An extract from a piece published by Raseef22 on 25 October 

The seventh of October… The day we were meant to drink in the sunshine and get some vitamin D. Everything was ready: our swimsuits were packed, we had agreed on a shopping list and prepared the food. I decided to sleep at my best friend’s house, as she lived close to the coastal road and we had planned to travel directly there together. We divided the food we had bought into separate bags – we were obsessed with sorting things – and weren’t finished until late into the night. 

She danced to the song Substance and I watched her with uncontrollable laughter, both of us giggling as I tried to film her moves that always had me in stitches. Then we fell asleep, looking forward to the next morning. At six thirty a.m. my friend’s sister burst into the room, screaming in our faces. “Get up, get up, it’s happening!” We looked at her, clueless. This wasn’t exactly how we’d expected the morning to begin. And in any case, what could be “happening” on a Saturday? 

Her sudden entrance was accompanied by a barrage of missiles the likes of which we had never experienced before. Once we realised our plan had fallen apart, I insisted we share the breakfast we had imagined enjoying under the morning sun. We ate it under a rain of missiles. My brother arrived immediately after to take me home before the battle truly began. 

I returned home, bent on convincing myself this was just another in the series of escalations we had become used to during the year. But something made this time seemed different. 

War – that big word – had scared us so much in the beginning. I’m talking about the first, second, third and fourth aggressions, and all the escalations in between. It had taken so much of our humanity; had made killing the other easy, desirable even – and on many occasions, necessary.

Extract from an elegy written for her friend Nada al-Dahshan, a pharmacy student martyred in an Israeli bombardment with her father and mother. 

“I can’t get to the end of this year,” she would say to me, “without going on umrah.” That was her greatest wish, and her first step would be to start work as a pharmacist. But her thirst for knowledge gave her an irrational anxiety, and she started thinking about applying for grants abroad while in her final semester at university. But she would not make a living, not ever leave Gaza, not feel what it was like to earn a stable salary, not see Ahmad Manasra out of jail. She will never see her daughter and never name her Layla, never go to a Joubran brothers concert, and never see me in love for the first time after trying so hard to convince me that it is the most beautiful feeling.

Extract from a piece published by Gaza Stories 

My mother wept today. It was a defeated, weary weeping. My mother, whose wonderful cook’s hands everyone swears by, wept after burning the ‘fake’ maqluba before it was ready, wept even though the burning wasn’t her fault. We hadn’t been able to find the right cooking pot after being displaced for the fourth time to what is, supposedly, the final stop: Rafah. 

The maqluba wasn’t the only thing to burn today. First it was my heart. That morning I had seen a beautiful little boy, all dressed up, carrying a small pot to somewhere that looked like it was giving out food. And once he left that place teeming with people waving containers above their heads, I cried like I never had throughout this nightmare, more than all the times I’d received crushing news about friends and loved ones. I cried because on his way back, the boy was laughing. I cried because if I were him I would have broken down in tears. But he laughed as he described the scene: “It’s hopeless!” 

Does that boy realise? Does he comprehend the meaning of “hopeless” in a situation like this? 

How could he have left laughing? 

And why was he laughing at all? Ya Allah… 

My mother didn’t weep because the maqluba hadn’t worked out. She wept because it had ended up in the bin. We all tried to reassure her that Allah understood what we were going through, that He had watched as we’d tried to eat it. No matter what we said, she carried on crying. I tried to calm her down, my sobs mixed with traces of laughter, and then she got up, eyes brimming with tears, to lay out her prayer rug and cry to Allah, begging for His forgiveness. I am still in shock that my mother, despite tasting the pain of losing her entire family, her dearest relatives, the ones closest to my heart and hers, wept for Allah’s forgiveness because of food that was thrown away!

A text published in Gaza Stories 

It no longer distresses me that the world has paid no attention to a lifetime of deaths in Gaza. I am unaffected. It no longer pains me that we are here, in an area of 360 km², knowing nothing more about life than how to survive it – people often fail to do even that. My dreams no longer pester me to fulfil them; there are no more dreams in the first place. Not so long ago, I decided to stop punishing myself for not being able to achieve what I wanted in this city, offered to us like a prize, that we are expected to love and die for. 

It doesn’t enrage me that we were born in a matchbox that opens and closes at both ends. It no longer drives me crazy that Gaza – and dying in it – is our incontestable fate. The scenes of death and destruction no longer sadden me; the absence of worldly justice and the delay in divine justice no longer infuriate me. What angers, grieves and maddens me now is that they have chosen a weapon stronger than all the missiles and explosives they’ve hurled at us throughout our lives in Gaza. Is starving us their next tool of war? 

The north is hungry, the south is hungry. The north is destitute, the south is delirious. 

Has the occupier decided to play with the psyche of primal humankind, using hunger to displace us from our homes after all its failed plans to displace us? 

Is the plan now to make Gaza unlivable? 

What conspiracy is this that has sabotaged our lives and ended so many others? 

What insanity is this that forces my family and I to think about how to get enough money to cross a concrete wall and then a desert, for the same price as a trip to the North Pole? 

What exactly is being negotiated? 

For how much longer will the world abandon us? And what world is this, with no power capable of restraining Israel? 

How long will death continue laughing at us? One scenario after another… 

And so many questions… No answers here.

An extract from a text from Gaza Stories 

This war has taught us the meaning of every concept. The meaning of a house; a quiet morning; clean food and water; gifts and belongings now abandoned; bathing; spending time with friends on the balcony. It has made me roam the corners of our house in my imagination, picturing every last inch: the door and the table adorned with Turkish and Palestinian antiques, the yellow glow of my bedroom, my wardrobe full of warm clothes, the bamboo plant in the kitchen that came to mind while I was trying to collect enough water for one person for one day… My mother and I would fight every week when I tried to shower it with water, telling her That’s what bamboo likes! 

How is that plant now, after nearly three months? 

I think to myself: Is it still wet in the middle or has it completely dried out? I come to the conclusion that it is thirsty, like me. 

There is a cruel war outside and a crueller one inside. Hate; racism. Someone deciding that so-and-so deserves a share of food while the other doesn’t; leaving home and having to live and deal with people who feel they are superior to others. I don’t think leaving home was the right decision. If I could go eighty days back in time I would decide to stay in the north, alone, between the cosy walls of my house. 

That’s what I wish, even if its tender ceiling collapsed on me 

What I wish, even if Palestine exploded around me 

I wish I had never lived a minute beyond the valley.

Now we are all alone with photographs of home and our dignified lives. 

But most importantly, as Mourid said, 

“No absent thing will return whole, and nothing will be reclaimed as it was.”