Shattered Map, Unbroken Faith: A Gazan’s Longing for Al-Aqsa

A personal testament of memory, exile, and an unbreakable spiritual bond.

In the quietest corner of my room in Gaza City, a small object stands as a silent witness to a decade of my life. It is a bronze-toned carved map of Palestine, its surface marked by an embossed silhouette of al-Aqsa Mosque at its heart. It was a gift from my Arabic teacher, Husam Thabet, eleven years ago, a reward for a boy who found refuge in the rhythm of words.

Today, as an English literature student, I keep this map perched atop Adele Geras’s Lizzie’s Wish, Holly Webb’s Izzy’s River, and David Colbert’s The Magical Worlds of Narnia. It is more than a souvenir; it is the physical bridge between the Western canon I study and the Eastern soul I inhabit.

During the heavy bombardment on Gaza City, the very foundations of the small house my family rented after our return from the south in March 2025 shook with a violence that words struggle to capture. The low, guttural hum of missiles caused the bronze-toned map to plunge from its shelf, shattering into jagged shards on the dusty floor. I remember gathering those pieces with a trembling hand, feeling as though I were picking up the broken limbs of my own identity.

I spent weeks painstakingly glueing it back together, piece by piece. The cracks remain—visible white seams running through the northern side of the map, but the Dome in the centre stands intact. For a Gazan, al-Aqsa is exactly like that broken map: scarred by occupation, but yet stubbornly held together by the glue of our collective yearning.

The world consumes news of al-Aqsa through sanitised, clinical headlines of “security restrictions.” But for us, the total closure of the Mosque throughout this past Ramadan was more than a restriction; it was a form of spiritual suffocation that defined our existence.

Geometry Exile

As the iron chains tighten on the gates of Jerusalem’s Old City during the last forty days, I felt them tightening around my own wrists. This is why I call it the “geometry of exile” — a deliberate strategy to prove that we are mere numbers without a geographical or spiritual centre. It is an attempt to convince a people that their holy sites can be turned into silent museums while the indigenous owners are caged behind concrete walls and drone-filled skies.

​This is a war of erasure. While the Israeli occupation forces prevented us from reaching our heart in Jerusalem, they were systematically levelling our spiritual landmarks in Gaza. To date, over 1,160 mosques in the Strip—approximately 95% of our worship of places—have been bombed.

I find myself constantly returning to this specific loss. In a previous report on the systematic destruction of our places of worship, I described the soul-reviving sight of residents praying in the ruins of a destroyed mosque, their foreheads touching the rubble.

But a haunting question remains: How do you restore a connection to a place you are forbidden to touch? How do you heal a wound that is kept open by a military order?

Fading Light

This year, as we entered the second week of Ramadan and began preparing our hearts for the final ten days, the skyline of Gaza was crowded with the weary silhouettes of tents: their frayed fabric flapping like broken wings in the wind.

I went to great lengths to secure a stable internet connection for my 66-year-old grandmother, Hanan. In a city where connectivity is a luxury and a target, I wanted to give her a window to al-Aqsa courtyards. I wanted her to hear the Taraweeh prayers from her scarred living room, to find a moment of peace amidst the genocide.

But on the 11th of Ramadan, that window was slammed shut. The total closure of the mosque hit us like a physical blow. I watched the light fade from my grandmother’s eyes, a reflection of the darkness that had fallen over the Holy Sanctuary.

That night, I retreated to the thin mattress I sleep on every night amidst the chaos. I lay there, consumed by a heavy-hearted dejection, staring into the dark until my eyes finally closed in exhaustion. For over a month, we lived in this state of enforced spiritual starvation.

“I used to go with my father,” my grandmother whispered to me recently, her fingers tracing the air as if she could still feel the cool, ancient limestone of the Old City. To her, the Mosque is a vivid, sensory memory. To me, it is a myth—a celestial city I can only visit through a screen that often goes black.

It is a soul-crushing realisation that a tourist from London or New York can walk the ancient stones of the Old City, while I, whose ancestors’ bones are buried in this soil, am kept in a cage.

Final Wish

This sense of being shut out from life itself reached its peak when I spoke with my cousin, Dunia. We chose to stay in Gaza City, refusing the IOF orders to head south in October 2025, clinging to the ruins of our neighbourhood. “Ali,” she asked, “If we are destined to be killed by an air strike in the coming hours, what is the one thing you want to do before you die?” I didn’t hesitate: “I want to spend one day in al-Aqsa. I want to see the Green of the Dome not on a digital pixel, but as a sun-drenched reality.” It is a simple wish that, in the logic of the occupation, is treated as a security threat.

In those long, dark nights, I began to write my will. Not a list of possessions, for we have little left, but a will in the form of a poem titled “If I Don’t Make It to Jerusalem”. I wrote it because I know that our love for the Mosque is what they fear most; it is the thread they cannot cut, the memory they cannot bomb.

As news reached us yesterday of the gates finally reopening, the irony was not lost on us in Gaza. A physical gate may swing open in Jerusalem, but the road remains blocked by more than just iron bars. For those of us living amidst the rubble of 1,160 destroyed mosques, the opening of a door we cannot reach is a cruel reminder of our immobilisation.

The occupation tries to distract the world with new horrors every day—laws to execute the Palestinian prisoners or the expansion of the Yellow Line—hoping we will be too busy mourning our children to remember our sanctuary. But they fail to understand that for a Palestinian, al-Aqsa Mosque and family are the same. Both are sacred, both are besieged.

Sense of Place

My study in English literature has taught me about the sense of place, in the works of the greats, but no novel could prepare me for the loss of place we experience daily. When I read Dickens’ descriptions of London’s fog, I think of the white phosphorus clouds over Gaza. When I study Hardy’s tragic characters tied to their land, I think of my grandmother, Hanan, and her invisible tether to Jerusalem.

Our tragedy is that we are forced to live as ghosts in our own geography, watching through a glass wall as our history is rewritten by those who hold the keys to the gates.

Every morning, the first light of Gaza’s sun hits the repaired carved map in my room. I look at the cracks I mended with my own hands and I see the map of my people’s history. We have been shattered by the vibrations of war, yes. We have been kept from our holy sites for over a month of enforced silence, yes. But we are people who refuse to stay broken. The act of glueing that map back together was not just a hobby; it was an act of resistance. It was a statement that even if they shatter our homes and lock our mosques, the internal map remains unchanged.

The closure of al-Aqsa and the levelling of Gaza’s mosques are two sides of the same coin: a systematic attempt to make us feel like numbers floating in a void, disconnected from our past and our God. But as I look at that carved map, I am reminded that even a shattered piece of stone still dictates the shape of the land. They can chain the gates and level the minarets, but they cannot stop the sunrise from hitting the green and golden domes.

​I will continue to write until the distance between my room and the Mosque is measured in footsteps, not in shards of memory. We are not just numbers; we are the keepers of the gate, even when the gate is closed. Our prayers, though forbidden in the courtyards of Jerusalem, rise from the rubble of Gaza, solid and loud. In the end, it is not the gates that define the sanctuary, but the hearts of those who wait outside them.