In the course of the horrifying, lengthy stretch of the genocidal conflict on Gaza, we didn’t have the privilege or the time to sit down with our emotions. Surviving was a precedence over processing our feelings. In the course of the few weeks of the ceasefire in January, I slowly started to navigate my emotions, making an attempt to crawl out of the shell cupping my coronary heart. It’s an excessive amount of, nevertheless, for one to really feel and comprehend suddenly what we’re enduring in Gaza.
Now that I’ve permitted myself to confront, to lastly course of all that I’ve been by means of…I’m nothing however grief.
This grief is a shape-shifter — it by no means manifests in the identical type, at all times unpredictable, at all times unannounced. Generally it’s a baby I lull to sleep; different instances it’s an untameable beast that devours my being. Generally it deceives me, I mistake it for therapeutic, because it briefly exits my physique. However in the long run, it at all times finds a method again, palpable, beating to a rhythm of its personal, lurking in my bones.
Hear me out after I say that my grief is lonely; it occupies the physique and turns it into its vessel.
Picture: Jaber Jehad Badwan / Supply: Wikimedia Commons
Each second all through the final eighteen months of this genocidal conflict has been hell. However receiving ‘evacuation orders’ and being forcibly displaced from our residence, together with all of Jap Khan Younis, was a deeper layer of hell no human ought to must endure. The displacement — God Almighty, the displacement — continues to hang-out me. It’s the worst lived expertise I’ve had, my worst nightmare, a trial I don’t want on anybody. Crossing that threshold into exile left me in a relentless ghorba, a state of estrangement that adheres to me whether or not my eyes are open or shut. Since leaving Khan Younis, I’ve not felt entire. The data that I’ll by no means be freed from it — that full therapeutic won’t ever come, that full restoration sounds inconceivable — has grow to be one thing I carry with me at all times, like part of my physique, like an additional limb, that I by no means requested for, nor do I’ve the energy to proceed to hold.
Each time I take into consideration how I’ve endured the final eighteen months with out breaking down, I’m astonished by my energy — by the truth that I remained standing, that I seemed calm from the skin, and my physique didn’t expose my ache. There have been quite a few moments after I needed to crawl into myself, however that was by no means an possibility. I needed to act and escape from floor invasions, into ‘secure zones’ — I needed to make powerful selections on what to take and the place to go.
On 22 July 2024, simply seconds after dropping evacuation leaflets from the sky, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) unleashed a savage and arbitrary assault on Bani Suhaila – airstrikes and tank shelling with out pause or mercy. I keep in mind telling my sisters, ‘Simply seize your youngsters and a backpack and stroll quick. We’ll meet on the Bani Suhaila roundabout.’ This got here after a grotesque twenty-five-minute stroll from my home to theirs, with tanks rumbling, helicopters vomiting evacuation leaflets from above, and the air ripped aside by the roar of F-35 bombs. The world was in chaos. Worry was all over the place. It was the second compelled displacement that month for the residents of East Khan Younis.
Certainly one of my older sisters may barely stand. Her husband was kilometres away in Deir al-Balah, and she or he was left alone with two youngsters to hold. I assured her that I’d take her one-year-old daughter, together with my luggage and my dad and mom’ medication bag. Once we bought to al-Jundi al-Majhool Sq. – the small one in Bani Suhaila, not the larger one in Gaza Metropolis, each now diminished to rubble – I needed to regular her. ‘No crying. No speaking. Don’t waste your vitality doing something however strolling as quick as you possibly can.’ Then, only a few steps later, one other explosion rang out. A bit of shrapnel struck my uncle in the identical place we had simply been standing.
At first, I didn’t know who it hit. The sound was deafening. My physique moved on intuition – I pulled my valuable niece tightly in opposition to me, urgent her small body into mine, desperately shielding her from any flying shrapnel. My thoughts spiralled into terror. I imagined the worst – what if I died and she or he in some way survived? Her mom, fortunately, solely steps behind. Nonetheless, the ideas flooded in: would she be orphaned, traumatized, left screaming in a world that simply tried to erase her? I clutched her very shut and fervently made dua’, quietly whispering the protecting phrases I had been praying because the very first day of this relentless genocide:
أعوذ بكلمات الله التامات من شر ما خلق
بسم الله الذي لا يضر مع اسمه شيء في الأرض ولا في السماء وهو السميع العليم
I search refuge within the Excellent Phrases of Allah from the evil of what He has created.
Within the Identify of Allah, Who with His Identify nothing may cause hurt within the earth nor within the heavens, and He’s the All-Listening to, the All-Understanding.
I went by means of all of it once more on 8 Aug 2024. We have been displaced twice that month and once more in October 2024. My first displacement occurred on Saturday, 7 Oct 2023. Nevertheless, it was the third displacement, on Friday, 13 Oct 2023 – after we have been forcibly moved to a UNRWA college – and the fifth, on Tuesday, 5 Dec 2023 – when my household and hundreds of different residents of Khan Younis have been forcibly displaced to Rafah, the place individuals from everywhere in the Gaza Strip had already been pushed – that stood out most vividly. These moments have been etched in reminiscence as we have been compelled to evacuate underneath large assaults and intense bombardment. It’s been eleven displacements up to now. The severity of the state of affairs turns into clear after I mirror on how I’ve come to measure every displacement by its degree of terror. Every one left marks: my physique shrank, my pores and skin burned, my speech turned faltered. For each displacement, I gained a white hair – one for every time I held again tears, for each second I saved it collectively as a substitute of falling aside.
Years in the past, my sister Alaa used some leftover dye paste on the ends of my hair. To my delight, the dye didn’t present. Even after twenty minutes, my hair refused to vary color. I joked that perhaps I used to be like my grandmother, who even in her seventies had barely a strand of gray hair. However apparently, it takes a genocide to rewrite your DNA.
Drowning within the anguish of genocide and exile, I may not discover consolation in literature that after gave me refuge. What as soon as supplied escape now felt hole. I may not discover myself in its pages. The grief I carried, the disorientation, the load of this conflict – none of it felt mirrored within the Palestinian literature I as soon as liked. Kanafani’s exilic texts, the resistance literature, even their brilliance couldn’t attain into the grotesque intimacy of what we have been enduring. To me, nothing written earlier than may mirror the profound ache that Gaza was enduring. I craved literature that would articulate what I couldn’t even start to course of.
That longing adopted me till December 2024, after I learn Mahmoud Darwish’s يوميات الحزن العادي (Journal of an Atypical Grief). The autobiographical literary textual content resonated with me on a degree I had not anticipated. Darwish’s phrases spoke to me from inside my very own silence. He wrote of how, after each sudden displacement, rage quietly consumed him, and the way estranged he felt in his personal pores and skin as soon as crossing the ghorba threshold. For each query he requested, he answered with one thing that tore the soul open.
– The place is your physique?
– Inside my garments.
– What are its borders?
– Dates. South: 15 Could 1948; East: November 1956; West: 5 June 1967; North: September 1970. These are the borders of my physique.
And like Darwish’s, my physique’s new borders have been mapped by displacements. Dates: East: 13 Oct 2023; West: 5 Dec 2023; North: July 2024; South: August 2024.
At the moment, as I stroll by means of Khan Younis – my grief-stricken metropolis, like all of Gaza, disfigured by conflict, emptied of its individuals, its face now unrecognizable, I carry grief as a companion. It walks beside me, uninvited however ever current. I’m on the verge of a silent sob, a muffled scream, a cry that not has a voice.
Writer’s Notice: I wrote this testimony on 17 March 2025, round 20 hours earlier than I used to be forcibly displaced once more.
