Alia, an aspiring young writer who happens to have been born in Gaza, wonders if anything would be left in her if all her pain were to disappear. But she still believes there’s beauty behind it. Her voice must be heard above the bombs.

The ways in which we allow our work to impact us is also a necessary recognition that the echoes of all the stories we report on will inevitably become parts of us. 

How do parents in Gaza, who are dealing with their own trauma and fear, help their children endure yet another Israeli attack? One parent tells Ziad Ali she attempted to lie to her daughter by saying the explosions were just fireworks, but her child already knows too much. “My daughter did not believe me. I was such a mess. She told me — ‘Mommy, this is a war, not fireworks.’”

For children, home is often the safest place on earth. But every few years in Gaza children’s homes are pushed into the front lines of war.

At a family gathering last May, everyone in Basma Ismail Kurd’s family was looking forward to her niece playing doctor. But after the last escalation between Israel and Hamas, and witnessing death and destruction around her, she no longer wants to become a physician. What do you tell a ten-year-old who has witnessed carnage around her, when you’re also traumatized yourself?

Neuroscientists say memories endure when there is a strong emotion attached to it. After witnessing 264 savage hours of the carpet-bombing of Gaza, it seems impossible to break free from this brain-structured prison.

Having lived through the Intifada, various escalations and four wars in Gaza, I have realized that what doesn’t kill you does not make you stronger, it makes you more vulnerable.

To the world the aggression in Gaza ended once there was a ceasefire. But what the people outside Gaza may not know is that we are living a daily war now, an inner war, as we fight the guilt of surviving and are lost in our attempts to return to normal.

Walaa Ghussein speaks with other young Palestinians who have left Gaza in recent years about how they deal with the ongoing trauma of war in occupation. “I later realized that I’m never ‘post’ my traumas,” Heba Al Hayek tells her. “As a Palestinian, I’m never given a real chance to process because I’m still there even if my body isn’t.”