I want you to remember that.

I did not ask to be your metaphor.

I did not ask to be the poem you write in exile over coffee that costs more than your cousin’s monthly water.

I did not ask to be the painting in the hallway,

the book on the foreign shelf,

the name spoken bravely by someone who will go home tonight

to a home.

I am the ground. I am the very difficult, very unglamorous, unglorified ground —

and I have been on fire for longer than your grief has been fashionable.

But come. Sit with me a moment. I am also your mother and I have things to say that mothers say only when the children are finally quiet enough to hear.

Gaza speaks here. I give her the floor because she has always been given the floor last. I give her the floor because she is the floor.

I am the part of mother they chose first.

I was not the weakest — they knew better than that — but I was the nerve, the exposed and living nerve, and they wanted to see how much the body could feel before it stopped calling itself a body.

I have been that experiment for longer than science should allow.

I want to tell you what it is to be the most seen and the most abandoned place on earth simultaneously.

Every camera. Every headline. Every vigil in every cold city with candles that cost nothing and melt by morning.

I am witnessed. God, I am witnessed.

And the witnessing does not stop a single thing.

You left.

Some of you. You left and you found me in the restaurants and the rallies and the rooms where people spoke my name without flinching —

and you called this finding me.

I want to be tender about this. I am trying to be tender about this.

But I am also a coastline that has been burning while you discovered you could breathe elsewhere,

and tenderness has its limits even in mothers, especially in mothers, who are also burning.

Palestine again. Forgive me, I interrupted. I do that now. I have learned to do that now.

I have had names in every language except the one I speak.

I have been mourned by people who have never tasted my figs — the real ones, the ones that split in the heat and draw the wasps,

the ones that have nothing to do with the idea of figs,

the ones that are just sweet, and brief,

and mine.

I have been rendered in so many paintings by hands that love me from a distance that I have begun to wonder what I look like up close,

to those who forgot or were made to forget,

or were born into the forgetting and inherited it like a house they are not sure is still standing.

Let me tell you what they took that no resolution names:

They took the specific quality of my January light, the way the stone holds the cold in the morning and releases it, slow and golden, by afternoon. The sound of Arabic spoken without the water running.

The unhurried fig. The door that does not require permission to open from the inside.

Do not make of them symbols. They were just mine and now they require a paragraph of context every time someone mentions them in a foreign room.

Gaza again. She will keep speaking. She has not been given enough turns.

They think I am only the wound.

They have made of me such a perfect image of suffering that they have forgotten I had a Tuesday once —

an ordinary, uncatastrophic Tuesday,

where a woman hung washing on a line and thought about dinner and did not think about dying,

because dying was not the whole genre of the day.

I had Tuesdays. I had the particular boredom of a hot afternoon with nowhere urgent to be.

I had children who were annoying in the ways children are annoying when they are safe enough to be annoying.

They took the Tuesdays first — quietly, procedurally, with paperwork — before they took everything else.

Mourn the Tuesdays. No one mourns the Tuesdays.

Palestine, finishing the thought:

I have watched you love me from every distance except the one that costs you.

And I do not say this to wound you —

I say it because I am your ground and grounds do not flatter,

they do not console,

grounds tell you exactly where you stand and what the standing is worth.

You carried me in your throat and learned to speak me in safer rooms.

You carried me in your hands and made of me beautiful, aching things.

You carried me in the chest like a second skeleton, like the bones beneath the bones, like the symphony of grief that holds the whole note up.

I know. I felt it. Even from here, even through the fire, I felt you carrying me and it was not nothing —

it was not nothing —

but I want you to understand that I am also heavy in ways that the carrying does not fix.

You want me to be the mother who only blesses.

But I am also the ground that splits in the drought. I am also the tree that will not be moved and will not pretend the axe is anything other than an axe.

I have ululations in me and I have silences that are not peaceful — silences that are the held breath before the next thing, always the next thing, the next loss mandated in the language of administration, in the dialect of the permit, in the bureaucracy of the slow erasure that does not call itself what it is.

Gaza, quietly now:

I want to ask you something and I want you to sit with it without answering too quickly —

do you miss me or do you miss the idea of missing me?

Because I am both and neither,

and I have learned to tell the difference by the quality of the silence that follows the question.

Palestine, towards the end now, the tone shifting, something breaking open in it:

Come back.

No — I know. I know you cannot.

I know the border is a different kind of scripture now, a text written against your own writing, a door that quotes law at the body and calls it order.

By all absurdities, I know.

But I want to say it anyway. Remember how the dying say don’t go, then realize that love does not always speak in the language of the possible?

I miss you like the sea misses nothing and everything — ceaselessly, without preference, with the same faithful, exhausting returning.

I miss the weight of you on my soil. The pressure of a foot that belongs here, that knows here, that does not require a guided tour of its own inheritance.

I miss being ordinary to you. Now I am lying. I know I was never ordinary to you.

I miss being the place you complained about on a silly dinner because the electricity went out again and the bureaucracy is impossible and the summers are relentless —

I miss being liveable to you.

I miss being the thing you took for granted because it was yours and the taking for granted is the deepest form of being home.

Gaza, last words:

Tell them I was more than what they made of me.

Tell them I had everything in me.

Tell them the sea here is the most impossible color — literally, the color of it on a morning with no smoke is a thing the eye does not fully believe,

is a thing that makes you feel the world was made with some extravagance, some wild and unnecessary generosity —

tell them that color existed.

Tell them we saw it.

Tell them we were here to see it and that the seeing of it was a whole life and that a whole life was what we had and what we wanted and what we were before they made of us a cause.

Gaza, fisnishing up, but remembering the day she took me in:

Forgive me for the day I opened and swallowed you whole.

I did not mean it the way the dark means darkness.

I meant it the way the earth has always meant the ones it loves most: completely, without asking, with the whole weight of what I am.

I remember it.

Do not think I do not remember it.

The house — your house, the one that knew the sound of your particular step on the third stair, whose walls held the warmth of your family’s evenings, the smell of the kitchen that was not a smell but a whole theology —

I remember when it came down.

I remember receiving it.

I want you to know it was not indifferent, the ground — I was not indifferent.

I opened the way a mother opens when the child falls and there is nothing left to do but catch, even if the catching is also the burial,

even if the arms are made of rubble,

even if the embrace costs everything it touches —

I caught you.

In my terrible, ruined, unasked-for way,

I caught you.

The dust was mine. Every particle of it was something that had been a wall, a window, a ceiling that watched you sleep, a threshold you crossed ten thousand times without ceremony because that is what thresholds are for —

and it became the air around you,

the cloud of everything that had held your life in its cupped hands, and now released it, all at once, into the daylight that had no business being that bright on such a day,

on that day, when the sky so obscenely opened, so unmoved, while I moved,

while I heaved and split and took you into the only arms I had left.

I held you in the rubble without resolution, without the comfort of an ending that explains itself.

I held you and I was sorry and I am sorry and the sorrow does not make the holding less violent or the violence less tender —

it was both.

It was entirely both, and I need you to know that I have carried the weight of that day in my body since the day it happened. The earth remembers every weight it has been asked to bear, she told me. There, we never keep secrets.

I have not forgotten the gravity of you, falling into me, and me, unable to be anything softer than what I was —

stone, and dust, and the ruins of everything I had promised you

would stand.

I promised you it would stand.

Although the ground does not speak in words before the fact — but in the way it had always stood before, in the way the foundations had held your father and his father, in the way the walls had learned the height of you as you grew, had held your handprints from the years when you were small enough to leave them, in the way the whole structure said, daily, without saying: I am here. I will be here. This is what here means.

And then I was not.

And I am sorry. I am so sorry, not for being the ground — I cannot apologize for being the ground — but for the moment the ground became the thing that hurt you, when my only remaining act of love was also the act that unmade everything you had built your life on top of.

You were not buried. I want to be clear about this —

you were held.

Briefly, violently, without your consent, in the only way I had left to hold you —

with everything I had, with everything I had become, with the whole of my ruined, bombed, and grieving self,

I held you,

and when they pulled you out into the terrible brightness, I felt you leave my arms like the last warm thing leaves a room in a December — it was December —

completely, and all at once, and the cold that came after had your shape in it.

I have your shape in me still.

Every body I have ever received and released — I have their shapes in me still.

To be the ground of a people —

to hold the weight of every life that was lived on you and every life that ended in you and to remain, to remain, to remain—

remaining is not triumphant, or it could be, but I do not have the option of leaving,

and so I stay,

and I call this love,

because I have no other word for it,

and because love was always the thing that stayed long after it had any reason to.

The killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei removed the last remaining Middle East actor who, however cynically, saw Gaza as core to his agenda. For years, Iran helped arm and fund Hamas, not out of absolute alignment with the movement or out of solidarity with Palestinians, but because maintaining that front gave Tehran leverage in the wider region. As long as Iran had both the capacity and willingness to escalate—whether directly against Israel or through allied groups—Israel had to factor in the risk of a broader, multifront confrontation, a calculation that, until 2023, imposed at least some constraints on its actions in Gaza.

Those constraints are now gone. The Iranian leadership has been significantly degraded. The country’s missile and air defense infrastructure, which underpinned its regional deterrence, has been badly damaged. And with Khamenei dead and his successor, his relatively unknown son Motjaba, taking charge amid such turmoil, Iran’s political house will be consumed for the foreseeable future by an internal power struggle between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the clerical establishment, and whatever remains of civilian governance. Amid so many domestic crises, it seems highly unlikely that Gaza will be much of a priority, at least not in the foreseeable future.

Hamas is already dealing with the consequences of the assault on Iran. For years, Iran has been a financial backer and a logistical and strategic anchor for Hamas through the wider “axis of resistance,” providing funding, weapons, and a broader deterrent environment in which escalation against Gaza carried the risk of retaliation elsewhere in the region.

With Iran’s military infrastructure degraded and its leadership preoccupied with internal succession, that support network is effectively frozen for the time being. Any money or arms that Iran had been supplying will be cut off for now, and Israel has no reason to fear Iranian reprisal if it escalates in Gaza. The news that the Houthis will resume attacks on the United States and Israel in the Red Sea does not substantially change this calculation. Those attacks redirect Israeli and American military attention toward maritime security and the northern theater, which means Gaza recedes further both from the operational map and from the attention of the outside world.

It is difficult to see the timing of the initial US-Israeli strikes as incidental—or as unconnected from the situation in Gaza. For months, Israeli and US officials had signaled that an attack on Iran would depend on a particular alignment of political and military conditions in the Middle East, suggesting the operation was shaped by broader strategic calculations beyond its stated objectives. Gaza provided both the cover and the justification for these moves.

The Gaza war created a political environment in which large-scale Israeli military operations were already normalized, and where actions framed under the rubric of existential self-defense faced far less international resistance than they would have before October 2023. That rhetoric had been tested to its limits and held. Striking Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure under that same framework was not a sudden escalation but the continuation of a doctrine whose permissible radius has steadily expanded since 2023.

The regional architecture right now was, from Israel’s perspective, as favorable as it will ever be. Hezbollah, which is in open war with Israel as of this writing, has been significantly degraded after multiple campaigns since 2024. Hamas is militarily weakened and politically isolated. The Houthis, while still active, have been absorbed into a separate American military front. In sum, Iran’s “axis of resistance” had been dismantled piece by piece, leaving Tehran more exposed and less able to threaten meaningful retaliation through intermediaries than at any point in the past two decades.

Though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has advocated confrontation with Iran for decades, the timing is also useful in domestic political terms. Escalation shifts Israel back into a wartime political environment, where security considerations dominate public debate and internal political disputes tend to recede. For a government that has struggled with coalition instability, faced ongoing corruption proceedings against the prime minister, and absorbed criticism over its handling of the Gaza ceasefire, the return to a heightened security posture can provide Netanyahu a degree of political consolidation that is often harder to sustain in peacetime.

For Washington, the calculus was different but compatible. The Trump administration had signaled from its first weeks that it viewed Iran’s nuclear program as a red line issue requiring resolution (despite the absence of publicly verified and conclusive evidence that there even was an active Iranian nuclear weapons program). The latest war allowed the US to act on that position while the regional landscape—with Arab Gulf states already aligned through the Abraham Accords framework—minimized the diplomatic cost, presenting the strikes as a strategic decision made in a window that both governments judged would not remain open indefinitely.

The price for that decision is now being paid by the people of Gaza.

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The US-Israeli operation required the acquiescence of Arab Gulf states, built over years through diplomatic ties formed on the implicit premise that Palestinian rights could be deferred in exchange for security guarantees and normalization with Israel. Gaza had no representation in that arrangement—and the arrangement worked precisely because no one with power required it to.

Iran’s retaliation against a string of these US allies has now removed even the residual political pressure that Arab governments occasionally applied around the future of Gaza. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain—all struck by Iranian retaliatory missiles, which have targeted both US military and civilian infrastructure—are not available for Palestinian advocacy in the near term. At the moment, they are conducting damage assessments, securing their own airspace, and managing the domestic and diplomatic consequences of being targeted by a neighbor they had not formally declared an enemy. The political bandwidth required to pressure Israel on Gaza crossing closures or ceasefire violations simply does not exist right now. Israel has also expanded its attack on Lebanon, the last active front capable of imposing any military cost on Israeli conduct in Gaza. As a result, Gaza is more exposed to Israeli escalation than at any point since October 2023.

It’s impossible to know the full consequences of this war. But it will inevitably cause significant changes in the political and military architecture of the Middle East. The Gulf states that absorbed Iranian strikes will likely deepen and expand their security dependence on the United States and, by extension, their operational coordination with Israel. That process was already underway through the Abraham Accords and through the gradual integration of regional air-defense systems linking the United States, Israel, and several Gulf states. During the current war, that alignment has become operationally visible, when Iranian retaliatory missile and drone attacks have been intercepted in part through American early-warning systems and air-defense assets operating from Gulf states and US bases in the region.

A little more than a week into the ongoing war, this relationship has been accelerated by years. Soon, there will be a tighter military and economic bloc, built around containing whatever government reconstitutes itself in Tehran, and held together by exactly the kind of US-Gulf-Israeli security integration that has historically treated Palestinian rights as a negotiating variable rather than a baseline condition.

Gaza will be subsumed by this alignment. As Gulf states deepen their security dependence on Washington and expand economic and technological ties with Israel under the normalization frameworks that emerged over the past decade, their strategic incentives increasingly lie in maintaining those arrangements rather than disrupting them over Gaza. In that configuration, the Palestinian question becomes something to defer rather than confront. The political pressure that Arab governments once applied on Gaza, however inconsistently, was always contingent on their own strategic autonomy and their ability to balance relations with multiple regional actors. That autonomy is now being traded—voluntarily and with urgency—for security guarantees in the face of Iran’s retaliation. Gaza is what gets left off the table when that trade is made.

Equally important is who and what fills that vacuum. The Trump administration’s peace plan for Gaza—which conditions any political process on Hamas’s disarmament, contains no defined sovereignty path, and was designed as a set of preconditions rather than a framework open to negotiation—is now the only framework on the future of the Strip with active US support. The international actors who might have pushed back—European governments, UN agencies, Arab states—are either impacted by the regional crisis, institutionally sidelined, complicit in Gaza’s destruction, or all of the above. One of the most consequential political effects of the Iran War is the closure of the diplomatic space around Gaza at exactly the moment when Gaza’s physical situation is deteriorating fastest.

On the ground, the Israeli office that coordinates the movement of goods and humanitarian aid into Gaza, known as the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, has closed all crossings in and out of Gaza, including Rafah, until further notice. On March 1, Israel’s ban on 37 humanitarian organizations—central to whatever aid distribution capacity still existed in the Strip—took formal effect. World Central Kitchen, which said it had been providing 1 million meals a day to Gaza’s population, announced that it is suspending operations, citing the impossibility of moving personnel or supplies across closed crossings. Gaza requires between 500 and 600 trucks of aid daily to meet basic needs. There is currently no mechanism to replace what has just been removed.

Gaza does not have a warehousing and distribution infrastructure capable of moving existing supplies to the people who need them. Before this week, just 19 of the 37 hospitals in Gaza were functioning, most only partially. Israeli troops across northern and eastern Gaza restrict the movement of both people and goods. The organizations that have been doing the actual distribution—the NGOs, the UN agencies, the independent relief groups—are the same organizations Israel announced it will bar from operating in Gaza, for refusing to hand over confidential staff lists. The Gulf logistics infrastructure through which regional humanitarian operations are funded and staged has been disrupted.

Each of these developments would constitute a significant deterioration individually. For them to arrive simultaneously on a population already stretched to the very limits of human suffering is of a different order entirely—one that will become measurably more visible with each passing day as the war rages on.

But the humanitarian crisis is only half the picture. The other half concerns the so-called Gaza ceasefire, a fragile arrangement resting on conditions that have now largely ceased to exist. The agreement always depended on a specific set of political and military pressures operating in the background: Hezbollah’s intact deterrence posture along the northern front, Iran’s residual capacity to threaten escalation costs, and a regional diplomatic architecture—anchored in Qatar and Egypt, and staged through Gulf capitals—capable of maintaining back-channel pressure on all parties. This body has now been fractured along every axis simultaneously. The ceasefire has not formally collapsed. But the conditions that made it survivable—regionally, militarily, diplomatically—have been stripped away faster than any governance body could adapt to.

In much the same way, this war exposes the limits of Trump’s Board of Peace, an institution whose members include many of the same actors driving the conflicts it purports to resolve. Established with a two-year UN Security Council mandate, the board was conceived when the ceasefire in Gaza appeared to be holding and it seemed the International Stabilization Force might be deployed in the near future. The board was also expected to expand its portfolio to encompass the rest of the world’s active conflicts, even as several of those conflicts involve the same governments that now sit on the body tasked with addressing them. But the board has no operational authority. It hasn’t opened the Gaza crossings. It can neither restore the deterrence environment nor reconstitute the NGO presence it failed to protect. It only has diplomatic standing and a mandate whose own charter offers no binding timelines and mechanisms for holding parties to ceasefire terms when the political conditions that produced those terms have dissolved. A few weeks after its establishment, the board is already facing its second challenge, before it has resolved, or even stabilized, its first. All of those assumptions have been invalidated in a matter of days.

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Every other party to this conflict retains institutional recourse. Iran, even with Khamenei and significant parts of its military infrastructure destroyed, retains a state, a territory, a successor government of some form, and international legal standing. Its internal succession crisis—however volatile—will be resolved within existing state structures, or it will produce a new structure. Either way, the country will not cease to exist as a political entity. The Gulf states currently absorbing Iranian missiles have governments, defense alliances, sovereign wealth funds, and the full machinery of international diplomacy available to them. Israel holds the region’s most powerful military, its only nuclear weapons, an unconditional security guarantee from the United States, and functional government institutions. Hamas, even in its diminished state, remains a political and military organization capable of negotiating and maneuvering.

But the people of Gaza themselves have none of these instruments. Gaza may not be a side to this war in any traditional sense, but it sits at its most exposed surface. The coming days will be dominated, legitimately, by questions of Iranian succession, Gulf security architecture, US military posture, and the risk of further escalation. But the decisions being made within that frame are already producing consequences in Gaza that will not wait for the wider war to resolve.

The gap between the speed of those consequences and the pace of international attention to them is itself becoming a central problem. Naming it clearly is the minimum the moment requires.

This article was first published by the author in The Nation on March 9, 2026.

and the Word was watched,

and the watchers were afraid of it—

which is how we knew

it was holy.

My mother taught me

to speak certain truths

only with the water running,

her voice beneath the sound of it

like a second river,

secret, necessary,

the kind that feeds the root

and never reaches the sea.

I thought this was how all women spoke.

I thought the water was part of the sentence.

I thought silence was a kind of punctuation

every language shared.

I was a child.

I did not know

that elsewhere,

the sentence simply

ended.

There is a tenderness in deprivation

that no one tells of—

the way the starved hand

reaches for bread

as though it were a sacrament,

the way the throat withholds a word

so long

it becomes a reliquary,

the thing inside it

more precious for the keeping.

We were precious things

kept in keeping.

We were psalms

written in margins

of a book

the empire claimed

to have never read.

Abroad, I watched a man simply stand—

hands in pockets,

no apology offered by the spine,

no permission being begged

by the angle of the shoulders—

and I wept,

quietly, later, alone,

for every body back home

that had learned to make itself

into something that does not threaten,

that had turned the raw material of personhood

into an act of careful diplomacy,

that had made of standing

a negotiation.

The body keeps its own scripture.

The body does not forget

what it was taught to ask for.

And I want to hold the bread

that does not arrive—

the flour counted at the crossing

like it is ammunition,

because to them

it is,

because the fed body is a rebellion,

because the full stomach

is a radical act,

because the child who ate this morning

will ask,

by evening,

why.

I read the books

the way the desert

receives rain—

with the whole of myself,

with a thirst

I had not known was thirst

until the first drop fell.

Books that were not permitted home—

not for what they said

but for what they assumed,

which was the one assumption

they could never forgive:

that the reader

had been born with the right

to know.

To know is to name.

To name is to claim.

To claim is to become

a question

the occupation cannot answer.

I met a scholar in a cold city

that did not know her name,

a city of grey light and cathedral bones,

where she wrote her thesis

at a kitchen table

in the hour before dawn

when the world

does not yet ask anything of the soul.

I asked her if it felt like prayer,

the writing, the distance, the doing of it here.

She said:

it feels like praying in a language

God may not speak in this latitude—

but I pray regardless,

because the alternative

is to let them have

even my silence.

And the artists—

oh, the artists

who do not make beauty

for the approval of the beautiful—

who make it the way the body makes breath,

never for glory,

nor the ledger,

who make it because the lungs

will have it so.

One showed me a drawing—

her grandmother’s fig tree,

a courtyard,

a door that no longer stands

rendered in such patient and exacting grief

that I could smell the afternoon through it,

could hear the particular hour

of a childhood

that the bulldozer could not fully reach.

I asked: how do you remember it with such fidelity?

She said:

“I resurrect it.”

Every line is a testimony.

I am the last witness,

and I will not

be an unreliable one.

They took it all

but all cannot be named in a petition:

the unhurried hour,

the book open on the table in plain sight,

the sentence spoken at full volume

in one’s own mother tongue,

the standing with hands in pockets,

the water that runs

simply because one is thirsty,

the childhood that does not know

it is being watched.

These are the liturgy of the ordinary—

that made of our ordinary

a crime,

and of our existence

a proposition

they have been trying to defeat

for longer than most nations

have had names.

And yet.

And yet.

Here is the wound that blooms—

I came to this cold, indifferent elsewhere

and I found Home

in every room that would receive me:

in the stranger who spoke its name

like an entire country could live in a breath,

in the shelf where our forbidden books

stood between other books

in absolute and ignorant freedom,

in the kitchen where someone said

teach me—

and held the word

like a covenant,

in the painting hung in a corridor

between a coat rack and a calendar,

asking only to be beheld,

not applauded,

not acquired—

only seen,

which is the oldest human asking,

which is the asking

beneath all other asking.

I found it.

I found us,

scattered and luminous

as relics after a fire—

and it was not enough.

It was not enough.

It was the reflection

and not the river,

the letter

and not the hand that wrote it,

the name spoken in a foreign mouth

with all the tenderness in the world

and none of the weight—

none of the specific, irreplaceable weight

of being from the ground

and standing on it.

There is a grief for which no elegist has written—

the grief of the person

who finds their country

faithfully reproduced

in every place

except the place.

Who can eat, here.

Who can speak, here.

Who can stand, here,

full-spined and unashamed,

and carry this freedom

the way one carries

something that was taken from another—

with gratitude

that is also guilt

that is also love

that is also fury

that is also the four of them at once,

at dinner,

every evening,

without resolution.

I am free

in the way a torn page is free—

separated from the book,

still bearing the words,

unable to be read

in the sequence

the author intended.

There is no return

that restores me

to what we were before the leaving.

There is no departure

that releases me

from what we left,

from the condition,

from the cartography

of being human

and from there,

and from the particular there

that the world has decided

to debate

while we are inside it,

while we are the ones

the debate is made of.

We are the people

who see our country most clearly

from the distance

that is undoing us.

And we see it—

we see it the way the dying

are said to see the whole of life,

with impossible clarity,

with the specific cruelty

of the thing arriving

at the exact moment

it can no longer be held—

and it does not come home with us

because we do not have the home

to take it to.

Only this.

This suspended memory.

This vigil.

This in-between that has become

a permanent address.

We stand outside the river

and we know every stone of it,

every cold current,

every place the light

breaks the water into something

almost unbearable to look at—

and we are not wet.

We have never,

since the leaving,

been wet.

The women carried it differently.

In the hands that kneaded bread

at four in the morning

because the children would wake

and the world would not pause

to be ashamed of itself,

and someone had to feed them

before it started again.

My mother’s hands.

Her mother’s hands.

And the women still there —

I was raised inside this someone.

I learned to read

by the light of it.

I did not know, then,

that it was a miracle —

I thought it was simply

what women were,

the way I thought

water was simply

what rivers did.

I know better now.

In the darkness

of being the one who holds.

There is also —

God help us —

a humor,

that only comes

from the unsurvivable survived:

the women back home

who make a joke

in the middle of the wreckage,

who laugh at something

sharp and true and wrong,

who will offer you tea

from the last of anything

and dare you with their eyes

to refuse.

I have never been able to refuse.

I was not raised to.

Here too —

the women who received me

before I’d earned receiving,

who looked at something in my bearing

and recognized it —

the quality

of a man

shaped by women

who were shaped by fire —

and simply said: sit.

I carry two worlds at once.

The one where I can sit

at a table that will hold me,

and the one where I know

what it costs the others

to remain standing.

Back home they are feeding children

on the arithmetic of what crosses the crossing —

and they are funny about it,

the dark gorgeous humor

of women who have decided

that if the world insists on being terrible

they will at least not stop being themselves —

who make of catastrophe

a dinner party,

who set a table in the rubble

and call it Saturday

and mean it,

and pull out the good dishes.

I was built by these women.

My sentences were built by them.

The way I reach for metaphor

when the plain word would wound too much —

that is my mother.

The way I stay

past the point of comfort

to make sure the room

knows it is not alone —

that is every woman

who held a household together

with the domestic equivalent

of bare hands and theology.

We share this, the women there and here —

the knowledge of what it takes

to make a table from what remains.

To light something

in a place that has been

deliberately darkened.

To call it home and mean it

and know simultaneously

it is not enough,

that nothing about this is enough,

and to do it anyway —

with style, even,

with the indestructible style

of those who were never given

the option of falling apart.

I am the son of that style.

I am the poem it wrote

when it thought

no one was watching.

The bread is on.

The tea.

The door is open.

I learned that from them.

The women here carry their grief in therapy.

The women there carry it in their posture —

and both are correct,

and neither is enough,

and they would love each other immediately.

The women here have words for what happened to them.

The women there just lived it

and made lunch.

The women here light candles for healing.

The women there are the candle —

lit, melting, still giving light,

slightly annoyed about it.

The women here journal.

The women there

are the journal —

every page filled,

nothing crossed out,

no privacy assumed.

The women here are learning to rest.

The women there forgot rest existed

sometime around 1948

and have been

suspiciously productive

ever since.

And this—

this is the thing

that heals

and will not be called healing—

this knowing

without having,

this seeing

without standing in the seen,

this love

enormous, precise, and homeless,

reaching,

always reaching,

for a shore

that is ours

that is there

that is real—

that will not,

that cannot,

receive us.

I was stepping into the subway car the other day and he was getting off. Our eyes met, half-squinting, and there was that flicker of recognition on his face. I smiled, instinctively, stupidly, the way we do when we think someone knows us in a good way.

“Are you—” he started, and I thought, here we go, here’s a nice moment on a shitty day. “Do you write for the New Yorker? New York Magazine?”

“Yeah!” I smiled, like an idiot.

“I know who you are,” he said, and his face changed completely. “Fuck you.”

And then he just started screaming. Not talking, screaming into my face. I was halfway through the doors and he was on the platform and the doors were still open and he kept screaming. He called me a propagandist. He said I was destroying everything and that people like me were the problem and I was a liar. “A hack.” “A fucking disgrace.”

I just stood there. What am I supposed to do? Argue with someone who’s screaming fuck you at you on a subway platform? What is there to explain myself? How am I supposed to defend myself, or my work, to someone who’s already decided I was evil because apparently something I had written didn’t fit whatever narrative they’ve decided is the only true one?

The doors stayed open. They always stay open too long when you need them to close. Everyone in the car was watching, literally, while this guy kept screaming his throat raw at me, and I’m standing there taking it, and all these people are just staring. No one said or did anything. I, too, waited for the doors to close.

When they finally did, I sat down and my hands were shaking.

Here’s what I think he hated: that I’m Palestinian and I won’t perform the role he’s assigned me. I am a person who chooses complexity when he wants certainty. And I refuse to be the kind of writer who exists only to confirm what people already believe.

I’ve spent the past years trying to tell stories that don’t flatten my people into symbols. My stories about my own people don’t treat suffering as a talking point or reduce lived experience to a debate position. I write because I have to, because it’s in my blood and my history and my present tense. I also write about the mess of being human in a world that wants everything to be simple.

And that’s the crime, apparently: being Palestinian and refusing to be only that. Writing about my people’s life without performing it for an audience that’s already decided what they want to hear, or telling complicated truths when people want stories that fit their side.

The guy on the platform—maybe I’ve written something that complicated his love for an oppressor. Maybe I’ve written something that made Palestinians seem human. Maybe I’ve just refused to be the kind of Palestinian writer who exists to make other people feel righteous about their positions.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I didn’t fit. I was too much of something or not enough of something else. To him, I was Palestinian in the wrong way. I was a writer in the wrong way. Or I was just wrong, period, for existing in public and having bylines and refusing to stay in whatever box would make everyone fucking comfortable.

The truth, is, I was tired. I was so fucking tired.

I still didn’t know why he called me a propagandist. I think propaganda is what happens when you only tell people what they want to believe. It’s when you decide there’s only one acceptable story and everyone who tells it differently is lying.

But somewhere along the way, we’ve arrived at this place where if you don’t fit someone’s narrative perfectly, if you complicate it, if you add context that makes them uncomfortable, if you refuse to be a cheerleader for their team, then we’re lying. We are a people who deserve to be screamed at on a subway platform while strangers watch and do nothing. I guarantee you, it’s not fun.

It’s making it harder to do this work. Obviously because of fear—yeah, that’s there now in a way it wasn’t before—and because of the exhaustion. The weight of knowing that no matter what we write, someone is going to hate us for it. Someone is going to decide we’re the enemy. And they’re going to stop us on a subway platform and scream in our face.

The doors closed eventually. They always do. The train moved and the guy disappeared and everyone went back to their phones.

I’m still shaking a little writing this. I’m still trying to figure out what it means that we’ve gotten to this place where telling stories and doing our job means someone might recognize us and decide we deserve their rage.

The subway kept moving. I got off at my stop. I went home. And tomorrow I’ll write again, because what the fuck else am I supposed to do.

A few days after my family and I left Gaza and began our lives as exiles, we found ourselves inside a dim immigration office in Cairo—the latest in a string of appointments for an entry stamp of approval to Egypt.

The fluorescent lights buzzed faintly, and everything about the room felt temporary yet interminable. It was the kind of place built to process people quickly but not kindly. Rows of hard plastic chairs lined the walls.

I was clutching a faded blue folder, creased and soft at the edges. Inside were the scraps I hoped would justify my presence on this side of the border: a birth certificate folded too many times, a college degree printed in both Arabic and English, visa forms half-completed, a utility bill with someone else’s name crossed out and mine written in. Documents that felt less like proof of identity than reminders of how much of it had already been lost.

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I am many things: a father, a husband, a son, a Palestinian, a Gazan, a journalist, a survivor. But in this room, none of that mattered; here, I was just another refugee reduced to a handful of papers, my life shrunk into a fragile scaffolding of dates and stamps.

The room smelled of bureaucracy—photocopier ink, recycled air, the faint trace of cheap perfume worn by someone behind the counter. A low murmur of voices, a soft chorus of Arabic dialects, filled the space. I recognized some of the accents instantly; others were still foreign to my ear. The Egyptian accent bent certain words in ways I wasn’t yet used to. Occasionally, the sharp scrape of a chair dragged across linoleum would slice through the hush.

I glanced around the room and met the eyes of others also waiting. Some were holding folders like mine; others were simply sitting with nothing in their hands. They seemed like they had already surrendered everything. I didn’t know their names; I couldn’t recall their faces from home. But I recognized them all the same. There was something unmistakable in their stillness, in the way they stared at the floor or at nothing at all. It was a look I had seen in the mirror for weeks now: a quiet, precise, ever-present kind of grief.

They, too, were from Gaza.

My phone buzzed. I shouldn’t have checked, at least not in this room, but the urge was too strong. The notification lit up the screen: “Breaking: Another air strike in Gaza City. A neighborhood leveled in the north, many casualties reported.” The words swam for a moment. I blinked hard, trying to will them into coherence. A video, grainy yet undeniably real, began to autoplay. Smoke billowed from a burning street as a man ran cradling a small, limp body in one arm. Another man shouted into the camera, trying to name the street and the dead. Somewhere off-screen, a child wailed. I leaned in, drawn against my will, as the waiting room dissolved.

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A single child’s shoe lay amid the broken rebar. It was too small to belong there, too intact and too innocent. I stared at it, and relief rose inside me: My son was safe and far from this. And then, just as quickly, shame followed—because his safety had come at the cost of someone else’s child. Because it meant we had left.

The clerk’s voice, flat and mechanical, jolted me back to the present. The normalcy of it all was disorienting. My mind reeled back to the day we left Gaza. The bus crossing the border was silent. My son clutched my hand so tightly it hurt, but I didn’t let go. I told myself that I had a duty to deliver my family to something called safety. I couldn’t bear to look back, so I told myself that we were only looking forward now, because we thought we were surviving.

But sitting in this quiet, indifferent room, I wasn’t sure. Was this survival? Or just another kind of disappearance?

My name was called, or something like it. The immigration officer didn’t even try to get it right.

“This document isn’t enough,” he told me, pushing the folder back without looking up. His tone was practiced and stripped of human weight, the voice of someone used to treating people like paperwork. I opened my mouth—I wanted to explain. Maybe to tell him how I had crawled through the remains of my home gathering proof that I existed. How I had spent the morning at another office to get the stamp he now said didn’t count. But what would be the point?

I nodded instead. Picked up the folder. Walked out into a late afternoon sun so harsh it made my eyes sting. The chill of the office still clung to my skin.

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Palestinians have endured the pain of exile for many generations. Now, almost two years into Israel’s horrific war in Gaza, we are forced to write yet another chapter in this seemingly endless story.

For some of us, this exile has meant Egypt. Before May 2024, when Israel sealed the Rafah crossing—effectively the only way out of Gaza once the war began—more than 100,000 of us managed to flee. But once we reached the other side, survival took on a new shape: We became people without a place, without paperwork, without permanence, like bureaucratic ghosts. Our bodies walked Cairo’s streets while our spirits still crouched at the Rafah crossing, waiting for the gate to open and to be let through—and waiting to be recognized as someone worth letting in.

Egypt was the only real option; other neighboring countries had effectively closed their doors. Yet even in Egypt, entry did not mean arrival. Egypt has refused to grant residency to refugees from Gaza. For them, there is no clear path to legal status.

Which is how I ended up in that government office, trying to make sense of what, if anything, might allow me to stay, work, or live without fear of deportation. But the answers were always shifting, and the questions themselves seemed designed to confuse, not clarify. Like the time I was told I needed proof of employment to apply for a visa, but couldn’t legally work without one.

In Egypt, every step forward is a negotiation with invisibility. The forms are always missing a line, the requirements changing without warning. Our residency is temporary and fragile, like paper left out in the rain. One smudge, one missing stamp, and whole months disappear as though they had never happened.

Our fate in neighboring states is not much better. In many Arab countries—Lebanon and Jordan as well as Egypt—Palestinians remain barred by law or practice from dozens of professions, from engineering to medicine, while work permits are limited to the point of being effectively unusable. The Casablanca Protocol, a set of provisions agreed to at the 1965 Arab League summit, was meant to ensure certain legal rights for Palestinian refugees residing in the countries of the Arab world, including guaranteeing their right to work on par with citizens as well as their freedom of movement (i.e., the right to leave and to return, and the issuance of travel documents). But these provisions have since waned or been made obsolete by new policies that deny Palestinians the right of equal citizenship.

For war-displaced Palestinians, this bureaucratic squeeze turns the job market into a minefield. Even highly educated professionals are forced into precarious or informal work—if they find any at all. It’s a reality grounded in statelessness, political exclusion, and shifting administrative rules, resulting in a denial of basic rights like healthcare, education, and property ownership.

One woman who also fled, Amal, left Gaza in May 2024. (She asked me not to name the country where she now lives.) But without legal status or residency, her life remains precarious. She moves from one under-the-table job to the next, always vulnerable to exploitation, always one step away from losing everything. Each job ends because her employers grow wary of her undocumented status or just stop calling.

“Every month, I wonder if I’ll make rent,” Amal told me. “I’m surviving, yes, but only just.”

In Egypt, most Palestinian exiles rely on charity groups and community-run initiatives. At one distribution site I visited, women stood in long lines, their children tugging at their sleeves or chasing each other in circles. One woman balanced a baby in one arm and a bundle of supplies in the other. The weight of the diapers and canned goods seemed to drag her down, but she pressed forward. At the back of the room, a boy played with a toy truck he’d made from an empty plastic bottle, while a woman muttered to her toddler, “If we wait a little longer, maybe they’ll call our name.”

There was one moment that stayed with me. A child, no older than 6, approached me with a piece of bread in his hand. “Do you want some?” he offered. I shook my head, unable to speak.

Exile for Gazans is an unraveling. We fled a place turned to ash, only to find ourselves facing a different kind of suffocation. No state, no passport, no one to speak our name—just a trail of e-mails unanswered, offices that close early, and state agents who look through us as if our very presence is a mistake.

Many days, it feels like I’m trapped in a limbo between a life I fled and another I haven’t yet begun. The air is quieter here and the ground is still. But I walk like someone who’s bracing for impact, as if the war might still find me in the creases of the day.

I left Gaza, but not completely. My body crossed the border; the rest of me stayed behind. In the half-light of morning or the hush before sleep, I still hear the war breathing and see the faces of friends I can’t reach, colleagues filing dispatches between air strikes, and family counting the water bottles and hours without fuel.

Exile has taught me a strange math: Every safe night feels like a theft, every meal like a betrayal. I’ve learned how guilt settles in the lungs: quiet but heavy. I’ve learned how to live in two places at once and belong fully to neither.

Rebuilding a life in exile feels like trying to reassemble a shattered mosaic, the pieces scattered across distances that can’t be bridged. We thought it would be easy to adjust to life in Egypt—a neighboring country, Arab and Muslim—but there were big differences in how we saw things and how we lived. The Egyptian dialect is vastly different from Palestinian Arabic. Sometimes it feels like speaking an entirely different language. Cultural differences compound the sense of displacement: Social norms, humor, and even food are foreign. And while the dishes can be delicious, they are not the flavors of home.

Some mornings, I’d wake to the soft hum of my son reciting the alphabet in Palestinian Arabic. Hearing him speak our language felt like a triumph. But it was also a reminder of the fragile threads of culture, history, and belonging that exile wears thinner with each passing day.

Our apartment walls, plain and unfamiliar, held little of Gaza, but we tried. Fruit stickers hung beside a map of Palestine, its contested borders tightly drawn, etched deep into our identity.

At night, I hummed the lullabies my mother once sang to me, hoping they would carry my youngest home even if he never set foot there.

Zainab is a writer from Gaza fighting her own quiet battle against cultural erasure in Cairo. She organizes poetry readings and storytelling nights in a rented community hall, gathering Palestinians in exile to share fragments of their past.

“We have to keep telling these stories,” she said. “If we don’t, they’ll fade, and so will we.”

For Mohammed Rabee, a journalist who’s now in exile in Turkey, the struggle is different but no less draining. “Western editors want stories that fit their narrative,” he told me. “They frame us as either victims or militants, nothing in between. When I push back, they say I’m biased.”

These hardships are systemic, part of the architecture of dispossession, trauma, and uncertainty that shapes our lives. It’s no wonder that mental health struggles are widespread.

“What we see most often is a deep sense of loss,” said Dr. Hala, a therapist working with exiled Palestinians in Europe. “Loss of home, identity, and belonging. It shows up as anxiety, depression, profound fatigue. They’re fighting on every front, for survival, dignity, and recognition.”

Each night, as I tuck my son into bed, I wonder if I’m doing enough to give him a sense of home in a place that still feels foreign to me. The photos of Gaza, the stories I tell, the lullabies I sing—they’re my attempt to build something enduring out of what exile has left behind. But the cracks always show. This life is both beautiful and fragile, real and imagined, rooted and uprooted all at once. And I know I’m not alone.

Palestinian exile stretches like a web linking those still in Gaza, those displaced, and those scattered across the world. The thing about being Palestinian is that statelessness follows us, whether we live in Palestine or not. In Gaza, people long for freedom. In exile, we long for the same thing. For more than seven decades, occupation has entrenched our dispossession. Refugee camps have become generational homes. Lives are built around waiting for return, for recognition, and for justice.

Much as I sit to educate my son about home, my friend Noor tells her daughter a bedtime story in Gaza, a story about a tree that grew despite the stones thrown at it. Her grandmother told it to her during another war in the 1980s. That grandmother had been displaced in 1948.

Noor’s world is shattered now, just like her grandmother’s and mine. Like me, she and her daughter are at home and homeless all at once.

We’ve become the keepers of our own history. But even this task is fraught, constantly undermined by dominant narratives that frame our struggle as a relic of the past rather than a fight for survival.

In the face of erasure, grassroots solidarity has become a beacon. Across the diaspora, Palestinians are building informal systems of support that governments and institutions refuse to provide.

In Berlin, Amani, a refugee, runs a legal aid group for newcomers navigating the maze of asylum processes. “No one helped me when I arrived,” she said. “I won’t let that happen to anyone else.” She translates documents, attends court hearings, organizes rights workshops.

In Turkey, a group of exiled journalists has launched a digital platform to amplify stories from Gaza, publishing testimonies, photos, and videos smuggled from inside.

“We can’t be there,” said Samir, one of the founders, “but we can make sure the world sees what’s happening.”

These efforts, however different, share one purpose: preserving the spirit of Palestine in exile. Through cultural festivals in Paris, political protests in London, and storytelling nights in Amman, Palestinians are holding on to who we are.

Exile may scatter us, but it cannot sever our connection. From Gaza to Berlin, Brooklyn to Beirut, and Istanbul to Amman, these stories draw a collective portrait of resilience in the quiet, powerful act of enduring.

Late at night, I watch Gaza through the screen of my phone. The footage, which is shaky at times, was filmed by a friend who’s still there; it shows children managing to play on a rubble-strewn street, their laughter rising above the hovering drones.

Outside my window, the world is orderly and silent. It couldn’t be more different.

I pause the video, close my eyes, and let the echoes of home wash over me. For a moment, I am back there—walking streets that no longer exist, in a world that survives only in memory. But when I open my eyes, I’m still here. Sitting in a space that still doesn’t feel like mine.

I ask myself a question I’ve asked a thousand times before: How can we keep Gaza alive in our hearts while building a future elsewhere?

The answer never changes: We don’t have a choice—we need to do both. Despite the distance and the silence of the world, Palestinians carry Gaza’s story as a duty. Our existence is persistence, and our voices are a bridge connecting past to present, Gaza to the world, and despair to hope.

This piece has appeared in the September 2025 Issue of The Nation. You can access the story online here.

I recently helped co-produce a film on Gaza called Severed, a short documentary that follows the story of Mohamad Saleh, an eighteen-year-old amputee from Gaza.

Mohamad is a survivor of five major Israeli assaults on Gaza, though that word doesn’t begin to hold what he’s endured. He lost his leg at twelve to an Israeli bullet, fired by a sniper. Since then, he’s lost his friends, his home, and, later on, members of his family — pieces of himself scattered through five major assaults on Gaza. And yet, he’s still standing and trying to shape a life.

When my partner Jen Marlowe, director of Severed, asked me to join her efforts, I didn’t hesitate. I said yes before she could even finish her offer, because I knew that story had to be told. I knew what it meant and how easily it could be forgotten, sidelined, or silenced altogether.

From the very beginning, the journey of putting the film together was marked with care and responsibility, by walking beside a young man as he gave voice to a grief too deep for most people to imagine — and trying to ensure that voice was honored.

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I first met Mohamad in Cairo, where he now lives in exile. The moment we sat together, I could feel the weight he carried. His voice was soft, almost careful, like someone who had learned to measure his words because too many of them had been met with silence. But when he spoke about Gaza and what he remembered and what he couldn’t forget, there was a clarity, a sharpness that made it impossible to look away.

In that meeting, I began to see a reflection of my younger self, also displaced and carrying loss. I saw a generation of Palestinians who’ve grown up under drones learning the language of grief before they learned how to write their names.

And so from that moment, I carried Mohamad’s story as someone who had lived too many of the same truths. That closeness was both a gift and a burden. It demanded more of me. I followed the development of the story from beginning to end — from Cairo to Gaza and back and forth and to the editing room. Every scene, every decision, every silence we left in was intentional.

Jen gave me the trust and space to do that. She invited me in as a full partner. We built this film with respect and reflection at every stage, aware of how delicate it was to turn one boy’s pain into something larger without distorting it. That balance — between the individual and the collective, truth and trauma — was always at the heart of Severed.

What emerged is a film that I believe holds deep truth. It sits with the emotional wreckage and allows us to feel what it means to live with an amputated past, and yet still dream of a future. It shows the quiet cruelty of exile, the empty chairs at dinner, and the nightmares that still arrive even when the bombs don’t. And it does so through the voice of someone who never asked to be a symbol, only to be seen.

For me, co-producing Severed was a moment of return. It reminded me why I do this work. As a journalist, I’ve reported on Gaza through every horror it has faced. But this film gave me a different language — one rooted in emotion, memory, and presence. It made me slow down and sit with the pain, rather than explain it.

More than anything, it gave me a sense of purpose. I felt deeply, every day we worked on it, that we were building something that would outlive the news cycle, a document of war, love, longing, and dignity.

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That is why I want people to watch Severed. It’s the kind of story that rarely gets told. 

I urge you to watch the film here: Severed – Full Film 

And I hope you’ll also read Jen’s powerful piece on the film, published in The Nation: “Severed: The story of a boy from Gaza.” (If you’re interested in helping get word out about Severed, you can contact Jen here.)

I am humbled to have helped bring Mohamad’s story into the world, which asks for nothing but witness, reminding me who I am and what I owe.

This piece sits with the emotional wreckage left by this war. It follows the therapists and psychologists still trying to help others while they themselves are displaced, grieving, and surviving with almost nothing. Many have lost entire families, sleep in tents, and treat patients with no medicine, no functioning clinics, and no rest. And yet, they show up to hold what they can.

These providers shared the invisible labor of emotional survival, discussing children who play games called air strike and act out death, and their parents who break down in front of their kids.

I carried this story for months before I could write it. It shows how the people in Gaza try to remain human when everything around them has collapsed.

If you read it, I hope you sit with it. Let it stay with you a while, and shift how you see Gaza, through the quiet work of those still trying to help others live.

Here’s the link to the story: Treating Gaza’s Collective Trauma

If you find this kind of work important, I’d be grateful if you’d consider subscribing to my Substack. Those of you already subscribed, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you’re able. Your support allows me to keep telling stories like this.

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Thank you, as always, for reading and for not turning away.

In turn, several Western governments that are usually reluctant to openly criticize Israel began to issue statements of concern, calling for an unimpeded flow of aid. Britain and France joined the chorus — the latter taking the additional step of announcing it will recognize a Palestinian state — and even U.S. President Donald Trump has now called out what he described as “real starvation” in Gaza, in a public rebuke of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This past weekend, in the face of growing international pressure, Israel announced several measures ostensibly aimed at allaying the humanitarian crisis it created: a daily 10-hour “tactical pause in military activity” within the 13 percent of Gaza that remains accessible to Palestinians; the opening of “secure routes” to allow more aid trucks to enter the Strip; and the resumption of aid drops from the sky.

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Any easing of Israel’s blockade on the enclave is to be welcomed, especially after a week in which scores of Palestinians died of hunger. Yet as a renewed trickle of food is driven and parachuted in for 2 million severely malnourished people, the move appears less a gesture of goodwill by Israel than a strategic recalibration — an effort to deflect mounting international outrage so it can continue annihilating Gaza. This is what Israeli ministers openly admitted in May, when Israel slightly eased the total two-month blockade on the Strip, and they are doing the same now.

The eventual shift in Israeli policy came just hours after the latest round of Israel-Hamas ceasefire negotiations collapsed in Doha. This timing was no coincidence: with no truce in sight and its military campaign intensifying across Gaza, Israel needed to change the conversation. Allowing aid in, however limited, was conceived as a way to project responsibility while continuing to pursue the goal of making the Strip unlivable. Humanitarian relief, in this framing, becomes both a shield against criticism and another lever of domination.

The tragedy is that even the bare minimum now passes for mercy. But when aid is only permitted under siege, when food follows fire and destruction resumes as soon as people have eaten, Israel’s overriding strategy becomes clear: maintain enough control to kill without consequence, and enough relief to look humane while doing it.

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‘They let us eat so we don’t starve on camera’

While the resumption of aid was touted as a lifeline, its scope remains grossly insufficient. According to the UN, Gaza needs 600-800 trucks of aid daily to meet basic needs. But yesterday, the first day of the new system, only 73 trucks entered the Strip along with three airdrops whose total payload was equivalent to only two additional trucks. Indeed, while visually striking, airdrops barely scratch the surface of what is required and often land in unsafe or inaccessible areas, even killing Palestinianswhen parachutes failed to deploy successfully.

And while food may have dominated headlines in recent weeks, other fundamental pillars of life in Gaza have collapsed too, often with much less attention. Water scarcity has reached catastrophic levels after Israel put almost all of Gaza’s desalination plants out of service, either by bombing them or restricting the entry of fuel. Groundwater sources have grown increasingly polluted, and hundreds of thousands rely on brackish, bacteria-laden water that poses severe health risks, particularly for children. UN agencies have warned that waterborne diseases are already spreading in overcrowded shelters and displacement camps.

Electricity remains largely nonexistent. The Strip has been plunged into near-total darkness since October 2023, with only sporadic access to solar-powered batteries or fuel-run generators, which are also running dry as a result of the intensified siege. Internet connectivity, meanwhile, has all but vanished: Gaza’s already fragile telecom infrastructure has been decimated by strikes and now sits dormant, isolating people from one another and the outside world. Some Gazans have found limited workarounds — using smuggled E-SIM cards linked to Egyptian or Israeli networks when signal is briefly accessible, or pooling scarce satellite connections through NGOs and press crews. These fleeting signals allow just enough bandwidth to send a voice note, an image, or a short video.

What’s more, as I write this, Israel carries on killing dozens of Palestinians at aid sites in Gaza every day, and Israeli tanks are continuing their incursion into the central parts of Gaza that have until now been spared the worst of the bombardment, squeezing Palestinians into an ever-shrinking sliver of the enclave. Seen in this light, Israel’s apparent about-face on aid changes very little: the aid may arrive, but so will the shells.

For those bearing the brunt of Israel’s onslaught, the resumption of aid has been greeted as merely survival on a leash. “They let us eat so we don’t starve on camera,” Nihal, a mother currently living in Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, who preferred to use only her first name, told me. “We still fall asleep to the sound of drones and wake up to the explosions.”

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The use of starvation as a weapon, and now of selective relief as a pressure valve, is central to Israel’s approach. At a time when the world is more horrified than ever at the sight of what it has created in Gaza, Israel is hoping to distance itself from the perception of deliberate cruelty — and perhaps aiming to avert more serious repercussions from the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court — even as it continues to enforce policies that produce mass suffering.

This policy shift may succeed in turning down the volume of global outrage for a little while, as Israel once again allows the world to believe it is doing something to help while ensuring that nothing really changes. But while people may eat today, what’s certain is that the bombs will fall tomorrow.

This article was first published by the author in +972 Magazine.

“My body is breaking down. My mother is collapsing from exhaustion. My cousin cheats death every day for a morsel of aid. Gaza's children are dying in front of our eyes, and we are powerless to help them.”

I am so hungry.

I’ve never meant those words in the way I do now. They carry a kind of humiliation that I can’t fully describe. Every moment, I find myself wishing: If only this were just a nightmare. If only I could wake up and it would all be over.

Since last May, after I was forced to flee my home and take shelter with relatives in Khan Younis refugee camp, I’ve heard those same words uttered by countless people around me. Hunger here feels like an assault on our dignity, a cruel contradiction in a world that prides itself on progress and innovation.

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Every morning, we wake up thinking only of one thing: how to find something to eat. My thoughts go immediately to our sick mother, who had spinal surgery two weeks ago and now needs nutrition to recover. We have nothing to offer her.

Then there’s my little niece and nephew — Rital, 6, and Adam, 4 — who ask for bread all the time. And we adults try to withstand our own hunger just to save whatever scraps we can for the kids and the elderly.

Since Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza in early March (which it eased only marginally in late May), we haven’t tasted meat, eggs, or fish. In fact, we’ve gone without nearly 80 percent of the food we used to eat. Our bodies are breaking down. We feel constantly weak, unfocused, and off-balance. We grow irritable easily, but most of the time we just stay silent. Talking uses up too much energy.

We try to buy anything available from the markets, but the prices are becoming impossible. A kilo, or two pounds, of tomatoes now costs NIS 90 (over $25). Cucumbers are NIS 70 a kilo (around $20). A kilo of flour is NIS 150 ($45). These numbers feel outrageous and cruel.

We survive on only one meal a day: usually just bread, made using whatever flour we managed to find. If we’re lucky, lunch may include some rice, but even that doesn’t fill us up. We try to set aside a little food for my mother, maybe some vegetables, but it’s never enough. Most days, she’s too weak to stand, too drained to even perform her prayers.

We rarely leave the house anymore, afraid our legs might give out. It already happened to my sister: while searching on the streets for something, anything, to feed her children, she suddenly collapsed to the ground. Her body didn’t even have the strength to stay upright.

We began to sense the depth of the hunger crisis when the baker Abu Hussein, known to everyone in the camp, began scaling down his operations. He used to bake for dozens of families a day, including ours, who no longer have cooking gas or electricity to bake for themselves. From morning til night, his wood-burning ovens kept running.

But recently, he was forced to start working fewer and fewer days each week. My sister would come home and say, “Abu Hussein’s is closed. Maybe he’ll work tomorrow.” Now, trying to get dough and flour has become its own kind of suffering.

Three generations of hunger

In the camp, I came to understand the true cruelty of this genocide: the suffocating overcrowding, the mass of refugees forced out of their homes, and the endless stories of hunger.

I’m currently staying at my aunt’s house, who took us in after we were displaced and has sheltered us for the past two months. Like nearly every other building in the camp, her home was almost completely destroyed by Israel’s attacks. My aunt’s siblings worked around the clock to repair what they could, managing to make one room livable.

The house overflows with grandchildren, each undergoing their own struggle with hunger. My oldest cousin, Mahmoud, is father to four of them. He himself has lost nearly 40 kilos (around 90 pounds) over the past few months. The signs of malnutrition are visible everywhere on his pale face and emaciated body.

Every day before dawn, Mahmoud sets out to the American-run aid distribution centers, risking his life to try to bring home some food for his starving kids. Since I arrived to stay with them, he has told me the same harrowing stories day after day.

“Today I crawled on my hands and knees through a crowd of thousands,” he said recently, showing me a bag with scraps of food that he’d managed to scavenge. “I had to collect whatever had fallen to the ground — lentils, rice, chickpeas, pasta, even salt. My bones ache from being stepped on, but I have to do it for my children. I can’t bear the sound of their hunger.”

One day, Mahmoud came back with nothing. His face was drained of color, and he looked like he might collapse. He told me the Israeli army had opened fire without warning. “The blood of a young man beside me splattered on my clothes,” he said. “For a moment, I thought I was the one who’d been shot. I froze — I was sure the bullet was in my body.”

The young man fell to the ground right in front of him, but Mahmoud couldn’t stop to help. “I ran more than six kilometers without looking back. My children are hungry and waiting for me to bring back food,” he said, his voice breaking, “but they won’t be happy if I come home dead.”

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My other cousin, Khader, is 28. He has a 2-year-old daughter, and his wife is pregnant. He’s consumed with worry about their unborn child, who is due two months from now. His wife isn’t eating properly, and every day he sits in silence, tormented by the same questions: Will this famine harm my wife? Will the child she gives birth to be healthy or sick?

His 2-year-old, Sham, cries all day from hunger. She begs for bread — anything beyond the tasteless, heavy staples of rice, lentils, and beans that have upset her stomach and made her sick multiple times.

One day, a friend of Khader’s gave him a handful of grapes for her. It was a small miracle. Khader knelt down beside Sham and offered her the grapes, but she only stared at them, playing with them in her tiny hands and refusing to eat them. She didn’t recognize them: not once in her two years of life in Gaza had she seen grapes before.

It wasn’t until her father put one in his mouth and smiled that she hesitantly copied him. She chewed. Then she laughed.

Bodies shutting down

I often stand at the door of the house, watching the children in the camp. They spend most of their time sitting on the ground, staring blankly at passersby. When I ask one of them to buy me an internet card so I can work, or call my niece from the neighbor’s house, they respond in low, tired voices. They tell me they’re hungry. That they haven’t had bread in days.

I’m only 30 years old, but I’m no longer the energetic woman I once was. I used to work long hours between teaching and journalism, but since this war started I haven’t had a moment’s rest. I juggle exhausting household duties — caring for my mother and family — while simultaneously trying to keep documenting and writing about everything that’s happening around me.

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For about a month now, though, I’ve lost the ability to follow the news. My focus is slipping. My body is breaking down. I suffer from anemia as a result of eating only lentils and other legumes for months. And for the past two days, I’ve been unable to swallow due to severe throat inflammation — a consequence of relying on dukkah and spicy red peppers to try to quell my hunger.

Mahmoud, a 28-year-old photographer who works with me on video stories, is struggling too. “I haven’t eaten anything in two days except soup,” he told me recently. “I don’t have the energy to work.” No one does. Working during a genocide requires a level of strength that is impossible to sustain. Starvation has crippled the productivity of every working person in Gaza.

Yesterday, I accompanied my mother to Nasser Hospital for a physical therapy session after her surgery. On the way, we saw dozens of people who couldn’t walk more than a few meters without having to rest. My mother was the same: her legs were too weak to carry her. She sat on a plastic chair by the roadside, gathering what little energy she could muster to go on.

As we continued walking, we heard shouting. Young men and women ran past, crying out in jubilation: “There are flour trucks on the street!” A huge crowd had formed. People were desperately sprinting toward the trucks for a chance at a bag of flour.

It was chaos. No one was escorting the trucks to ensure that everyone could get their share safely. Instead, we watched the crowd race toward dangerous areas under the control of the Israeli army, just for flour.

18 deaths in 24 hours

After the therapy session, we left the hospital and passed women crying over their starving children, dying right before our eyes. One woman, Amina Badir, was screaming, clutching her 3-year-old child.

“Tell me how to save my daughter Rahaf from death,” she cried. “For a week she’s eaten nothing but a single spoon of lentils each day. She’s suffering from malnutrition. There’s no treatment, no milk at the hospital. They’ve taken away her right to live. I see death in her eyes.”

According to the Health Ministry in Gaza, the death toll from hunger and malnutrition since October 7 has risen to 86 people, 76 of them children. Yesterday, it reported that 18 people had died of starvation in the previous 24 hours alone. Medical personnel staged a stand-in at Nasser Hospital to appeal for international intervention before more people starve to death.

This story was first published by the author, Ruwaida Amer, in +972 Magazine.

I didn’t expect my 3-year-old son, Rafik, to find comfort in a YouTube screen while we were surviving a war. But during the long, hunger-filled days of displacement in Gaza, with bombs overhead and no clean water in our mouths, he would whisper her name like a lifeline: “Ms. Rachel.”

Her videos once filled our home with colors, words and songs. When everything else collapsed, he clung to that memory. Even as everything around us fell apart, amid loss and terror. Something about that voice, calm and joyful, made him feel safe when nothing else did.

Rafik was barely speaking before the war. But amid the screams and sirens, I had downloaded a few of her videos on my phone, hoping for even a minute of distraction for my kid. We had no WiFi, but in the corner of our bombed-out shelter, her voice gave him a tiny flicker of joy.

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I, too, was clinging to anything that could keep him tethered to life, joy and the version of childhood he was being robbed of. As fathers, we’re supposed to protect and provide. But in Gaza, we hold our children as the bombs fall and whisper promises we may not be able to keep.

“Can you say ball?” she’d ask. He repeated it, giggling. “You can do it!” she always said. My son believed her, and so did I. That belief carried us through more than just a night of shelling. Outside, warplanes roared and homes collapsed. Inside, my child was asking for the voice that taught him his first English words.

Other fathers I know told me the same: The weight of failure, though not of our making, settles in our chests. One friend said he used to dream of teaching his son to ride a bike. Now he just prays the boy wakes up each morning. Another father confessed that every time his daughter asks if she can go home, he has to lie, because her home was turned to ash.

Months later, long after we escaped Gaza, but not the grief it carved into us, I saw a video of Ms. Rachel, real name Rachel Accurso. She wasn’t singing or teaching letters this time. She was looking directly into the camera, asking the world to look at the children of Gaza. “Please look at her eyes for one minute,” she said, pointing to a picture of Siwar Ashour, a then-5-month-old severely malnourished baby whose picture came to represent the dire need for an immediate delivery of aid into Gaza.

When I saw that video, I thought of all the parents in Gaza trying to explain to their children why food has run out, or why their sister is gone, or even why the sky is always on fire.

I also saw pictures and videos of Accurso meeting 3-year-old Rahaf. Watching the little girl's face exude joy as she sang along with Accurso almost made it hard to remember that this innocent child lost both her legs in an Israeli bombardment before she was evacuated along with her mother to the U.S. to receive treatment.

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I reached out to Ms. Rachel to ask what moved her to speak up, and what it has meant for her. “I see my children and every child in the children of Gaza,” she told me. “The silence surrounding their unimaginable suffering is unconscionable.”

She also shared how as an early childhood educator she knows how crucial the first few years are for brain development and the lifelong effects trauma and malnutrition have on a child. “It’s a failure of humanity to deny children food, water, medical care, shelter and education — the basic needs of childhood and their human rights.”

Gaza has become one of the deadliest places in the world for children. Since October 2023, more than 50,000 children have reportedly been killed or injured by Israeli airstrikes and shelling, according to statements released by UNICEF in May.

Newborns are dying for lack of formula, toddlers drink sewage water, and children fall asleep crying from hunger.

For Accurso, the images of malnourished babies emerging from Gaza can’t be separated from the work she has devoted her life to. “As an educator, you care about every child in your class. I’ve taught children from so many places and so many backgrounds. They all want to play, to learn, to laugh and to belong. They are all innocent and precious. And geography does not change that.”

“It’s sad that people try to make it controversial to stand up for children who are facing unimaginable suffering,” she continued, echoing a point she’s expressed in previous interviews. “What should be controversial is people staying silent.”

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For parents like me, who have lived this war with our children, fled bombings, rationed food and buried friends and relatives, her voice has felt like a crack of light breaking through an otherwise impenetrable silence.

So many of us carry the guilt of not being able to do enough, even when we know there’s nothing more we could’ve done. To hear someone on the outside say, “These children matter,” is to feel, briefly, that we haven’t failed them entirely, that maybe the world can still listen.

Ms. Rachel is reminding the world that advocacy doesn’t have to be loud or political to be powerful. Sometimes it’s a lullaby, a tear, or a mother whispering comfort while holding her baby.

In a media ecosystem where saying “Palestine” can cost you followers, sponsors and jobs, Ms. Rachel made a different choice. She spoke with certainty and courage. To say that children deserve food, water, and safety shouldn’t be a brave act. Standing up for those who suffer shouldn’t be condemned. Speaking out against the systems that cause that suffering shouldn’t be dangerous.

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But it is.

We live in a world where a father’s plea to save his starving daughter can be labeled as “confusing politics.” The emotional labor of fatherhood, and parenthood, in Gaza is brutal. We’re asked to absorb our children’s fear, hide our own, and somehow carry on. Accurso’s refusal to look away breaks through that cruel normalization. The people inflicting our pain are labeled “defenders,” while our grief, our screams and even our survival stories are erased, ignored, or repainted in the language of hate. Sometimes I wonder if the world has already decided who is worthy of mourning and who is not.

These days, my son watches Ms. Rachel on a screen far from Gaza. The same bright songs and soft encouragements that once helped drown out the sounds of war now fill our quieter mornings with something unfamiliar: calm. He claps, sings and smiles, and I watch him, still half-expecting the ground to shake.

There’s a new kind of meaning in the colors and tunes now. For him, they’re play and comfort. For me, they’re a reminder of everything we carried out with us and everyone who couldn’t leave. It’s how we know we haven’t fully survived, I think, as we hold on to fragments of safety layered with memory.

An original version of this story was first published by the author in MSNBC.

At sunrise, Abu Tamer left the tarp-covered structure where his family of six had been sheltering for weeks. He walked past rows of exhausted people sleeping in the open and past children combing the sand for scraps of food or firewood. The rumour had spread fast: trucks were arriving at the US-run humanitarian distribution site set up near the southern Gaza border in the city of Rafah. Aid was finally allowed into Gaza after almost twelve weeks of crossing shutdown.

He didn’t return. What was supposed to be a site for food and survival became, instead, a trap. Witnesses told me that shortly after the crowd formed, Israeli gunfire rang out. Some ran, and some dropped to the ground, while others were never seen again.

For weeks, there has been a shift in the international narrative around the food crisis in Gaza. “Aid is getting in,” some media outlets reported. “Things are improving.” But on the ground, that story feels like a cruel misrepresentation. What little aid has arrived is not only grossly insufficient, it has often lured people into danger. In some cases, it has even become the reason people are killed.

On paper, the situation seems to be improving. More trucks were crossing into Gaza over the past week or so. U.S. officials have celebrated the success of aid delivery corridors. Media headlines talked about “resumed deliveries” and “increased access.”

But such language hides a devastating reality: that many of these trucks are arriving into a place that has already been invaded by starvation, and in a context that remains as deadly as ever.

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In March last year, Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinians attempting to retrieve flour from aid trucks, killing over 100 people in what became known as the “Flour Massacre.” Now, a similar horror has unfolded in southern Gaza.

In the city of Rafah and its surrounding areas, people tell me that approaching an aid convoy often means risking your life. Whether it’s airstrikes targeting supposed “Hamas hideouts,” gunfire from nearby tanks, or the chaos of stampeding crowds, aid has become a site of carnage. One man told me, “My cousin was shot in the leg just for standing near the trucks. He wasn’t even holding anything yet.”

One of the most striking examples is the now-abandoned US-run aid distribution site, established with great fanfare in early May 2025. Its purpose, the people were told, was to facilitate safe and neutral delivery of food to a population on the brink of famine. But the testimonies I’ve gathered from those who went there tell a much darker story.

People who approached the site were subjected to profiling. Some were questioned and others beaten. A few never returned. Several individuals I interviewed described being stopped by Israeli or foreign personnel, interrogated about their origins, their families, their presumed political affiliations. One man said he was told to strip for a “security screening” before being turned away.

Then, within days, the site was shut down. No explanation or accountability, just another promise of help turned into a source of trauma. What seemed to be a humanitarian corridor turned out a site for surveillance under the pretext of assistance. It was a choke point disguised as a lifeline.

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On June 5, another massacre unfolded in southern Gaza after “gunfire was opened at crowds of people approaching the aid trucks.” Dozens were killed, many of them women and children, as they sought food or fled toward what they thought were safe zones.

The Israeli military claimed they were pursuing “terror suspects.” But none of the victims I’ve confirmed so far had any ties to armed groups. This was merely a breadline. The repetition of these killings cannot be incidental. It is part of the logic of collective punishment.

This is happening a year and a half into the Israeli war on Gaza. While Western media boasts about floating piers and drone-monitored aid corridors, these same countries continue to arm the same military that bombs hospitals, schools, and now aid lines. In the same breath that U.S. officials highlight humanitarian achievements, they veto ceasefire resolutions. They finance the continuation of a war while pretending to offer salvation.

The aid is not flowing because things are better. It is flowing in small, deadly trickles because the world is trying to maintain an illusion, that Gaza is being cared for and Palestinians are not being left to starve.

But those of us living it, or surviving it, know better. “They say aid is coming,” a man told me, “but we only see funerals.”

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Such organizations like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, are they facilitating survival, or just giving cover to an unjust war?

Most NGOs are operating without guarantees of safety. Convoys are attacked. Humanitarian workers are targeted. Some international organizations remain silent or complicit, unwilling to risk their funding or access. When others speak up, they end up ignored.

Above all, the reason that people in Gaza dying is because of more than one reason. Lack of food and falling bombs are taking place in real-time. Because snipers still shoot. Because ceasefires are still being rejected. What the people want, what we all want, is breath and bread. The ability to walk without being hunted. The freedom to rebuild without burying our people again tomorrow.

I think often think about Abu Tamer and the way he walked that morning, hopeful despite it all. He didn’t think he was doing anything dangerous. He thought he was going to get a bag of food for his five children. His body was found in on the site two hours after the attack. His wife buried him with her bare hands.

No matter how “improving the situation” the world sees it, in Gaza, even the promise of aid has become a reason to fear. There is no safety in starvation or peace in piecemeal humanitarianism, and there is no salvation in a world that demands our death before it acknowledges our life.

This article was first published by the author in The New Arab.

We say the bread line starts at dawn. We say the children sleep through meals because there’s nothing left to give. And when we still have words to speak, we use them sparingly, like our food, because we know the rest of the world isn’t always listening.

I have a new radio story out on This American Life on what it means to survive Gaza’s starvation. I report on the severe food shortages, the collapse of aid, and the daily math of survival, featuring my own experience living through hunger and reporting while diagnosed with acute malnutrition.

The story also centers the voice of a young woman in northern Gaza who speaks with startling clarity about how she manages to ration what little they might have. She tells me how she distracts her body, how she silences the growling in her stomach, and how she stays alive.

You can listen to the segment directly on YouTube here (starting minute 38:00):

▶️ ‘Week Eleven’: This American Life

This was not an easy story to tell. But it felt necessary. Hunger is one of the most intimate violations of war, and one of the most invisible. I hope this story brings it closer, in sound, in truth, and in witness.

Telling these stories takes time, care, and a lot of unseen labor. If my work matters to you, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support makes it possible for me to keep reporting.

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Thank you for listening, and for your support!

I’ve survived so many times now I’ve lost count. I was pulled from the rubble with my son after our home was flattened, walked for hours carrying a bag of bread and the bones of what once was a life, fled neighborhoods, towns, and streets we once called home, only to find no home waiting on the other side, and every time I survived, something else died. Sometimes, it was a friend. Sometimes a cousin and sometimes a colleague. Some other times it was the sound of my son’s laughter and my own belief that living means something.

Survival is not a blessing.

I’ve come to learn that survival is just another word for staying inside the pain. People wake up every day in a different place than where they were yesterday and find it more crowded and more tired and more broken. Stepping over children sleeping on cardboard under trees is now a normal thing, and the days are all the same. So are the struggles of hunger and water and the bitter metallic taste. The same questions about where we should go next, what we will eat today, and who else we’ve lost.

A reporter captured the moment at midnight, as the sky lit up like day from illumination flares.

Watch the post on Instagram

The caption reads:
“We are dying. The Israeli bombing is relentless. Women and children are the victims. No safe places left. No food, no water. Famine is spreading rapidly.”

I’ve sat with people who don’t run anymore when leaflets fall from the sky, I remember talking to a woman in Khan Younis who told me she stayed in her home after the first warnings. Her name was Sameera and she was sixty-two. Her husband was too sick to walk and she couldn’t carry him. “If we leave, we die on the road. If we stay, we die here,” she said. “At least here I know the ground. I know which walls will fall on me.”

She didn’t say it with fear. There was simply no fear left.

Another man in Deir Al Balah was standing in the middle of a bombed street and sweeping glass and dirt into a pile. He’d lost two of his daughters, and when I asked him why he didn’t leave earlier, he said, “I didn’t want to spend the last moments of my life running.”

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It’s neither courage nor resistance, only exhaustion, the kind that comes with an understanding that in Gaza there is no such thing as a safe place. We just run until our legs and souls give out. And even if we make it out alive, we still carry the weight of every person who didn’t.

In one video, a child sits on top of the rubble sobbing. His father is still trapped beneath the debris.

Watch the video on X

People always say survival is the goal and we’re lucky to have made it. But there’s no such thing as luck about people dissolving slowly and dying in slow motion.

During my months reporting from there, I saw children who don’t speak anymore. I once saw a boy in Jabalia who used to love cartoons but now just sits and stares at the wall. When I tried to ask for his name, he covered his ears. His mother said he hasn’t spoken since the missile hit their home and took his sister.

When someone cries out of an injury, we know they’re still holding on. But when they just stare at the ceiling as they bleed, we know they’ve already left, even if their body hasn’t.

There is nothing noble about this kind of survival. There is no aftercare or healing.

A young Palestinian student, Shayma, describes what it’s like to be forcibly displaced amid the devastation and having nowhere to go. The camera pans across the flattened neighborhood where she is sheltering.

We don’t want to die. But when some of us fantasize about death, it’s because we’re full of everything that hurts. Our moms whisper that they envy those who died peacefully and quickly. I myself used to shower in cold water at night just to feel something cold. My neighbor lost her baby to dehydration around the time my son and I were diagnosed with malnutrition in March 2024. She still carries his blanket in her bag.

And here my friends tell me to stay strong and safe. But I don’t want strength anymore. I don’t want to be the one who survived everything. I don’t want my son to grow up believing that pain is something you get used to or that losing everything and still breathing means you’re lucky.

We all have our tricks for trying to suffer a little less. Some stop talking about the people they lost because even saying a name is unbearable. Some lie to themselves and pretend their loved ones are still displaced just somewhere they can’t reach. Some stop eating because food feels like a betrayal when the person you used to share it with is gone.

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I once believed that writing would help me make sense of it and that putting these stories down would somehow soften them. But even that doesn’t work anymore. I can’t keep writing about mass graves and call it documenting and narrating pain while still living inside it.

There is nothing poetic about this grief. It is ugly and it is heavy and it is repetitive. Sometimes I walk for hours just not to think and keep my body moving while my mind shuts down, or just to delay the next memory from arriving.

I still wake up sometimes believing we’re back home and feel like I’ll hear my mother’s voice and make coffee in our old kitchen.

The truth is, survival, when it’s endless and hollow and filled with nothing but hunger and mourning and fear… it begins to feel like a punishment.

We are alive in ways no one in this world would envy.

So when the people in Gaza no longer pray for safety, it’s because we’ve seen too much and lost too many.

World Press Freedom Day, which was marked on May 3, is a time when we deliver speeches, pledge solidarity, and commemorate journalism’s role in holding power to account. But in Gaza, the most basic freedom—the freedom to live, let alone to report—is denied at every turn. Since October 2023, more than 210 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed, according to the latest figures from the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate—a toll unmatched in any conflict in modern memory. More remain missing or are presumed dead beneath the rubble.

Most of the dead have been denied even the dignity of recognition. Their names—like Al Jazeera’s Hossam Shabat and Palestine Today’s Mohammed Mansour, both killed by Israeli air strikes in March—briefly surface in headlines and then vanish, as if their lives were as disposable as the rubble they documented.

Since Israel’s assault resumed on March 18 after a brief and faltering ceasefire, Gaza’s journalists have been pushed to the very brink. With equipment destroyed, press jackets offering no protection, and nowhere left to shelter, they keep reporting anyway—because if they don’t, no one will. Like everyone else in Gaza, most journalists are hungry, displaced, and without shelter. But they also carry the crushing weight of their duty: to keep documenting, even as their own lives are being systematically dismantled.

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What the world often forgets is that Gaza’s journalists are not just filing stories but also engineering miracles. With the electricity and cell phone service cut off for days or weeks at a time, reporters race to charging points powered by car batteries and climb to the higher floors of ruined buildings hoping to catch a sliver of a cell signal. When cameras are destroyed, they borrow or pool whatever gear survives, patching together broken tripods and cracked lenses. Fact-checking is done in real time amid air raids; entire reports are dictated by voice note when typing becomes impossible. There are no safety nets, no press-­freedom hotlines, no emergency extractions. Their only network is each other—and it’s this fragile, fiercely loyal chain of colleagues that keeps the truth alive when everything else is being destroyed.

And let’s be clear: This targeting of Palestinian journalists is not incidental. It is deliberate. Press vehicles, clearly marked, have been shelled. Homes where journalists were sheltering have been bombed. Reporters have received death threats from Israeli officials. To report from Gaza is to know you are in someone’s crosshairs.

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I covered the first months of this war from inside Gaza before evacuating with my family for safety. Now I carry the unbearable guilt of knowing my colleagues stayed behind. Our community of journalists is small, close-knit. I wake up to news of more dead and missing, and it feels personal every time, because it is.

I remember crouching in the corner of a half-destroyed room, clutching my press vest as though it might shield me from the next strike. I filmed funerals where the dead outnumbered the mourners, interviewed survivors whose stories I barely had time to record before the next round of shelling began. Each dispatch felt urgent yet inadequate, as I tried to capture the full weight of grief, the relentless fear, the sense of being hunted simply for doing your job.

I don’t write this from a place of survivor’s pride but survivor’s shame. While I am alive and safe, my colleagues are not only risking their lives; they are doing so under conditions that defy imagination. Their bravery inspires me daily. And it leaves me asking: What does freedom of the press mean when it is met with a missile?

As I write this, new ceasefire talks are underway again. But in Gaza, even “peace” has become a kind of theater—a brief pause to bury the dead before the next round of killing begins. The toll keeps rising. The destruction deepens. And through it all, Gaza’s journalists continue to report.

It is no longer enough for international newsrooms to issue statements of support or post solemn tributes when a Palestinian journalist is killed—if they even do that. The targeting of media workers is a war crimeunder international law. Where are the urgent calls from mainstream organizations for independent investigations into the deliberate targeting of media workers? Where is the coordinated push for enforceable protections and legal redress?

Palestinian journalists are bearing the brunt of a war on truth—and every reporter who believes in press freedom should see their struggle as our own. The global press corps must stop looking at Gaza as someone else’s crisis and start treating it as the front line in the fight for journalism itself. Applause for Palestinian journalists isn’t enough. Protection, accountability, and justice—that is the debt we owe.

A version of this column was first published by the author in The Nation, titled: “Gaza Is the Front Line in the Fight for Press Freedom”.

It had been months since Israel had allowed any food, water, medicine, or gas to enter Gaza, and we were all slowly starving. I remember the way hunger settled into my body—not just as pain, but as a kind of silence. My head throbbed constantly. When I stood up, the room spun. My mouth tasted like metal. My limbs felt heavy, like I was wading through water. I stopped feeling hunger as a craving; it became something else—a slow shutting down.

I still remember when my parents, my then two-and-a-half-year-old, and I were diagnosed with malnutrition. While I was the worst off, nothing hurt more than watching my own child and parents fade before my eyes. Watching them go hungry and knowing I had nothing to offer was its own suffering.

Every day, I would look at my son’s face and wonder if I would ever be able to fill his plate or cup again. Would there ever be a night when he didn’t cry himself to sleep from hunger? A morning when he woke without that hollow look in his eyes? I did what I could to keep him smiling and slip a little light into his day. Even when joy felt like a lie and safety was just a word we’d long forgotten the meaning of.

Now, I watch my friends, family, and colleagues suffer that same slow collapse, knowing exactly what it means and being unable to stop it.

On March 2, Israel once again tightened its stranglehold on the strip, systematically blocking the flow of food, water, and medical aid. According to UN reports, only a trickle of humanitarian convoys have been allowed in—far below what is needed to stave off mass starvation. The World Food Programme warns that 93 percent of Gaza’s population now faces crisis-level hunger, with famine already taking hold in the north.

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Every day begins the same in Gaza right now: with the attempt to make it to the next. People walk through streets of rubble looking for food, wood, or anything to keep their families alive. There’s no gas, no electricity, and barely any water. Wheat is gone. People crush animal-feed barley and corn into flour. Even that is hard to find.

Cooking gas ran out long ago; now people dig through the ruins for wood—old doors, broken furniture, anything that will burn. Fires burn in alleys, leaving a smell on everything: hair, skin, clothes. The sharp, sour smell of burning plastic and garbage fills the air. It never leaves you.

Aseel Afana, a mother in Jabalia, looks at her daughter’s face every day and feels the crushing pain of being unable to get her enough food or powdered milk. “Almost every night, Sila, who is only 14 months old, cries from hunger,” said Aseel, who can’t remember the last day her daughter felt full. “I try to keep her happy and maybe make her smile,” she added, “even though none of us has a reason to smile right now.”

Aseel’s voice shook as she described trying to keep her little daughter safe—even though, she noted, there’s no such thing as safety in Gaza. “I feel weak, helpless, naive. And the world is watching us die. That’s the only conclusion we can reach—that our lives just don’t matter much.”

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Amid this growing desperation, reports emerged over the weekend that the United States and Hamas are engaged in negotiations over a possible ceasefire and the urgent entry of humanitarian aid. A senior Palestinian official confirmed the talks, underscoring the critical need to ease conditions for the more than 2 million people facing severe hunger, dehydration, and medical shortages under Israel’s ongoing siege. As part of the negotiations, Hamas has agreed to release Edan Alexander, a 21-year-old Israeli-American soldier captive in Gaza. Donald Trump announced Alexander’s expected release, calling it a significant step toward both securing a ceasefire and unlocking aid access into Gaza.

If the reports are true, and if aid begins to flow again, it will come not a moment too soon.

When food is blocked at the border, when aid trucks are stalled, when bakeries are bombed and farmland flattened, it is no longer about denying supplies. It is about denying life. And that is why the world must understand: this is not a famine of nature—it is a famine by design.

Truckloads of aid sit idle at the border, turned away or delayed for weeks by Israeli decisions, while inside Gaza, parents grind animal feed into flour and children scavenge for scraps in the rubble.

The market barely holds together. There’s a very limited number of vendors behind makeshift tables, selling scraps: a bit of rice here, a bag of flour there. A few days ago, a friend of mine saw a starving woman walk up and hand over a gold bracelet, probably a wedding gift, asking quietly for a bag of flour. The seller glanced at her, then looked up at the sky, as if he was wondering how much longer any of them have.

And everywhere, the same soft, worn-out questions pass from mouth to mouth: Where can I find bread? Where can we get water?

In Gaza, more than 3,500 children under the age of five are now staring down death by starvation, Gaza’s Government Media Office warns. Another 70,000 children lie in hospital beds, their small bodies wasted by severe malnutrition.

I spoke with Abdelhakim Aburiash, a journalist reporting from northern Gaza, who hasn’t had food or clean water for days. “I can’t explain the pain in my stomach, in my bones, in my head,” he said. “I feel I can’t go on. But I have to go on.” His body is breaking, but he refuses to stop speaking. Abdlehakim has lost over 15 kilograms of weight—around 33 pounds—in two months.

Across Gaza, famine isn’t just in the empty kitchens. It’s in thinning arms, swollen bellies, and sunken cheeks everywhere. People walk doubled over from cramps. Children’s skin cracks from dehydration. Eyes lose their light. And above it all: the constant hum of drones, the sharp crack of artillery, the scream of jets.

I have known hunger—the gnawing emptiness, the dizziness, the body’s quiet ache. But what I witness now in Gaza is not hunger. It is starvation. Hunger is a feeling. Starvation is a weapon. Hunger makes you weak. Starvation is used to break you.

We are watching a people, my people, starved in real time.

I remember the small, desperate tricks of hunger: breaking bread into tiny pieces to fool the mind. Drinking salty water just to feel something in the mouth. Splitting one egg three ways. Learning not to ask, “What’s for dinner?” because it’s a cruel joke.

We are not telling this story to make the world feel sorry. We are telling it because we are either already dead or dying slowly. And we are asking those who still have power, those with voices that can be heard beyond this slaughterhouse, to know: that we are being starved. We are sleeping on the streets without shelter. We are scraping at the bottom of life itself, and when we lift our heads, we see a world that has decided we can disappear.

There is a grief here that words can’t carry.

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Even from afar, the ache of Gaza lives in my body. I know the hollow look in my friends’ eyes on the screen, the thinness of their voices when they manage to get a message through. I know what it means when they say they are “okay”—that they haven’t eaten in days, that they are rationing water by the capful, that they are burying neighbors and praying they are not next.

It is a particular kind of torment to watch the people you love endure a struggle you know too well —to recognize every pause, every forced smile, every silence on the line as a mark of exhaustion and loss. To scroll endlessly through updates, voice notes, and photos of rubble and ash, knowing that no call, no message, no post will fill an empty plate or quiet a child’s hunger.

The helplessness is a weight I carry across every hour. Because when you have survived starvation, you understand that what they are living now is not just a crisis—it’s a slow, deliberate crushing of life. And from here, all I can do is bear witness and refuse to let the world look away.

This is what I want people to understand: In Gaza, right now, parents are fainting while waiting in bread lines, children are collapsing from dehydration, and infants are dying for lack of formula. Inside overcrowded shelters, mothers are rationing pieces of bread among several children, while fathers scrape the bottoms of pots for leftover grains.

Doctors on the ground report an alarming rise in cases of severe acute malnutrition, describing babies with loose skin over bone, their bodies too weak to cry. Markets have been emptied of food, residents say, and many are resorting to trading scraps of wood or metal in desperate attempts to obtain anything edible.

At water distribution points, lines often form before dawn, with children standing barefoot for hours clutching empty jugs in the hope of filling them from damaged taps.

Parents, residents report, are routinely skipping meals—not by choice, but because there is nothing left to eat. Some have been forced to feed babies sugar mixed into water, when water can be found at all. Children, once seen playing in the streets, now scavenge through rubble for scraps of food.

Hospitals in Gaza are overwhelmed, with doctors warning that hunger is killing people even before the bombs return. Morgues are at capacity, and aid trucks remain stalled at border crossings, leaving an already dire humanitarian crisis on the brink of catastrophe.

This is no longer just a living city but a place being starved to death in plain sight without immediate and massive intervention. The world is watching a man-made famine. It is looking on as an entire population is being pushed past the edge of survival—and it is doing nothing.

A version of this article was first published by the author in The Nation.

I never thought I’d write these words. I’ve just been awarded the Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media — an award that bears the name of I.F. Stone, a journalist who believed in telling the truth even when the consequences were devastating.

This award is a tremendous honor. But it’s not just about me. It is about Gaza. It is about the stories we told when no one wanted to hear them — stories written while bombs fell overhead, while the internet vanished, while entire families were being erased.

And most of that work — the reporting that brought me to this stage — was done while I was still in northern Gaza, where the siege was so total it felt like the world had turned its back on us entirely.

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I was reporting while trying to keep my family alive.
I was writing while evacuating — again and again.
I was gathering testimonies from survivors while becoming one myself.

There were days when I hadn’t eaten. Days when the air was so thick with dust and death that it felt like a second skin. Days when I had no gear — no phone charger, no camera, no recorder — just memory, scraps of paper, and whatever fragments of Wi-Fi I could catch like breath.

There were nights when I filed dispatches not knowing if the place I had just written about would still exist by morning.

There were mornings I woke up not sure if I was lucky to still be breathing — or if surviving meant having to carry yet another body, yet another goodbye.

And still, I wrote. Like so many of us did. Because we had no choice.

“This recognition comes at a moment when the stakes could not be higher — when we are witnessing not only the erosion of journalists’ protection in Gaza, but the deliberate silencing of an entire people’s right to speak for themselves.”

When I was finally forced into exile, I carried not just my trauma with me — but the stories of my people. I carried the silenced, the buried, the unspoken. I carried the knowledge that while some of us survived, far too many didn’t.

This Izzy Award, then, is yes a victory. But also a memorial. A recognition that truth-telling under fire still matters. That bearing witness, even when the world looks away, still matters.

Because in Gaza, journalism is dangerous. And it is deadly.

Over the past year, we have seen the systematic targeting of journalists. Not just accidents. Not just casualties of war. Targeted killings. Cameras became threats. Press vests became targets. Telling the truth became a death sentence.

And yet, they kept reporting.

“When I think about the friends and fellow journalists we've lost, it becomes clear to me that journalism is not just about telling the story of survival — it is itself a form of survival.”

Being a Palestinian journalist means living with constant misrepresentation. It means being spoken about, not to. It means having our words dismissed, distorted, or drowned out.

So we learned to tell our stories anyway — through smuggled footage, broken phones, scribbled notes, memory.

Because if we don’t tell them, someone else will.
And too often, their versions erase our humanity.

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This award is for those who couldn’t leave. For those still reporting from tents, from rubble, from what used to be homes and schools and streets. It’s for the journalists in Gaza working with no gear, no networks, no insurance, and no promise of tomorrow.

It’s for those we’ve lost. Friends. Mentors. Colleagues. Dozens upon dozens of journalists killed — some while holding microphones, others while holding their children.

It’s for the Palestinian people — those who endure, resist, and insist on being seen.

I am grateful to the Park Center for Independent Media for this recognition. You chose to honor work that is not just dangerous — but inconvenient for power. You chose to see us. To hear us. And to believe that Palestinian voices belong not on the margins, but at the center.

“Thank you for believing that journalism matters — not just when it’s easy, but when it’s nearly impossible.”

I thank my family, who kept me standing when everything around us collapsed. And I thank my fellow reporters in Gaza — those still standing and those who are no longer with us. Their bravery is not history. It is happening right now.

This Izzy Award is a reminder:
That we are not invisible.
That our work is not in vain.
That even in exile, the story continues.

To the people of Gaza: your voices will not be silenced.
Your stories will not be forgotten.
Your truth will not be buried.

This is not the end.
We are still here.
We will keep telling the truth.
And we will not stop.

For 15 months, Palestinians in Gaza have endured relentless bombardment, starvation and displacement. When a ceasefire finally arrived on Jan. 19, it merely offered a brief, fragile pause to bury the dead, tend to the wounded, and cling to the remnants of life before it was disrupted. In Gaza, the expectation of devastation is as constant as breathing.

I covered the first phase of this war from the ground before I fled Gaza for my family’s and my safety. Now, reporting from Cairo as airstrikes continue to fall with unimaginable intensity, I see that for those still on the ground, there is no safety or calm, only the certainty that every lull is merely the prelude to even more destruction.

Even with reports of a new ceasefire deal on the horizon, this latest return of airstrikes has felt more like a confirmation that no pause will ever lead to lasting peace. And the deepening psychological toll — a burden that now rests on the ashes of over a year of agony and terror — means the fear of death or injury has become secondary to the slow erosion of hope.

By the weekend, more than 750 people had been killed — most of them women and children — while hundreds more were wounded. After Israel broke the ceasefire, health officials reported the death toll in Gaza since the war began in October 2023 surpassed 50,000.

For Palestinian journalists, reporting on this war is both a professional duty and an act of survival.

On March 24, the IDF killed two more Palestinian journalists: Al Jazeera Mubasher correspondent Hossam Shabat and Palestine Today reporter Mohammed Mansour. Shabat was killed when his car was targeted in Beit Lahiya, while Mansour died in a bombing that struck his apartment in Khan Younis. The IDF confirmed both killings, claiming both journalists were terrorists. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the deaths and denied that claim, a spokesperson stating, “The deliberate and targeted killing of a journalist, of a civilian, is a war crime.” Al Jazeera had denied earlier claims that Shabat was a terrorist.

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Their deaths add to the staggering toll of journalists and media workers killed in the war — more than 200 since October 2023, according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate — as those who remain continue risking their lives to document the unfolding devastation.

The targeting of media workers in Gaza has been routine. Press vehicles, clearly marked as such, have been struck by Israeli forces, and shelters housing displaced civilians and journalists have not been spared. We’ve seen numerous reports of journalists being personally targeted and threatened by the Israeli military.

Despite these relentless attacks, journalists in Gaza continue to do their job. Abdelhakim Abu Riash, a freelance photojournalist in northern Gaza, says he is “running out of places to report from — and of colleagues to report with.” But stopping isn’t an option, he says, “because then there would be no one to tell the world what’s happening.”

Sulaiman Hijjy, another photojournalist who has been reporting from Gaza, has grown accustomed to this grim reality. Since the airstrikes resumed less than two weeks ago, he found himself reliving the earliest days of the conflict. “For 15 months, I have filmed mass graves, bombed-out neighborhoods, entire families erased in a single airstrike,” he recalled.

“When the ceasefire came, I thought maybe I could breathe.” But there was no relief. Now, Hijjy files stories between airstrikes, capturing what remains of lives and landscapes before they, too, are erased.

The names of our fallen colleagues like Hossam, Mohammed and so many others before them should be voices that echo in newsrooms, not carved into gravestones.

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Even reporting from afar, the images of death don’t haunt me as a distant horror; they are a daily reality for me and thousands who remain in Gaza. They remind me that even as I report, I am also mourning. Documenting all of this means standing at the edge of life and loss, and continuing to write even when the world reads our words yet refuses to act. Carrying out this work is to ask, time and again, whether anything we say will ever be enough to break the world’s indifference.

Journalists aren’t the only ones fighting for life and dignity in Gaza. Dr. Yasser Shami, a surgeon at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, described the nearly impossible conditions of providing care in a hospital stripped of resources. “For two months, we tried to prepare,” he recalled. “We had no real supplies, but at least patients weren’t pouring in every minute.”

The current situation in his hospital’s emergency room is even “worse than before,” he says. He recently had to amputate a 9-year-old boy’s leg with no anesthesia. He says the “little boy screamed until he passed out,” before he moved on to the next patient. “I don’t think we’re even allowed the time to grieve here,” he said.

Each day, Shami faces impossible choices: who receives the last dose of antibiotics, who gets the only available ventilator, who might have a chance with urgent care, and who is already beyond saving. There is no proper triage — only a cruel calculus of survival dictated by scarcity.

According to a United Nations report from last December, 136 Israeli strikes on hospitals in Gaza pushed the health care system to the brink of collapse. This dismantling of Gaza’s health infrastructure means that even those who survive the bombs may not survive their wounds.

Medics, surgeons and journalists alike continue to press on, despite ongoing bombardments and the dimming prospect of lasting peace.

Every day, those journalists who have managed somehow to survive pick up their cameras, notebooks and microphones, even when they know they could be next.​ We grieve for those we’ve lost, yet we dare not stop — we owe it to them to keep telling the stories of those who can no longer speak for themselves.

An original version of this report was first published by the author in MSNBC.

You were sitting on the steps, rolling grape leaves between your fingers. You had the pot balanced perfectly between your knees. The radio hummed behind you. A scratchy old song from Fairouz was playing, and you were humming along, off-key as always. The tea on the windowsill was growing cold.

I wanted to call out to you, but my throat locked and my feet wouldn’t move.

Suddenly the pot clattered to the ground. The radio cut to static. And the sky cracked open.

I woke up gasping, my fingers gripping the sheets, trying to hold on to something—your voice, your scent, the warmth of the kitchen before dawn. But there was nothing, only the kind of quiet that means something has been taken.

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You never liked to sit still. You were always moving, always making something out of nothing. You stitched dresses with thread from a market stall. You turned old books into new stories for children who had none. You carved names into the backs of school desks, pressed the ink of poetry into walls.

In the mornings, you walked with the students, your feet scuffing the pavement. The boys with their ink-smudged fingers, the girls adjusting their hijabs in the window’s reflection. You laughed with the teachers who swapped stories between sips of cardamom coffee.

At noon, you argued politics with the fruit vendors. Your voice raised over the calls of “banadoura!” and “teen baladi!” You bought figs, pressed them gently between your fingers to test for ripeness.

In the afternoons, you sat with the doctors on hospital benches, watching them wipe the sweat from their brows, with exhaustion written into their bones. You traced the lines of their hands—hands that had pulled babies into the world, hands that had stitched together what shrapnel had torn apart.

And in the evenings, you waited for the fishermen whose boats were heavy with the scent of the sea and returned with their nets full of stories of how far they had to go, how little they could bring back.

You were beautifully and painfully everywhere.

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Then came the winter that swallowed you whole.

The students never made it home that day. The teachers fell silent pre-class. The hospital corridors cracked with voices that spoke only in numbers. The fishermen’s boats came back empty, the water behind them dark, thick with things no one dared name.

The bakeries that spread the scent of sesame and thyme turned hollow. The streets, tangled with the rhythm of your feet, fell still.

I tried to reach you. I searched the places you used to be.

I ran to schools, but there were no desks, no ink stains, no scuffed shoes swinging under chairs. Only walls blown apart, chalkboards split in half, pages from textbooks curling in the wind.

I ran into hospitals, but the beds were stacked with people who no longer opened their eyes. The doctors sat against the walls with their hands still and their eyes vacant.

I ran across markets, but the fruit stalls were overturned, oranges crushed under boot prints and the blood soaked into the sand.

I called your name. I screamed it into the ruins and the dust and the silence.

I still haven’t heard back from you.

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Now I am here. Somewhere far. The sky is calm and the streets are clean. No one looks over their shoulder before crossing the road. They tell me to be grateful. They tell me I am safe.

But I don’t know what safety is if you are not here.

They ask me where I am from. I try to explain but the words knot in my throat. I could tell them facts. Coordinates. Population figures. Casualty counts.

How do I tell them that you were the old men playing backgammon outside the mosque? That you were the scent of rain hitting dry earth? That you were the call to prayer weaving through the streets and mingling with the laughter of children kicking a tattered ball?

How do I tell them that you were the women baking bread before the sun rose, the writers scribbling against the weight of time, the journalists running toward the fire, the mothers tucking their children into bed, whispering, “It will be okay,” even when they knew it wouldn’t?

How do I tell them that you were my first home, my last refuge, my unfinished sentence?

That you are still here, in the salt of my skin, in the dust under my nails, in the grief lodged between my ribs.

That I hear you in the ambulance sirens that aren’t supposed to exist here. That I see you in the flicker of a candle when the power goes out. That I taste you in the first sip of bitter coffee before dawn.

That I am trying to keep you alive.

That I don’t know how.

That I don’t know if it is even possible.

That the world has buried you alive.

That they will stand over your grave and call it collateral.

That they will erase your name from maps and your stories from history and tell me to move on and start over

That I spent nights trying to speak to the world while you ached, not out of some relentless professionalism, but because my love for you burned fiercer than the metal and glass still buried in my back from the day before.

But I will whisper your name into the wind until it reaches the places they locked you out of. I will slip your stories between the cracks of their silence and stitch them into the seams of a world that pretends you never existed.

They will redraw maps, wipe the blood from their hands, call you a memory.

I know you are still there, breathing in the dust that refuses to settle. I hear you in the echo of the waves that still crash against a shore no one can walk anymore.

You are the embers buried beneath the ruin. You are the flicker beneath the ash and the heat beneath the rubble.

I know you are waiting.

And I know that when you rise—and you will rise—they will call it a miracle.

But I will call it what it is.

Home, coming back to life.