Gaza... When Survival Becomes a Daily Miracle

In Gaza, tragedy is no longer a fleeting event that allows people a chance to catch their breath; it has become a daily reality that wakes up with them and sleeps beside them, if they can sleep at all. There is a woman who lost her sons and husband under the rubble, yet every morning she still adjusts the edges of her dress and sits at the door of a tattered tent as if she waits for the impossible to return. She looks at the faces passing by, not searching for anyone, but because her heart refuses to believe that those who used to fill the house with noise and laughter have vanished all at once.

And there is a girl who survived alone from an entire family, no longer knowing the meaning of the word "home" because home, for her, was a mother who woke her in the morning, a father who carried her on his shoulders, and siblings who fought over trivial things. But now, home has become a faded image she tries to remember the details of before the days steal them from her memory.

The bombardment does not cease to allow people a chance to grieve; every explosion is followed by another, and every heavy night gives birth to an even heavier one. People live to the rhythm of fear, not the ticking of the clock; they measure time by the number of times they survived and the names that have disappeared from their tables.

And when winter comes, it is not an ordinary guest; the cold enters the torn tents without permission, slipping through small holes and settling in the bones. Children shiver under damp blankets, and mothers try to make their bodies a barrier to protect their sons from the frost, but the cold is stronger than the tired bodies and harsher than the words that cannot provide warmth.

As for losing shelter, it is a wound that no one sees. To return to a place where one has lived all their life and find nothing but rubble, to search for a window and find none, to look for a room and find only stones and dust; even the tent that came as a replacement for the house is no longer a guarantee of safety. The winds can uproot it, the rain can swallow it, or its owners may have to leave it and move again if it hasn’t been struck by the cursed shelling.

In Gaza, displacement is not a journey but a repeated fate. People carry what they can and leave behind what their shoulders cannot bear: memories. They move from one place to another, from one fear to another, until the question is no longer where will we go but whether there is a place that has not yet been touched by danger?

Hunger there does not knock on the door but resides in the house, sitting next to the children and accompanying the mothers all day. One meal becomes a dream, bread becomes a wish, and clean water becomes a blessing that people talk about as others do about luxury. Many sleep with empty stomachs and wake up to the same hunger they went to sleep with.

And because fear, hunger, and cold have come together, sleep has become a distant luxury. How can one sleep when waiting for an explosion that may come at any moment? How can the eyes surrender to rest while the stomach is empty and the body shivers from the cold? The nights pass long, as if dawn has forgotten the way to the city.

Even daily life has lost its usual form. Rodents have spread among the displacement areas, sneaking between tents and the little remaining food, and families are trying to protect their children from new dangers they never imagined would become part of their lives; the rat has become a wolf that eats children!! Where did they come from? Did not the bombardment, hunger, and cold eradicate them!!!

War does not strike only humans; it extends to everything that gives life its meaning: the hospital that was a refuge for the sick, the school that opened the doors to the future for children, the university that embraced the dreams of youth, and the places of worship that people went to seeking peace—all of them have suffered the same loss, fear, and destruction as humans.

Amid all this, journalists have paid the price for conveying the truth, and doctors have paid the price for staying alongside the wounded. Some worked knowing that danger was close, but duty was greater than fear.

As for the prisoner behind bars, he faces another kind of suffering; he sees nothing of what is happening, yet he lives it in his imagination every moment. The prisoner wakes up and asks himself: Is my mother still alive? Have my children found something to eat? Have they managed to shelter from the cold? Do they still have a home to return to? Or have they become like thousands of families that carry their homeland in their memory only?

The hardest thing the prisoner faces is not torture or rape, nor amputation, nor the wall or the closed door, but the unanswered questions, as days pass and he does not know the fate of his loved ones. He tries to sketch their faces in his mind, fearing the years will steal them from him.

The pain can reach a point where even the news of release becomes heavy on the heart, not because freedom is undesirable, but because the outside is no longer what it used to be. A person may emerge searching for their family and home, only to find none; they find only their names in their memory, as freedom loses some of its meaning when everything waiting for you beyond the gate is loss, fear, and uncertainty.

Yet the people of Gaza remain remarkably resilient in their grip on life. They plant hope in a land burdened by wounds and cling to one another amidst all this destruction, as if they are telling the world that a person may be besieged, may hunger, and may lose their home and loved ones, but as long as they can dream, something within them will remain stronger than all attempts to break them.