During the horribly long and genocidal war in Gaza, we did not have the privilege or time to examine our emotions. Survival took precedence over processing emotions. In the weeks following the ceasefire in January, I slowly began to control my emotions and tried to crawl out of my closed-minded shell. But it is too much to feel and understand all at once what we are enduring in Gaza.
Now I have allowed myself to face myself and finally process everything I have been through…I am nothing but sad.
This grief is transformative. It never appears in the same form, is always unpredictable, and always appears without notice. Sometimes it’s my kids that I put to bed. Other times, it is an untamable beast that devours my being. Sometimes it tricks me into thinking it’s healing because it temporarily leaves my body. But in the end, it always finds its way back, palpable, beating to its own rhythm and lurking in my bones.
Hear me when I say my sadness is loneliness. It occupies the body and turns it into a vessel.
Image: Jaber Jehad Badwan / Source: Wikimedia Commons
Every moment of the past 18 months of this genocidal war has been hell. However, receiving an “evacuation order” and being forcibly expelled from our home along with the entire population of eastern Khanyuni was a deeper layer of hell that no human being should have to endure. That movement, God Almighty, that movement continues to haunt me. This is the worst experience I’ve ever had, my worst nightmare, and an ordeal I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Crossing that threshold into exile has left me in a constant state of solitude. Golbaa state of alienation that clings to me whether my eyes are open or closed. Since leaving Khan Younis, I have not been in a complete mood. The knowledge that I will never be free of it, that full healing will never come, that full recovery is impossible, has become something I always carry with me, like a part of my body, like an extra limb, but I never asked for it and I don’t have the strength to hold onto it.
Every time I think about how I have endured the past 18 months without getting sick, I am amazed at how strong I am. The fact that I remained standing, the fact that I appeared calm from the outside, and the fact that my body showed no signs of pain. There were many moments when I wanted to crawl inside myself, but that was never an option. I had to take action and seek refuge in a “safe zone” away from the land invasion. I had to make some difficult decisions about what to bring and where to go.
On July 22, 2024, just seconds after dropping evacuation leaflets from the air, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) launched a brutal and arbitrary attack on Bani Suhaira with relentless air strikes and tank shelling. I remember telling my sisters, “Please walk quickly with your kids and backpacks.” Let’s meet at the Bani Suhaila roundabout. ” This happened after a gruesome 25-minute walk from my house to theirs as tanks roared, helicopters spewed evacuation leaflets from above, and the air was rent by the roar of F-35 bombs. The world was in turmoil. Fear was everywhere. This was the second forced evacuation for residents of eastern Khan Yunis in the same month.
One of my older sisters could barely stand. Her husband was several kilometers away in Deir al-Balah, leaving her alone with her two children. I promised her that I would take my one-year-old daughter with me, along with my bag and a bag with my parents’ medicines. When we arrived at Al-Jundi Al-Majour Square, not the larger square in Gaza City, but a smaller square in Bani Suhaira, both of which were now reduced to rubble, I had to hold her steady. “Don’t cry. Don’t talk. Don’t waste your energy on anything other than walking as fast as you can.” And then, just a few steps later, another explosion rang out. A piece of shrapnel hit my uncle in the same spot where we were standing.
At first I didn’t know who I was hitting. The sound was deafening. My body acted on instinct. I pulled my precious niece tightly to me, pressing her small body against mine, desperately shielding her from flying debris. My heart was filled with fear. I imagined the worst. What if I die and she somehow survives? Thankfully, her mother just walks behind. Still, the thought flooded in that she would be orphaned, traumatized, left alone in a world where she could only cry. I hugged her tightly, made dua fervently, and quietly whispered the words of protection I had prayed for since day one of this merciless slaughter.
أعوذ بكلمات الله التامات من شر ما خلق
الأرض ولا في السماء وهو السميع العليم
I seek refuge in the perfect Word of Allah from the evil of His creation.
In the name of Allah, nothing can harm the earth or the heavens in His name. And He is All-Hearing and All-Knowing.
I went through everything again on August 8, 2024. We experienced evacuations twice that month and again in October 2024. My first evacuation happened on Saturday, October 7, 2023. But it was the third evacuation, on Friday, October 13, 2023, when we were forcibly removed to a UNRWA school, and the fifth, on Tuesday, December 5, 2023, when my family and thousands of other residents of Khan Yunis were forcibly removed. It was most clearly visible in Rafah, where people from all over the Gaza Strip were already being cornered. These moments were etched in our memories as we were forced to evacuate following a massive attack and heavy shelling. So far, 11 moves have been made. The gravity of the situation becomes clear when I reflect on how I came to measure each evacuation by the level of fear. Each one left a mark. My body shrank, my skin burned, and my words became slurred. Every time I moved, I had more gray hair. Every time I held back tears, every moment I kept it together instead of falling apart.
Years ago, my sister Alaa used leftover dye paste on the ends of my hair. To my delight, no dye showed up. Even after 20 minutes, my hair color did not change. I joked that I might look like my grandmother, who didn’t have a single gray hair in her 70s. But apparently, rewriting DNA requires genocide.
Drowning in the pain of genocide and exile, he can no longer find solace in the literature that once gave him salvation. What once provided an escape now felt empty. I could no longer find myself on that page. I felt that the sadness, disorientation, and weight of this war that I felt were not reflected in the Palestinian literature that I once loved. Kanafani’s exile papers and resistance literature, even their brilliance could not reach the grotesque intimacy we endure. For me, nothing that has ever been written reflects the deep pain that Gaza has endured. I longed for literature that could articulate things I couldn’t even begin to process on my own.
That yearning continued to follow me until December 2024, when I read Mahmoud Darwish’s “يوميات الحزن العادي” (ordinary sadness diary). Autobiographical literary texts resonated with me on a level I never expected. Darwish’s words spoke to me from within my own silence. He wrote about how anger silently consumed him after each sudden evacuation, and how alienated he felt in his own skin after crossing the river. Golba threshold. To every question he asked, he answered with soul-rending words.
– Where is your body?
– Inside your clothes.
– What are those boundaries?
– date. South: May 15, 1948. East: November 1956. Western: June 5, 1967. North: September 1970. This is the boundary of my body.
And like Darwish, the new boundaries of my body were mapped by displacement. Date: Eastern: October 13, 2023. West: December 5, 2023. North: July 2024. South: August 2024.
Today, as I walk through Khan Younis, I grieve as a companion for my grief-stricken city, which, like all of Gaza, has been scarred by war, its people gone, and whose faces are now unrecognizable. It walks next to me, always present, uninvited. I’m trying to let out a quiet sob, a muffled scream, a scream that can no longer be heard.
Author’s Note: I wrote this testimony on March 17, 2025, about 20 hours before I was evicted again.
Source: Eurozine – www.eurozine.com
