my 21 years. I understood I might never see it again. There were 24 people being evacuated to Italy, including students and family reunions. Elderly people and children were exhausted from the long evacuation process.

During these hours on the bus, I started to think about everything I had endured during the war. I cried like a child longing for her mother. Millions of emotions, suppressed and scattered during the chaos, now poured out as I left Gaza behind.

Heavy freedom

After days of exhaustion and fear, the journey was finally over. I arrived in Italy. I had expected to feel happy and relieved, but the truth was the opposite. Life outside Gaza seemed completely normal, too normal, while my people continued to suffer, even during the so-called ceasefire.

Italy was safe, clean, beautiful, and welcoming. And yet, it just kept reminding me how unfair life could be.

The first days in Italy felt unreal after witnessing two years of war. Life here was slow and quiet, the air clean, the streets calm. There was no chaos, no faces filled with fear, no constant uncertainty. People moved freely, unburdened. I realised how heavy freedom could feel when you’ve lived without it for so long.

I thought building a new life away from home would feel like a fresh start, but I didn’t realise the weight of carrying two lives at once - one of them scarred by war. How heavy it is to be a 21-year-old girl away from her loved ones, trying to build a better future for herself.

Subscribe now

But, as always, Gazans know nothing about giving up. I still have hope for the future. It is January 2026 - a new year and a new chapter of my life. All my wishes go to Gaza and my family. May they remain happy and safe for all the years to come.

My heart is also full of gratitude and appreciation for Italy and its people. I am here living a good life because of the support of many lovely Italians. Effort and hard work sometimes pays off. I am deeply grateful for this opportunity, and I hope that all students in Gaza who dream of a scholarship will be able to achieve it. I also hope that they can pursue their dreams without carrying the weight of survivor’s guilt that I bear in my heart.

Thank you, Italy. But I count the days until I can return to my homeland, to rebuild it with my education and my hope. My beloved Gaza, I carry you in my heart.

***

Sara Awad is a Palestinian writer who evacuated to Italy to complete her bachelor’s degree in languages. Her work has appeared in The Intercept, Al Jazeera English, TRT World, Drop Site News, The Independent, Truthout, PRISM, and other international platforms. Passionate about capturing human experiences and shedding light on untold stories, she reports on social issues, resilience, identity, and hope amid the ongoing realities of war and occupation.

Thursday morning in the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza was not an ordinary day. It wasn’t the roar of fighter jets that gripped our hearts this time, but a more terrifying sound: the silence creeping from behind the walls of Al-Awda Hospital in our camp. As a resident of this besieged and exhausted camp, I didn’t need to read the official press release saturating the news to understand the scale of the catastrophe. The power to the hospital had been switched off.

I went along the road to the hospital, where I normally see people rushing along to find a sanctuary for survival. Along the roadsides, sewage water overflowed, a grim reminder of what is causing an invisible enemy which is infiltrating the bodies of my neighbours: Hepatitis A. Upon arrival at the hospital, the massive roar of the generators we had grown accustomed to was gone, replaced by an eerie stillness. I entered through a gate that usually bustled with life, stepping into a reception hall swallowed by gloom, lit only by the faint beams of mobile phone flashlights held by nurses.

Subscribe now

In the corners, I saw children whose faces had turned a sallow yellow, as if a premature autumn had struck their fragile bodies. This is Hepatitis A, the “yellow plague” gnawing at the livers of the displaced in nearby tents. They came here seeking a miracle, only to find that the miracle now depends on “litres of fuel” that had been withdrawn. I saw a mother clutching her jaundiced child. His eyes were dim as he stood bewildered before the reception desk, only for a nurse to tell her with profound sorrow: “There is no fuel for the laboratory to run the tests.” In that moment, I realised the true meaning of “slow death”: to have the cure existing just behind a door, but the key, a litre of fuel, is held captive behind borders by the Israelis.

No power

I approached one of the mothers who was holding her whimpering child. Her voice trembled as she asked me: “We fled death in the tents only to die here because the power is out?” I had no answer. I simply recorded her words in my journal, which was by now full of tears rather than ink. Inside, the air conditioning had been cut. The elevators had stopped working entirely. I saw patients being evacuated from the general and specialised surgery departments in a scene resembling a forced displacement. They had to be moved from their hospital beds because the operating rooms had shut down. As a result of the lack of fuel, more than 50,000 life-saving surgical procedures have been postponed, turning time itself into another weapon against the wounded.

In another dark corner of the maternity ward, a woman was in labour and groaning. The hospital is now forced to prioritise patients among the dying: it shuts down entire vital departments just to get hold of a small generator to light a single bulb over a midwife’s head. Other women in labour are taken to different hospitals, while paediatric admissions are sent to Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.

I heard the medical staff whispering about the “black market”. Can the world imagine a hospital that saves lives being forced to hunt desperately for fuel from traders at $12 per litre? This means Al Awda Hospital needs $12,000 every single day just to operate. This is a state-level budget needed by a besieged hospital while international organisations close their operations and offer nothing but apologies. It is an impossible amount for a facility that survived 26 months of relentless bombardment, only to be stabbed in the back by a “fuel siege”. Many medical staff, those who haven’t left the field for 600 days since the start of the genocide, have been forced into “involuntary leave”.

Engineered annihilation

What is happening within the halls of Al-Awda Hospital is not a passing fuel crisis: it is a new chilling chapter in Israel’s process of “engineered annihilation,” practised against the Palestinian population in Gaza. Then, while the world was pushing the narrative about “calm” and 2026 heralding a so-called “recovery”, Israel chose to inaugurate the new year with its most lethal move since the start of the aggression: the announcement of a plan to end the international humanitarian presence in Gaza.

This scheme, which aims to expel more than 37 international organisations, led by Doctors Without Borders, goes beyond a mere administrative decision: it is a death sentence for our remaining, stricken medical facilities. We are talking about organisations whose tireless efforts and essential supplies have literally kept us alive throughout more than two years of relentless slaughter and destruction. By expelling them now, the primary goal is to silence international witnesses and strip Al-Awda Hospital and other steadfast institutions of their last chance at survival.

Subscribe now

We are facing a process of institutional uprooting aimed at turning Gaza into an uninhabitable space. Israel, which has already banned UNRWA and attacked many of its facilities, is expelling international organisations in order to complete a war of starvation and annihilation. We are witnessing a systematic medical strangulation where hospitals are left coping with an explosion of epidemics, with bleeding supplies suffering a 60% deficit. Medical stocks now cover only 10% of the minimum requirements for life in Gaza. All this amidst a shameful international silence.

I left Al Awda Hospital wondering: if the artery of Nuseirat has stopped, how much time do we have before the heart of Gaza stops entirely? How cruel is the moment when a doctor is forced to choose which of the dying deserves the least pain, or which life-saving surgeries must be delayed? In Gaza, we have had to learn resilience, but today we discover that resilience can be killed by an empty fuel tank.

***

Rawan Wajdi Jouda is a writer and a translation graduate from the Islamic University of Gaza. She is a member of WANN, with contributions featured in WRMEA and Al Jazeera Blogs. She seeks to bear witness to the daily suffering of Gazans and document their lived realities through storytelling.

My uncle’s wife, Ruba, is 21 years old. Back in 2022, she achieved 93% at Tawjihi - among the top scores - on the final standardised exams in the Palestinian school system. Then she started studying mathematics at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza City. She dreams more than anyone I know. She married my uncle, Nasser, in August 2022. Then she gave birth to a wonderful baby girl in June 2023. Her daughter’s name is Tohfa, which means “unique” and “beautiful” in Arabic. She is now almost three years old. My uncle Nasser and Ruba lived happily together as a married couple for a year and two months. Then, on 7 October 2023, the war began, and everything turned upside down.

At the beginning of the genocide, they moved from their house to shelter in Al-Rafee school in Jabalia, which was meant to be a safe place in the north of Gaza. But on 17 November 2023, the Israeli occupation started shooting tear gas and white phosphorus bombs at the school. They couldn’t do anything to protect themselves from the toxic gases because the school’s windows had all been shattered by the force of repeated airstrikes, leaving the frames empty and the rooms exposed.

Subscribe now

During the bombing, they were forced to leave their five-month-old baby, Tohfa, in a safe-room designated for children in such situations. But the Israeli army increased the bombing and dropped leaflets telling people to leave for the south because the north was now a dangerous place. So Nasser and his family were forced to move to Deir al-Balah days later to keep them safe. For many families, moving there was the only hope to find temporary shelter away from direct airstrikes hitting their neighbourhoods.

Ruba was only 19 at this time, and her daughter was still very young and needed care. Ruba was far away from her family, but she carried the water and cooked food over a dangerous fire. This was the first time she had used fire to cook, and it was never easy. Meanwhile, my uncle Nasser was working from dawn until night to earn money and secure food for his family amid the war and rising prices.

Shattered souls

Around this time, Ruba started to feel a strange pain under her left arm. The pain extended to her chest and shoulder, but because of what was happening around her, she didn’t take much notice. She thought it was probably because of carrying water or working too much.

After the first ceasefire in Gaza ended in November 2023, Ruba returned to her damaged house. At this point, she was relieved and happy. With her help, my uncle Nasser repaired as much as he could. But here in Gaza, nothing beautiful lasts. The war soon returned - mercilessly. They had to leave their house again, this time with shattered souls. The pain also soon returned to Ruba from under her left arm to her chest and shoulder, and it was more intense now.

Nasser took her to many doctors and hospitals, but they couldn’t determine the exact cause because the necessary medical imaging was not available. Doctors kept saying it was inflammation, torn tendons, or nerve damage, and they always prescribed painkillers or antibiotics. But the symptoms kept returning, more painful each time. She couldn’t sleep at night, she cried constantly and told her family: “I’m dying”.

By the time the second round of the war paused in January 2025, a boil-like swelling appeared under Ruba’s arm, extending to her chest. Nasser took her to Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, where doctors referred her to Al-Shifa Hospital. There, doctors asked Ruba to undergo an urgent surgery to remove what they thought was a boil. But when the doctor started the operation, he was surprised to find that she didn’t have a boil. He became nervous and searched quickly for the source of pain. He cleaned the wound and ended the operation.

A week later, Ruba’s pain returned mercilessly, and the swelling reappeared in the same place. She returned to Al-Shifa Hospital, where doctors asked her to undergo scans and medical imaging. On 6 December 2025, they requested another surgery to take a biopsy from the swelling, which they now suspected was a cancerous tumour.

Ruba, Nasser, and their families were forced to wait two weeks for the results. The pain increased, yet she wasn’t allowed to take any medication. This was not only because appropriate options were scarce, but also because the doctors feared that giving her the wrong treatment without a clear diagnosis might worsen her condition. We prayed for her, asking God to protect her and not deprive her daughter of her mother.

Cancer diagnosis

After 10 days, the results arrived, and unfortunately, Ruba was diagnosed with malignant cancer. We were all shocked at the news. Ruba burst into tears, thinking about her child, her life, and her future. Doctors said that her case was considered untreatable in Gaza and she must travel outside as soon as possible to receive proper medical care. So far, that has been impossible because of Israeli restrictions.

Ruba loves tea, spicy food, and life in general. Ruba has a family, dreams, and an innocent child, Tohfa, who needs her mother. When I asked Tohfa what her mother has, she replied innocently, “Mama fiha Wawa hana,” which means, “My mum has pain here,” then she pointed to her arm. All night, she asks where her mother is and keeps calling for her. Tohfa is consumed with happiness when we tell her that she will visit her mother at the hospital. Ruba is not just my uncle’s wife. I consider her my sister. Her kindness and love for others define her. Ruba deserves the best.

The genocide in Gaza has severely damaged the healthcare system. Many hospitals and clinics have been destroyed, making it near-impossible to treat patients. There is a serious shortage of medicines, medical equipment, as well as doctors and nurses. In addition, power, fuel and water cuts make it difficult to use the available medical machines and maintain sterile conditions.

Subscribe now

Despite the “ceasefire”, the Israelis are only allowing a small percentage of the aid that is needed to support people in Gaza. As a result, many people, including my aunt and uncle, now rely on humanitarian organisations, which are facing new restrictions placed on them by the Israelis.

The shortage of medicines and medical equipment has worsened. We always have to wait in long lines to be given a prescription to buy the medicine from a pharmacy. Then, often, the medicine is not available in the pharmacies and, if it is, the price is exorbitantly high and therefore unaffordable. Hospitals say that more than half of the medicines and most other medical supplies are gone because only a small part of the needed aid is allowed in.

Toxic weapons

The effects of chemical and other weapons on human beings are well-documented. I believe Ruba’s illness, as well as those of many cancer patients, can be traced directly to the toxic gases, the residue of rockets, the phosphorus, and the internationally banned explosives used on us by Israel.

There are currently around 11,000 cancer patients who require ongoing medical care in Gaza, according to World Health Organization (WHO) data, citing the Gaza Ministry of Health. Many of these patients are able to trace their illnesses directly to the aftermath of the weapons being used by the Israelis, which has led to urgent calls from human rights groups for an independent international investigation to hold Israel accountable for using prohibited substances.

We will not forget or forgive the people who caused the deadly illnesses of Gazans. Or anyone who could have prevented these toxic and internationally-banned weapons from being used, knowing full well their long-term effects.

The healthcare system in Gaza has been almost completely destroyed by Israel. If Ruba’s condition had been discovered earlier, she might have been able to recover before the cancer spread. Ruba is now waiting for her fate to be decided. She has recently received her first dose of chemotherapy, yet her condition remains unstable. Her husband and family are doing everything they can to process her travel documents, struggling to secure a way for her to leave Gaza for treatment before it’s too late. However, so far, all their efforts have been to no avail.

We try to escape reality, but the war lives inside us, leaving its marks physically on our bodies and psychologically on our souls.

Left to die

This is a story of a people being left to die slowly. And it is not only about Ruba. All cancer patients, and others with life-threatening conditions, must have their right to travel as soon as possible, without restrictions, to receive proper medical care. Our healthcare system has been dismantled by Israel in full view of the world - and many so-called “civilised” countries have supplied the weapons used to do it. These patients are not numbers or statistics: they are human beings with shattered and broken souls. Ruba and every patient in Gaza need the world’s attention: they deserve life, without humiliation, waiting, or borders.

The situation for patients in Gaza remains uncertain and unfair. While some emergency cases are allowed to travel outside Gaza, this happens based on the discretion of the occupation authorities. Many patients have been waiting for a long time, and whether someone is allowed to leave often depends on luck or chance. No clear rules are known. The process is opaque.

The world is required to do more than express sympathy. It must demand that Israel allow immediate access to treatment for all patients in Gaza, permit travel for those who need it, and take responsibility for protecting their right to life. Israel, as the occupying power, bears responsibility for the destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system and for restricting patients’ movement. Countries that continue to provide support also bear responsibility. Urgent action is needed.

***

Alaa Dmeida is a 20-year-old English Literature student at the Islamic University of Gaza and a writer who is striving to convey the voices of the oppressed people in Gaza.

By Huda Skaik in Gaza City

Israel’s decision to bar 37 international humanitarian organisations from operating in the occupied Palestinian territory from the beginning of this month did not come as a shock to those of us living in Gaza. It was merely confirmation that the Netanyahu government is intent on continuing its genocidal policies by other means. It also confirmed that this genocide has never been just about bombs and tanks. In reality, it is about systematically dismantling every structure that allows Palestinians to survive, endure, and bear witness to what is being inflicted on them.

Israel revoked the operating licences of the aid groups, including Doctors Without Borders and the Norwegian Refugee Council, for failing to comply with new government regulations. The new rules require international NGOs working in Gaza and the occupied West Bank to provide extremely detailed information on staff members, funding, and operations. The aid organisations have responded by saying that they conduct all the due diligence required. Some have added that these new rules passed by the Israeli Knesset go further than in any other countries in which they operate.

Subscribe now

During nearly two years of genocide, Gaza has been turned into a laboratory of engineered deprivation. Hospitals have been destroyed, water infrastructure dismantled, bakeries shut down, and borders sealed. Aid convoys have been obstructed, delayed, and attacked. Nearly everyone in Gaza has been displaced at least once, and many multiple times. Now, Israel seeks to institutionalise this violence by criminalising humanitarian work itself, under the pretext of new “regulatory” requirements imposed by an occupying power on an occupied population. Another totally illegal move.

From Gaza, this decision reads as another example of collective punishment. International organisations have been among the last remaining lifelines for a population deliberately pushed to the brink by famine, disease and psychological torture. Aid agencies have provided food in markets (although people often cannot afford to buy it), and they have provided medicine in hospitals stripped of electricity and anaesthesia. They have often been a lifeline for us.

Witnesses

Another important element of their role is that aid workers are often the ones who hear our stories because journalists are not allowed to enter. With borders sealed and communication networks often collapsing, they are the “outsiders” we are allowed to speak to. Expelling these organisations and aid workers is a deliberate act that will deepen a humanitarian catastrophe engineered by Israel itself and increase our isolation. International media have also reported that some materials normally provided by aid agencies will now be released by Israel. This is a part of Israel’s plan to use aid to allow certain favoured armed groups to gain leverage.

The timing is also telling. As international scrutiny intensifies and evidence of war crimes continues to mount, Israel is tightening control over witnesses. Aid organisations do more than deliver relief: they document violations, count civilians killed, record testimonies, and challenge official narratives. Silencing them is part of a broader effort to control the narrative of Gaza. Israel wants to control who speaks, who is believed, and whose suffering is rendered invisible.

Having lived through siege, starvation, displacement and repeated ceasefire violations, I have seen how aid is already treated as conditional and expendable rather than a right. One example is that supplies enter Gaza, but there are no longer the professionals needed to use them because doctors have been killed or abducted. Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, a leading paediatrician at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, was unlawfully abducted by Israeli forces on 27 December 2024 and remains in an Israeli prison. Aid workers themselves have been targeted and buried beneath the same rubble as those they were trying to save. At least 562 aid workers, including 376 UN staff, have been killed in Gaza since 7 October 2023.

The latest ban is the logical extension of that violence: if you cannot fully destroy life, you turn to suffocating it slowly. If you cannot kill them all, you will make living impossible.

Another layer of death

Israel’s claim of “regulating” international organisations cannot be separated from its long history of restricting Palestinian civil society. These regulations are not neutral safeguards: they are political filters designed to ensure that only compliant, Israel-controlled aid is allowed. This kind of aid feeds bodies while ignoring the cause of the hunger - and treats genocide as a natural disaster rather than a deliberate crime. In the face of mass killing, this neutrality is a form of complicity.

What does it mean to ban aid in a place where more than 80% of the population depends on humanitarian assistance to survive? It means weaponising hunger. It means turning winter into a death sentence for families living in tents. It means telling mothers that formula exists, but not for their children. It means telling the wounded that treatment exists, but not for their injuries. It is an extension of the siege by administrative decree.

From Gaza, the message is clear: banning aid organisations will not bring security, peace or stability. It will just add another layer of death to an already-devastated territory. It also exposes, yet again, the moral collapse of an international system that allows an occupying power to decide who may eat, heal, or live.

The question facing the international community is no longer whether Israel is “going too far” – that line was crossed long ago. Now the real question is whether the world will accept a new norm: one where an occupying power is allowed to starve, bomb and systematically suffocate an entire population into submission without accountability.

Because if the world allows Israel to ban aid organisations with no consequences, it is not just turning its back on Gaza – it is turning its back on the very principle that human life is worth protecting, regardless of who holds the power. History will remember who starved Gaza – and who stood by while humanitarianism was outlawed and extinguished.

***

Huda Skaik is an English literature student and a journalistic writer from Gaza. She is a member of We Are Not Numbers, and she is also a contributor for The New Arab, Electronic Intifada, Middle East Eye and WRMEA. She has a strong interest in reporting and writing.

In Gaza this year, Christmas arrives stripped of its core: joy. Prayers are still murmured, candles still glow in the shadows, and churches—some damaged, some barely intact—remain standing. Yet the spirit of celebration is missing, overshadowed by a grief too heavy to carry. For Gaza’s dwindling Christian community, Christmas is no longer a time of gathering or celebration, but a reminder of what—and who—is no longer there.

On 24 December 2025 night, I went to the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza City, where the mass was held, and the hymns were recited. I spoke with three Christian people and asked them to provide me with how Christmas feels this year. They shared with me how they prepared for Christmas in previous years, and how this year is different by describing for me the atmosphere of this night.

Subscribe now

“Our priest gave us gifts — I’m really grateful for his love and kindness”

Jehan Tarazi, 11, one of many children from Gaza’s Christian community who have been living through displacement, siege, and deep loss. Like many, she carries the weight of memory.

“We had so much fun decorating the tree and the church,” Jehan says eagerly, “but if the genocide hadn’t happened, and if we hadn’t lost anyone, we would have been even happier.”

“We’re really happy we got to celebrate the glorious birth of Jesus,” she says with a smile. “I miss the people we lost from the church,” she adds. “They used to sing with us during mass… I wish they were still here.”

This year, like many others, her family couldn’t travel to see relatives due to the ongoing siege. The separation is painful.

“We can’t celebrate safely or without fear. We couldn’t travel to be with our relatives because of the situation.”

Despite everything, Jehan remains thankful.

“Our priest gave us gifts — I’m really grateful for his love and kindness.”

When asked what she wishes for, Jehan’s words carry the kind of clarity only a child can offer: “I hope life goes back to normal. I wish this genocidal war was just a dream and we hadn’t lost our loved ones, and I hope the genocide never comes back. I also hope next year will be better, that Gaza will be okay, and we’ll have rebuilt it.”

“Praying in the Church of the Nativity, where Christ was born, has a special meaning, just like the first time a Muslim prays in Al-Aqsa Mosque”

At 31 years old, Yousef Tarazi never imagined celebrating another Christmas under siege. A member of Gaza’s Christian community, Yousef now finds himself living, praying, and working inside the same church where he once celebrated the birth of Christ in joy — but now, he does so as a displaced person, with his life packed into plastic bags.

“This year is especially hard,” he begins. “After two years of genocide, we’ve lost everything — friends in the attacks on Gaza’s churches, our homes, our sense of stability. Many Christians are still displaced, using the church as a shelter.”

Some families, he says, returned to their damaged homes and came to mass dressed in their finest, attempting to honour the holiday spirit. “But I’m still here, in the church, with no privacy or independence. I sleep here, I work here, I pray here. I don’t feel like I have a life anymore.”

Yousef speaks with the weight of grief. Before the genocide, Christmas was full of spiritual warmth. His community would travel to Bethlehem and Jerusalem, cities deeply connected to the Christian faith, to pray and gather. “Praying in the Church of the Nativity, where Christ was born, has a special meaning, just like the first time a Muslim prays in Al-Aqsa Mosque,” he says. “It’s ours. Who is the occupier to deny us the right to pray in our own sacred places?”

After prayers, the celebrations would continue with social visits and community gatherings — all now lost to the sound of drones and displacement.

“I miss my friends so much. I still remember them… but I don’t feel peace anymore. I want to live a new life,” he expresses.

When asked what message he’d like to send to the world, he pauses. Then, with striking honesty, he says: “I don’t even know what language the world understands anymore, to be honest.”

“We Used to Dance and Visit Each Other. Now We Just Try to Heal”

For Fouad Al-Najjar, 13, Christmas this year feels like no other. It’s the first in Gaza since two years of genocidal war — and although there is a temporary truce, the absence of peace is unmistakable.

“This Christmas feels completely different,” he says quietly. “After two years of genocide, with all the destruction and lack of resources, we’ve lost so many loved ones — people we used to be happy with, people who stood by our side with love and peace between us.”

Before the genocide, Christmas in Gaza was filled with life. A massive tree stood proudly in the church courtyard. Families would visit each other’s homes, exchange greetings, sing, dance, and play games like Bingo. They would travel to Jerusalem and Bethlehem to pray at the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — sacred rituals now blocked by siege and separation.

“Now we can’t do any of that. We used to put up a huge tree in the yard, but now it’s just not here anymore,” Fouad explains. “We can’t go visit each other, and even though there’s a ceasefire, it hasn’t brought peace. They still shoot sometimes.”

Subscribe now

Despite displacement and loss, the Christian community has found quiet strength. “Even though many of us are scattered and displaced, we didn’t let that stop us from celebrating,” he says. “This year, the Christmas celebration was only a prayer and a small gathering in the yard of the Holy Family Church.”

Fouad sees value in this togetherness — even when everything else has fallen apart. “Being next to each other and supporting one another helps heal a little bit of the pain from losing people.”

When asked what he misses most, his answer is simple and powerful: “I miss peace the most. And the people we lost. And visiting family.”

Christmas in Gaza no longer arrives with the certainty of joy or the comfort of tradition. It comes fragmented, held together by memory, faith, and an unyielding insistence on dignity in the face of erasure. For Gaza’s Christians, the holy season has been reduced to its barest essence: prayer without celebration, gathering without safety, and hope without guarantees. What remains is not silence, but a quiet resistance and a refusal to let faith, identity, and community be extinguished alongside homes, churches, and lives.

The testimonies of Jehan, Yousef, and Fouad reveal a shared truth across generations: that loss has reshaped the meaning of Christmas itself. For children, it is a season haunted by absence; for adults, a reminder of stolen stability and denied sacredness; for families, a time marked by separation rather than reunion. Yet within this devastation, there is a persistent act of holding on. Candles are still lit. Hymns are still sung. Prayers are still whispered beneath damaged ceilings. These acts may seem small, but in Gaza, they are profound declarations of existence.

What Gaza’s Christians ask of the world is neither pity nor symbolic gestures. They ask to be seen fully—as a living community, not a vanishing one; as people of faith whose sacred spaces are targeted, whose traditions are interrupted, and whose losses are ongoing. Their Christmas is not a story of seasonal sorrow alone, but a reflection of a broader Palestinian reality under siege: one where ceasefires do not guarantee safety, where survival itself is an act of defiance, and where faith becomes a refuge when everything else collapses.

In the shadow of genocide, Gaza’s Christians celebrate Christmas not because the wound has healed, but because abandoning it would mean surrendering memory, belief, and identity. Their silent joy is not forgetfulness—it is endurance. And in that endurance lies a question the world cannot continue to ignore: how long will faith be asked to carry what justice refuses to hold?

On October 10, 2025, while I was studying for my final university exams, my father shouted:

“The ceasefire agreement has been signed. Finally, the genocide is over.”

For a moment, I thought the worst chapter of my life had ended. The airstrikes, the bombs—everything would stop. I could finally return to the rubble of my home after being displaced to the south of Gaza. I thought all of us in Gaza would breathe life again.

Two months after the US-brokered ceasefire—which is far from a real ceasefire—came into effect, Gaza appears comparatively calm, but it is not at peace. For example, my home in Jabalia is still inaccessible; it remains classified as a “yellow zone.”

The Israeli occupation classified areas of Gaza into 3 zones based on three colours: red, yellow and green. These colours are zones that risk becoming set in stone. They do not constitute traffic rules; they determine our survival. The danger of this classification lies not only in its immediate moment, but in the possibility of it becoming a permanent reality, as has previously happened in parts of the West Bank and inside Palestinian communities within Israel, where arrangements presented as temporary measures turned into long-term realities. This is what concerns us most. In this way, war does not simply end; rather, the future of civilians is entirely redrawn.

Subscribe now

The Red Zone: The Forbidden Zone. These are areas of complete danger and a total ban on existence.

The Yellow Zone: The Gamble Zone. This is where my city, Jabalia, lies. Here, returning is fraught with danger. You might return, or you might not return at all. Our fate here hangs on the “mood of the occupation forces” and daily risk calculations.

The Green Zone: The Permitted Zones. The Israeli occupation claims that this is a ‘safe’ area.

But as a direct witness from Gaza, I can say without any doubt that the Israeli occupation has repeatedly violated the ceasefire agreement in the Green Zone.

For instance, on December 19, 2025, an Israeli missile turned a wedding in a shelter at ‘Shuhada Gaza’ school near ‘Al-Dura Hospital’ in a neighbourhood called Al-Tuffah into a tragedy, killing at least 25 Palestinians.

This school was supposed to be a safe shelter in the Green Zone. Moreover, this is supposed to be a ceasefire, so it should have been respected, and people should not have been killed.

When we learned the news, fear returned mercilessly. My mother had relatives sheltering there. She called them, hands shaking, tears streaming, until my mother’s cousin Mai answered with a trembling voice: “We survived by a miracle.” She recounted how, without warning, smoke, stones, and glass entered the classroom. They could not see or breathe, and debris was everywhere. They ran through the streets without knowing where to go, leaving everything behind—mattresses, blankets, food, and winter essentials—carrying only the clothes they were wearing.

Mai told us that they went out running, pulling the children from among the rubble in the darkness of night. They found themselves running through the streets, not knowing where to go. Mai added, “Even if we survived, we would never forget the memories of seeing others fall in front of us, the building collapsing before our eyes, and all those details”.

While they were running in the streets, a family they had never met or known before came forward and offered to host them in their tent to spend the night there. They shared dinner together. This is the way of us, the people of Gaza; we always stand by one another and support each other, even if it is in a tent.

Now, Mai and her family will set up a tent in a camp that won’t protect them from the bitter cold or the heavy winter rains.

Later news reports confirmed that the school building near our relatives’ building was the target. A simple wedding without decorations, or fancy halls, or embellishments, turned into a miserable tragedy. Five people were killed and others injured in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a school sheltering displaced people, according to Al-Akhbar newspaper, citing the Palestinian Civil Defence.

Subscribe now

The tragedy did not end with the explosion. According to Al Jazeera, Israeli forces prevented ambulance and civil defence crews from accessing the site for more than two hours, delaying the evacuation of the wounded and the retrieval of the dead following the strike on a school sheltering displaced people in Gaza. It also reported that the Israeli occupation claimed they “regret any harm to uninvolved civilians in Gaza.”

It is hard to see how “regret” can make up for the lives lost and the suffering caused.

Words of regret do not make sense when the same tragedies keep happening. And yet, the world stays strangely silent in front of these massacres, without taking any real action. It feels as if the suffering of the innocent is ignored, leaving the victims alone in their pain.

This incident is just one of many massacres and violations carried out by Israeli forces after the ceasefire agreement, which they have violated 738 times since its signing on 10 October 2025, according to Al-Jazeera.

Moreover, since 10 October, when the agreement went into effect, Israel has killed at least 394 people, according to Al-Jazeera.

The school was named ‘Shuhada Gaza’ (The Martyrs of Gaza). We used to think it was just a name to honour those who fell in previous wars, but on that night, the name became a haunting reality of the present.

This is a one-sided ceasefire. Israel decided when it began; it then violates it, and the world remains silent as if nothing had really happened. Twenty-five people, who thought they were safe once the ceasefire agreement was signed, were killed. Their hopes perished with the ceasefire.

The story of Shuhada Gaza school is not just one tragedy—it is the reality of life under Israeli occupation, where a ceasefire exists only on paper, but the suffering of Palestinians continues.

By Amna A. Dmeida

Amna is a writer and English Literature student from Gaza, who bears witness to the daily suffering of Gazans and documents their lived realities through storytelling.

“Wa anta ta‘ūd ilā al-bayt baytak, fakkir bighayrak, lā tansa sha‘b al-khiyām.”

“And as you return to your home, think of others; do not forget the people of the tents.”

Mahmoud Darwish wrote these words, calling on the world to remember those forced to live beneath canvas and dust. I am sorry, Mahmoud, but allow me to clarify something important: I feel a deep anger toward the phrase; “people of the tents.” Palestinians were never meant to live in tents — we once lived in beautiful, dignified homes, filled with life and memory. We were pushed into tents by force. The tent is not who we are; it is not our identity. It is a temporary wound, a reality the occupation has imposed upon us, not a name we must inherit or accept.

In recent days, people across the World have seen shocking images of flooding and inundation in Gaza, heaping yet more misery on a whole people displaced. For two years, the people of Gaza have endured a genocide that tore apart their homes, schools, and neighbourhoods, forcing them into tents. No matter how much fabric is added, no matter how the edges are trimmed, a tent can never replace the solid four walls of a home.

Inside the tents, when it is not raining, heat burns the skin by day and cold bites at night. And then when it rains, the water seeps through the seams, wind rips the fabric apart, and every flimsy corner reminds families of what they have lost. Water must be fetched from far away, and despite the ceasefire, food arrives in meagre portions. Even in sleep, fear enters the very soul —the thunder of shelling, the rattle of machine guns, the grind of tanks rolling nearby.

Subscribe now

What has been lived, and what continues to be lived, is akin to a wound that no shelter, no money, and no consolation can heal.

Aseel, a translation student at the Islamic University of Gaza, now lives in the south Gaza Strip after being forced to leave her home. She recalls the first days in the tents with a mixture of shock and exhaustion.

“At first, we found ourselves in the tents during a heatwave,” she says. “The heat inside was suffocating. Even when the sun was not at its peak, the temperature inside felt unbearable. I couldn’t stay in the tent for more than a few seconds. Most of the day, I had to sit outside, just trying to survive until nightfall.”

But the brief relief of night brought another challenge. “As soon as darkness fell, the cold was sharp and merciless. There was nothing to keep us warm. Dew would gather in the morning, and whenever the wind shifted the tarps, water would fall on us. When it rained, even lightly, the wind would tear at the tents. Winter in these tents is a nightmare,” she explains. “Every day, we hoped for relief, or at least for more tents, or for prices to be lowered so people could cover themselves from rain and protect the few belongings that may have survived the displacement.”

Even more frightening than the temperature extremes, she says, is the danger from nearby shelling. “The tents offer no real protection. Even a tiny piece of shrapnel can pierce the fabric and injure someone inside. I have seen fragments fall through the tents while people were sleeping. That fear never leaves you.”

Life in these tents, with the constant extremes of heat and cold, and the ever-present threat of shrapnel, has turned each day into a struggle not just for comfort, but for survival. “Every morning, we wake up knowing that simply staying alive is the first victory of the day,” Aseel adds, her voice heavy with the weight of experience.

Jumana, a 20-year-old living now in Al-Mawasi, Gaza, describes her life in the tents as a never-ending nightmare.

But she says, “They are better than nothing. Many people around us don’t even have a place to sleep”

Jumana first had to leave her home on October 14, 2023, from Tel al-Hawa. “At first, we thought we would just go to my grandmother’s house in Rafah for a week or two and then return. But until today, we have not been able to go back,” she says.

Among the hardest losses, she recalls, was leaving behind the energy and life from their previous home in Khan Yunis. “We lost our house, our belongings, our sense of stability. Nothing remains.”

Aid from organisations has been limited. “No one really looked after us,” she notes. Now, all they hope for is some safety and a few solar panels to make the tents slightly more bearable.

Her message to the world is clear: “We are people like you. We had lives, ambitions, dreams. We lived comfortably once, more than many of you. We are not asking for just a little medicine or food—we want to be seen as human beings, not just numbers.”

Subscribe now

Noor, a second-year university student, now lives in a tent in Al-Mawasi after a long and painful displacement that began in December 2023. She describes her daily life as “extremely difficult, each day much like the one before.”

“We had to leave our home after pamphlets were dropped over Khan Yunis on December 2, 2023. The experience was terrifying and difficult. We haven’t returned home since, even after Khan Yunis was considered relatively safe—the house was destroyed, unfortunately.”

“My home, which gave me a sense of safety and stability, my clothes, my memories, my university certificates—all gone. The hardest moment was when my cousin, who was like a sister to me, was killed. I still cannot get past that. Alhamdulillah for what remains.”

Since being displaced, Noor has moved several times: “At first, we stayed with my cousin for four months, then in a room with a kitchen and bathroom for a year, and now, for about five months, I’ve been living in the tents.”

“We cook, we organise the tent, and we try to protect ourselves from the heat during the day and the cold at night. There is no privacy at all. The divider between our neighbours and us is just a piece of cloth,” she says.

“Sometimes there isn’t enough water, and the places we buy it from are far away. We have to carry it long distances on foot. Food is very limited in variety, and everything else has become a struggle,” she adds.

“Sometimes, especially with the sounds of nearby explosions or shelling, I feel threatened. Some of our neighbours were injured, but thankfully, my family is safe.”

Yet she knows that tents are never truly secure: “There is no real protection, but we try to be careful and stay away from dangerous areas as much as possible—even though no place is completely safe.”

She recalls one of the scariest moments of her life: “When the land next to ours was bombed, my brother, my uncles, and their children were there. It was the most terrifying moment in my life. Thank God they all came out safe, but their bodies were covered in ash, and the smell of gunpowder was everywhere. I will never forget that day.”

Over the past few days, I reached out to everyone I had previously interviewed, wanting to check on them after the heavy rain and understand what they went through that night. Their responses revealed a mixture of exhaustion, acceptance, and a quiet resignation that words can barely describe.

Aseel told me, “Alhamdulillah, we are okay. In the end, these are only tents and tarps — of course water will leak. You can’t sleep the whole night because when the water gathers on the tarp, the wooden beams can break from the weight. Still, we are better off than others, and others are better off than us. May God help the people. Hasbun Allah wa ni‘ma al-wakeel [God is sufficient for us, and He is the best disposer of affairs].”

Noor shared something similar: water had entered her tent too. In fact, everyone confirmed that their tents flooded, but what struck me most was their acceptance. They reminded me that despite their misery, others have no shelter at all — no tent, no tarp, no place to escape the storm.

I interviewed one more woman, Amina Jaser, about life in the tents. She begins quietly, “We are seven in this family. My mother and father are old and need care. I’m also responsible for the wife of a martyr. And today, after everything we’ve lived through—displacement, fear, hunger—we’re still here, trying to stay alive.”

“The constant displacement destroyed my health,” Amina says. “Each time we were forced to move, I felt my body collapsing. I reached a point where I couldn’t walk properly. I couldn’t breathe. And all our life became queues—bread, water, the charity kitchen. Even the bathroom has a line.”

“I need monthly medication,” she explains. “I haven’t been able to buy it for a long time.”

Then winter arrived, and the tent became a trap.

“That night when the heavy rain came,” she says, “we woke up in the dark to find everything soaked—our blankets, our clothes, the few things we kept with us. The cold hit us like a knife. The phone broke from the water. We stayed up until morning because there was nowhere dry to lie down.”

She looks away for a moment, then speaks again; “Tell me—where do we go? At night, in winter, the tent feels like a grave.”

“We don’t have enough bedding,” she says. “We don’t have transportation to return to Gaza City. And with the prices so high, food is barely available. I became malnourished. My whole family did.”

“Rents are impossible,” Amina tells me. “There’s no income. Everything depends on aid. And even that is not enough.”

Yet she speaks without anger, only with a voice worn by months of hardship.

“We try to stay patient,” she says softly. “But there is a limit to how much a person can bear.”

Her final words are simple, but they carry the weight of an entire life overturned:

“We are not asking for much. Just safety, medicine, warmth, and dignity. We are human beings—nothing more, nothing less.”

A tent cannot replace the ground where families built their lives. It cannot carry the weight of memory or shield children from fear. For two years, the people of Gaza have endured burning heat, freezing nights, hunger, and the constant threat of death.

But it has not only been the tents that are flooded. In my own neighbourhood, five houses were completely submerged, along with the streets—everything was underwater. This is our reality: at 3 a.m., the neighbourhood was not asleep; it was drowning in water and sewage, and the streets had turned into rivers.

The world has witnessed these horrors for more than two years without intervening. The question is not whether Gaza’s people are suffering—that is clear. The question is: what does it mean for humanity if no one takes meaningful steps to bring this genocide to an end?