January 10, 2025
I, the creature who once loved mornings the most, can no longer tolerate them.
I wake up trembling. Something in my heart feels wrong, like everything else around me. I wrap my head in three blankets, making sure my ears are covered, but before I can even hear myself breathe, the epic morning noise begins. From beyond the blankets: the sound of my younger siblings quarrelling over half a piece of pita bread.
My mother begins to rebuke them, “You want to embarrass us in the eyes of the neighbours? Everyone’s flour is running out; you’re the only ones shouting about it.”
My head is filled with the desire to leave: to escape this cosmic hell by any means necessary, even if leaving means death. My body is tied down, my joints knotted by fear. I remember my grandmother, who used to relieve my fear after every Israeli aggression with a little olive oil and many prayers. Today, my joints are bound tighter than ever, and my grandmother is not here to comfort me.
The funniest thing of all, and I don’t know if it’s really funny, is that the fear I’m experiencing isn’t a fear of death or annihilation, but rather a fear of life. It’s a fear of the phonetics exam I’m taking in the coming days, of my haphazard Italian learning, of my inability to complete anything, of missing opportunities, of falling behind my classmates at university, of the possibility of gaining or losing weight.
Death has never frightened me; it has only restricted me, casting black, petrified sadness on my heart. But this morning, my fear of life grows and grows, and, with it, a great anger at my inability to overcome fear. I cry under the covers and wish for the return of my grandmother with her tin of olive oil.
We are displaced: my mother, myself, and my four younger siblings (Hadi, Taqwa, Raghad, and Maryam), living in a tent in Deir al-Balah, in the centre of the Gaza Strip. This four-by-four-metre room serves as our living area, bedroom, study and, workspace. Behind a small partition is our kitchen and dining area: two metres by four. Our tent is made of leather with an iron frame and waterproof triangular roof. By this measure, we might be considered aristocratic among the displaced.
My mother is making tea. I no longer get angry about my family waking up at six o’clock, disrupting the only hour of the day when I might have found some peace. While still under the covers, I begin to read from my phone, as I do every morning: the one habit my knotted joints haven’t hindered. My mother places a cup of tea next to my head and brings me ghorayeba (a type of shortbread made from flour, sugar, and ghee). Today is my sister Maryam’s ninth birthday, her second during this genocide. My mother has baked ghorayeba to celebrate.
When Maryam turned eight, she cried every day, asking, “Where’s Dad?” Recently, she’s started to say, “I want to see my grandmother. Why did they kill her?”
In my entire life, I’ve never loved any biscuit more than ghorayeba. I’ve always identified with it. In Arabic, its pronunciation is a variation on the word “strange.” Its texture is so hard that, as soon as you take the first bite, the rest of the biscuit begins to crumble all over your clothes like white snow. It’s fragile like negotiations, pretends to be tough like I do every day, and melts in your mouth just like my toughness melts when I notice the buzzing of Israeli drones above our heads. Ghorayeba can be eaten only once it’s cold. Cold like this tent.
My mother sits beside me, watching, and hoping her ghorayeba will alleviate the depression that’s been eating me up for days. I have no idea how to deal with this depression or how to dampen its severity even a little. So I retreat again under the blankets and continue reading on my phone.
With eight people in one tent, the noise grows louder, soon matched by noise from the surrounding tents. Close to 900 people live around us in this camp. Oh God, how I hate these sounds! By now, the option of getting up has become a must. So I get up. My limbs are still knotted as I tidy my blankets and go to wash my face and brush my teeth. But recently—and by “recently,” I mean “for the last year and a few months”—I’ve been having memory problems. As soon as I reach the small wash-hut beside our tent, I realize I’ve forgotten my toothbrush and have to go back to retrieve it from the empty pea tin I’ve set aside for pens and other random things.
It’s fragile like negotiations, pretends to be tough like I do every day.
The wash-hut is our own construction: built from old pieces of wood and blankets left behind by our former neighbours in the displacement camp in Rafah, before they returned to their homes in al-Qarara (which had not yet been bombed) and we resumed our displacement journey here, to Deir al-Balah. The hut stands beside our tent and contains a 250-litre water barrel and a stove, which we use for cooking during gas shortages. In our tent, the ground is covered by a kind of plastic rug. Here in the hut, the soil is exposed.
Each bathroom in the camp is shared by at least three families, sometimes four. The average size of a family in the camp is six, meaning most bathrooms are shared by at least eighteen people. I am lucky, having to share this room only with a maximum of eleven people.
As I bathe, I notice my hair has grown down to a little below the middle of my back. I want to say it has grown quickly, but then I remember that fifteen months of this genocide have passed. My hair is also falling out at an alarming rate; I don’t know how to stop it.
After washing, I return to the tent and read a few pages of Al-Hamadhani’s Maqamat, borrowed from the only library I can find in Deir al-Balah. Then, I remember my exams are a few days away and I try to revise. I am studying for a degree in English literature, with a minor in translation, at the Islamic University of Gaza, and this is my second year.
At the start of the genocide, the Islamic University was destroyed by Israeli forces. A few weeks later, on December 6, 2023, my beloved professor Refaat Alareer was murdered in a targeted Israeli bombing, which also killed his brother, his sister, and four of his nephews. Six or seven months after the genocide started, our studies resumed online.
Children are milling around me. My mother is trying to bake a birthday cake for Maryam. I put on my Bluetooth headphones, which work in one ear and not the other, and set a phonetics lecture to run at double speed because my laptop battery lasts only an hour and a half. After thirty minutes of loading and reloading the lecture with a crappy internet connection, I haven’t learned a thing.
I’m relapsing again. My anxiety has returned, worse than this morning. I try wrapping my head in the blankets, but nothing stops the feeling this time. Oh God, how it hurts: my lungs threatening to burst through my rib cage, my heart exploding in my chest, my whole body in knots. I call out to my mother, desperately wanting her to recite some prayers and ruqyahs over me. But she is crying too; my neighbour Walaa and my sisters are trying to soothe her.
I’m not even able to ask what’s wrong. I can’t leave my mattress. It’s as if this mattress is a prison cell. The noise of the camp is suffocating me.
January 12, 2025
“Town centre, town centre, town centre!”
The voices of cart and tuk-tuk drivers ring out in the street. But there are no calls from taxi drivers and no taxis in sight. This change in transportation—the widespread disappearance of taxis—still surprises me, even after more than a year. Before the genocide, I used to choose my ride based on trivial things: this car doesn’t have air conditioning; that driver looks suspicious; this car’s empty and I’m afraid to ride alone; that car’s back seat is full of men and I don’t want to sit next to them. All these options used to pass by in two minutes or less.
These days, I choose between a horse and a tuk-tuk, if I can find a tuk-tuk. Otherwise, I choose between a horse and a donkey. If I’m lucky, I’ll find my ride in ten minutes. If God and all his angels are pleased with or pity me, I’ll find the impossible: a car.
Today, I’m in a hurry, meaning luck frowns on me and I’m forced to stand for half an hour, cursing and swearing at everything, wishing for the death of the donkeys, the horses, the drivers, and the occupation. Alongside these wishes, I wish for the disappearance of this homeland itself—a place that confuses the entire world—so that all of us can go to a place where there is no fatigue or hardship, so that no one else will have to be born in a place as sad as this.
Tears well in my eyes as a couple of donkey carts arrive. To preserve my privilege of choice, I choose the slightly faster donkey: driven by a man, not a child.
If something happens, I’ll be able to hold the driver accountable, I think. And then I laugh at myself for believing that law still exists, that someone will protect me if things go wrong.
I climb into the cart and sit cross-legged, in all my elegance, with my hand on my cheek and head lowered, scorched by the midday sun.
The woman sitting next to me asks, “Where are you from? You look displaced.”
Like a robot programmed to answer, I reply, “Yes, I’m from Gaza City.”
“Where in Gaza City?”
“From Rimal, auntie. Do you know that street with the post office, the one near the Shawa and Hosari Tower, that leads to Taj Mall? I used to live there.”
“Yes, by God,” she replies. “We’re from al-Zaytoun.”
Her words flash through my mind. I remember my grandmother, Safa; our Eid visits to the family home; the watermelons my cousin Fawzi would spend all day cutting till the pieces were exactly equal in size.
In the silence that grows between me and my fellow passenger, I drift back to the last days spent in my home, when I would hear the sound of ambulances all day long, speeding like lightning across al-Wahda Street to al-Shifa Medical Complex; when I would watch the reporters in the Shawa and Hosari Tower (home to many press organizations) from the living room window while my father watched them on TV. I would see them all from that window, and their presence comforted me. But the number of lit windows in the Shawa and Hosari Tower diminished day by day, until they all went out and their sound died down.
My memories are interrupted by the voice of my fellow passenger: “Did your house collapse or is it still standing?”
“They tore the tower apart like a cake,” I answer. “It collapsed on the third day of Ramadan.”
“May God compensate you with something better. And where are you staying now?”
“In a tent.”
The conversation doesn’t last much longer. I’ve become accustomed to this. The unbearable traffic has transformed shared rides into daily funerals in which each passenger remembers their lost home and martyred loved ones. Everyone talks about their pain casually; nobody cries. I really don’t know what prevents the sadness from appearing on our faces or what stops our mouths from trembling as they recall all this pain. It’s not because the tragedy of others makes the burden of our own tragedies lighter or less important. It seems each person’s pain is theirs alone.
January 14, 2025
Yesterday, as rumours of progress in the negotiations grew, my mother and our neighbour, twenty-four-year-old Walaa, discussed our return to the North—what they would take, what they would wear, how we would return. My mother said that a tuk-tuk would be enough to transport Walaa, her husband Saeed, their four-year-old daughter Naria, and their few belongings home. Whereas we would need a lorry to transport ours. She told Walaa about the house my father has rented for us and how, when we return, we won’t have to live in a tent any more.
Today, I sip my morning coffee, a small cup ordered from the same man who yesterday complained that I made one coffee last all day. I don’t know why I didn’t tell him, “What business is it of yours? If you don’t like me ordering just one coffee, find me a job with a good salary and I promise I’ll order more.”
The rumoured breakthrough in the ceasefire negotiations causes me to sip with greater fear today—not fear of disappointment, should the negotiations fall through—but fear of truly accepting that our house and everything in it has been destroyed; that my grandmother and my friends have been killed and won’t come back; of returning to my city, whose beauty has become a pile of ashes; of seeing my father for the first time in more than a year.
Who am I to tell someone being subjected to genocide that their pain isn’t well crafted, that their pain isn’t painful enough?
And how is my father? For ten years, he tried to lose a single kilogram, without success. Now, he has lost twenty kilograms in a few months. In pictures, he reminds me of myself. Every time I look in the mirror, I realize I share more of his features. How will you greet us, Dad? How will I react, when I see you again? Everyone I’ve spoken to today has said, “May you return to your father soon, inshallah. May God reunite you in peace.”
In moments of heightened anticipation, emotions pour out of me in ways I don’t expect. Waiting for the publisher to announce my poetry collection last month, I burst into tears for two hours because my father wasn’t by my side and because I couldn’t hug my friends Rawan and Maryam. I remember the guilt that overcame me because I’d written all my poems on the blood of my comrades and loved ones, on my pain, on my burnt fingertips, on the prospect of my own death. Poems built from death can never bring pride; they can only bring more pain. My poetry is nothing but stylized pain. When I finish writing a poem and it seems perfectly crafted, I look at it with tears welling in my eyes and heart. Oh God, how beautiful it is. And how ashamed I am that pain looks so beautiful.
I’m sitting at a table among the olive trees. Whenever I raise my head, their branches meet my gaze. I’m trying to work on a digital pamphlet for Modern Poetry in Translation, a collection of Gazan poets and poetry. But how do I find the capacity to evaluate the beauty and ugliness of my own poems, let alone edit others’ poems written about their personal pain during this genocide? How have I dared to reject some of these poets because their poems aren’t good enough? Who am I to tell someone being subjected to genocide that their pain isn’t well crafted, that their pain doesn’t seem authentic, that their pain isn’t painful enough?
This is ridiculous. All of this pain assessing is ridiculous.
Back in the tent, I lie on my mattress. Fear and anxiety gnaw at me, and I do nothing but surrender to them, falling asleep or rather just closing my eyes. My body is so exhausted, I can’t move. I stay like this, listening to the sounds around me: the songs from the party our neighbour Modi has thrown for his wedding, the applause of his campmates, the pounding of air strikes, the buzzing of drones.
The sound of the wedding party fills the air, now mixed with a chant of “Truce! Truce! Truce!” as if the whole camp is trying to summon the truce toward us, to force it to come. It’s a tradition, on the last day of an aggression, for the Israeli warplanes to go crazy and carry out as many air strikes as possible, as if they’re racing to use every missile. After the 2021 aggression, my grandmother called to tell us that her neighbour had been martyred just five minutes before the ceasefire went into effect. It seems ridiculous to me: surviving all that, then dying at the last minute.
January 15, 2025
Today, I’ve thrown aside my poems and done nothing except watch the live news on Al Jazeera, waiting for Qatar to announce a ceasefire and terrified the broadcaster will say, “End of negotiations. The war continues.”
On the tiny phone screen, the Qatari commissioner stands up and announces: “The agreement has been signed, the ceasefire will be implemented as soon as Sunday at exactly 12:30 a.m.”
My body trembles and I laugh.
I leave the tent and my ears are flooded with noise they can finally delight in: the joy in the street, ululations, and bullets fired in celebration, their sound and light breaking the darkness. My heart, shattered since the first ceasefire deal failed, can barely believe this moment.
I think: I’ll change the biographies of the Gazan poets I’ve collected for the poetry magazine. I’ll write next to their names: “Survivors of the genocide!”
I used to say: “Everything has an end. The genocide has an end, and I have an end. And I don’t know which will end before the other.” In truth, I never expected to outlive this genocide. I never expected to triumph over death without a scratch on my body, without even losing a limb.
We used to say that we wouldn’t rejoice when the genocide ended, in honour of our lost loved ones. We used to say that we wouldn’t rejoice because our true tragedy would come to light. We used to say that, when we were no longer busy trying to escape death, we would devote ourselves to seeing what it had taken from us.
But I don’t feel any of this; I only feel joy. I have seen the truth of the human spirit: individualism overwhelms everything and is difficult to contain. The fear of sharing one’s home, one’s clothes, and, most importantly, one’s food. The desire to own everything because you fear it will run out. The intense struggle with your soul to share food while the fear of starving consumes you. The fear and the anger: the fear of hunger and the anger at feeling your survival is more important than others’.
When a missile falls and you hear its sound, you smile. You smile because you are still alive, even though you know that another person was killed the very moment you realized you were safe. You pray for the one who was killed and you grieve, but your joy is greater than all of this: your joy that you didn’t die and that no one you loved died. You rejoice while others grieve. You rejoice when you realize that the home that was bombed wasn’t yours but the one right behind it. You feel a little sad, but you’re still happy about your survival. Survival is individual, always individual. Joy is individual and so is grief.
We used to say that we wouldn’t rejoice when the genocide ended, in honour of our lost loved ones.
When Dr. Refaat was killed, the news reached me in the middle of the night. Everyone was asleep, and I was curled up in the middle of our old house, on the floor, grieving. When my family woke up the next day, they ridiculed my grief. I was indignant that no one understood or sympathized with what I felt. But grief is individual.
You continue to grieve while the world goes on with its life. Your neighbours laugh, and you sit alone with your pain. No matter how hard we try to portray ourselves as one people, no matter how united we are, individualism will always prevail. It’s as if this body separates you from others, as if this mould that frames your soul, in reality, isolates it. All the concepts and representations that make us appear unified are false.
When I watched the Qatari commissioner announcing the ceasefire, I didn’t think about Dr. Refaat, or my grandmother Safa, or Tamer, or Nada, or Bilal, or Raghad, or Abu Sami, or anyone. I didn’t think about the home I’d lost. I only thought about the fact that I’d survived. I laughed and began to imagine my future. Am I afraid to admit my loss? After the genocide is over, I won’t mention the names of any of those I’ve lost. I won’t visit their graves. I won’t go to the street where my house used to be. I don’t want to see its rubble.
I don’t want to remember any of this.
Adapted and excerpted from Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide, published by Biblioasis, 2025.
