Gaza.. We Survived, Then What?

Author

Taghreed Ali

I have been writing about Gaza for years, and I learned how to approach a house that has been destroyed, how to ask a mother about her child, and how to document the testimony of a man who emerged from the rubble. I thought I had learned how to write about war, but I discovered that the hardest thing to write about is not the moment of bombing, but what comes after it: to see a person survive, and then ask them: what is left for you?

At the beginning of the war, we considered survival a complete gain, and it was enough for a person to come out alive from a targeted place, or to find their children beside them after a harsh night. Today, the word 'we survived' seems incomplete, because death may recede, but life does not necessarily return.

In Gaza, the only question is no longer: who survived? But the harder question has become: how does one who survived live?

Imagine Samer, who lost his home and has nothing left of it except a key that he keeps. When I asked him why he doesn't get rid of it, he replied: "I don't know, maybe because if I throw it away, I will feel that the house is really over."

The key is not just a metal piece to him, but the last evidence that this man once had a house. Before the war, Samer knew where his children sat, where his wife placed the tea cups, and when he would return home at the end of the day. Today, he does not know where he will be in a month. This loss does not fully show in the images of the destroyed buildings: to lose one's address, routine, privacy, and the feeling that there is a place waiting for them.

As for Amina, she is one of the mothers who found themselves facing responsibilities they did not choose. On an ordinary day, her questions do not start with what will we do today? but rather: is the food enough? do we have water? what if one of the children gets sick?

Before the war, she used to think about her children's clothes, school expenses, and household needs. Now, the order of things has changed; what was necessary has become postponed, and what was postponed has become a luxury.

And sometimes, as I go from one interview to another, I discover that I carry with me people's questions more than I carry answers. Once, I sat in front of a family in a displacement camp, preparing to record their talk about the home they lost. I put my phone aside and asked them how their day was going. No one talked about the bombing at first; the mother was looking for water, the child was asking for a phone to charge, and the father was counting the money he had left.

I stopped writing for a moment, and in that moment, I understood that war does not remain in the moment the shell falls; it transfers to very small details, to a question about tomorrow's meal, a phone battery, medicine, and a place to sleep.

When I returned to writing, I felt that I could not summarize these people in the phrase 'they survived the shelling.' Yes, they survived, but they entered another life in which they have to survive every day.

Then there are the children, who do not even have the language to describe what happened like adults do. A child does not need a long speech about war to feel its impact; it is enough for them to ask about their room and not find it, or to look for their toy and not find it, or to hear the word 'tomorrow' without knowing what it means, and here the word 'adaptation' becomes confusing.

We say that people have adapted to tents, scarcity of services, rising prices, and loss of work, but does deprivation become normal just because a person has gotten used to it? Does waiting become less harsh simply because it has lasted long? And does losing a home become ordinary because its owners have learned to sleep elsewhere?

Perhaps the most dangerous thing that long crises do is that they make a person redefine what is normal. At first, power outages were a crisis, then they became part of the day. Searching for water was exceptional, then it turned into a daily task. Displacement was temporary, then it became a way of life.

Here, the problem does not lie solely in the event itself, but in the way it reshapes people's lives. Each time I moved from one story to another, I found my question changing. Initially, I asked: How did they survive? Then I began to ask: What remains for them after survival? The difference between the two questions is significant; the first seeks to understand a moment that has ended, while the second seeks to understand a life that continues.

Therefore, I do not want Gaza to be reduced to the number of those killed or the extent of the destroyed buildings. These figures are necessary for understanding the catastrophe, but they do not alone tell us what happened to those who remained. There is a child who has lost years of education, a father who has lost his source of income, a mother who measures her days by the availability of water, food, and medicine, and a family that no longer knows where their next home will be.

These are not merely side effects of war; they are the life that war has left behind. Perhaps Gaza will never return to what it was, and there are homes that will not return, and people who will not return, and memories that have changed forever. However, the future should not merely be an extension of this devastation.

Those who survived do not need more praise for their ability to endure; they need conditions that allow them to reclaim their lives: a home to return to, a job that provides the family with income, a school that brings the child back to their normal day, and medical care that does not begin with the search for help before reaching the doctor.

For strength is not merely the ability to endure indefinitely, but rather to provide a life that does not force one to endure every day. Thus, the word 'survived' has become for me more of a question than an answer.

We survived the shelling, but we are still looking for a home, and we survived death, but we are looking for work, treatment, education, and safety, and we survived, but we have not yet regained the ability to look at tomorrow as something normal.

Here lies the story that does not appear in the images of war: the story is not only about who died and who remained, but about how those who stayed will live.

We have survived death, and now we want to know how to return to life.