Surviving and dying in Gaza

After the last Israeli aggression on Gaza in May 2021, I was already living in despair. It took me a whole year to heal and rebuild, to rehabilitate the dreams and ambitions that had been forced through the mill of Israeli massacres.

In 2021, Israel killed my 67-year old grandmother, my uncle Raed, his wife Shaima, and my seven-month-old cousin, Ibrahim. The other seventeen relatives present in the same house, including 4 men, 3 women, and 10 children under the age of 13, were injured. Half of them spent more than six hours under the rubble, in the dark, waiting to die.

It’s been a year. The wounds have barely begun to heal, the shock of loss still raw. I finished my final year of university, and dared to have hopes for a better future. 

But Israel had other plans, and I should have recognized my own hubris.

On August 5, Friday — the one day in the week reserved for family gatherings and joyful moments — I sat on my laptop after lunch. It was a very normal day until we heard yelling in the streets. Israel had targeted a resistance fighter.

Terrified, I closed my laptop and rushed to check the news. I didn’t expect that everything would escalate so quickly. These terrible moments are a repeat of what we lived through on November 14, 2012, when the same horror was visited upon Gaza, and another resistance fighter was targeted. 

I put my hands on my head, unable to believe what was happening. The news reported that a young child had been killed in a sudden Israeli airstrike. Pictures followed of the injured, who had been doing little more than sitting in the street to escape the indoor heat after Gaza’s only power plant shut down due to Israel’s effective fuel ban on the strip.

Then, our whole apartment shook from the force of nearby shelling. 

“Will we all die?” my 4-year-old sister, Alma, asked me. She almost seemed embarrassed.

“Don’t worry, these are fireworks,” I said. 

Alma is two wars old now. Nothing gets past her, and whatever lies I tell her are instantly mocked. When Israel isn’t able to kill our children, it settles for killing their childhood. 

The clock struck 8 p.m., the exact hour in which I read my family’s surname on the news last year, when Israel committed a massacre against my family in southern Gaza. The temporarily closed wounds reopened, as the whirl of memories from May 2021 revisited me.

The first bombs to drop on Friday dashed the past year’s attempts to normalize what had happened. All my attempts to live my life vanished into thin air with the sound of the first explosion. My many dreams and wishes were whittled down to hoping I wouldn’t lose anyone else this time around.

It’s strange how, in the blink of an eye, all the plans you had suddenly become so insignificant. The stories I was writing aren’t even completed, and the graduation ceremony I was planning on celebrating now seems unfathomable.

My ambitions become isolated to a few more immediate concerns — staying with my family so that we could die or survive together, how to keep wearing my hijab despite the extreme heat, and how to elude my mother’s request for me to get her a spoon from the kitchen, because even one second apart could mean that one of us will die, and the other might live.

Sometimes to survive, you have to die

On Saturday, my eyes brimmed with scalding tears. I read the news of the bombing near the Imad Aqel Mosque, where we used to live. The children killed there were our neighbors. Again, the same street, the same kids, the same pain resurfacing — this time, from an older memory, from my very first war.

I was 8 years old when, on December 27, 2008, at 2:00 a.m., Israeli warplanes hit the Aqel Mosque with two missiles. My childhood friends were massacred in the strike, Tahreer, Dina, Ekram, Jawaher, and Samar Ba’alousha. The beautiful days I spent with them are forever burned into my memory. My family and I survived that night, which none of the paramedics and first responders could believe.

The problem is that with every war you go through, every time you try to move past what happened, they are reborn and relived. 

This is life in Gaza. Sometimes, to survive, you have to die. And to live, you have to die, too. 

Everyone from Gaza has a story like mine, a story that Israel would prefer to manipulate and destroy. They loathe our testimonies, and they would kill them, and all the storytellers if they could. They already have. Despite this, I muster what little strength and energy remains to utter these words, because no matter the pain it costs, these stories are worth telling.