Writing about Gaza from exile is entirely different. Writing about Gaza from the inside feels like visiting something you love, becoming emotionally charged, then pouring that emotion into text. From the outside, it becomes an act of attachment and longing for everything we write about.
I used to think that distancing myself from Gaza — a society that struggles with everything, even charging a mobile phone or having enough water in the morning — would mean distancing myself from those problems. What happened was exactly the opposite. Being away from Gaza made me more attached to it, and everything, even the most fleeting detail, stole my heart with longing and nostalgia.
It is true that accessing information has become more difficult. Instead of leaving my home in Gaza and heading directly to the place where I wanted to gather information, as I did when I worked inside the Strip — when I could cover all of Gaza in a single day — I now face obstacles. I remember that in earlier stories I could move from Gaza City to Rafah, to the central camps (Deir al-Balah and al-Maghazi), to the north (Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, Jabalia, and Jabalia Camp), and back to Gaza City. Anywhere in Gaza was within reach.
My reporting relied on face-to-face interviews with ordinary people, government officials, or anyone whose testimony I wanted to include in a story. As a native of Gaza, I also found it easy to reach sources and obtain information inside the Strip. Asking one person would lead me to another, then another, until I reached the top of the pyramid and gained access to confidential sources of information.
Obviously, in exile, I have to work overtime to make up for it. It requires building a network of relationships capable of doing work that a phone call alone can’t. It requires sending people on the ground to collect information, and often not in exactly the same way you would have.
I’ve been able to achieve a lot using this method. But there are things that remain missing. Despite repeated attempts to compensate through photos, videos, and exclusive interviews, something about capturing the external details of the scene isn’t available to everyone.
The accumulated longing and nostalgia, however, are what allow me to compensate for it. It builds up with every interview I hear or conduct, and with every background I see in the interview footage, marked by destruction and profound grief everywhere. I lived many of these emotions before leaving, and in that sense, I drew on my own experiences to convey what had happened. What I end up doing is writing a story whose events feel like they happened to me.
