Gaza.. The Life That Hasn't Found Its Way

Author

Taghreed Ali

I have been writing about Gaza for years, and I thought I knew how war could change a person's life. I wrote about the shelling, displacement, and fear, about those who lost their homes, loved ones, and jobs. I carried people's questions to paper, and each time I returned to my notebook, I believed I had said something new. However, writing from within the war made me discover something else: what war does to a person does not end when the sound of the explosion stops.

In Gaza, I learned that survival is not life. A person may survive the shelling, but they do not necessarily regain the life they had before. They may remain alive, but they lose the place they once knew, the job they relied on, the school their children attended, and the street whose details they memorized. They may wake up in the morning without knowing where they will spend their day or how they will secure their family's needs.

Therefore, when I write about Gaza, I no longer ask only: how many people were killed? And how many houses were destroyed? I have started to ask another question: what remains for those who survived? This question is harsher than it seems.

I remember an interview I conducted with a family that had been displaced multiple times. I was holding my notebook and asking about the house they left behind, about the place they are living in now, and about the things they lost. But I stopped when one of the children began to talk about his room. He didn't mention the toys he lost, nor his clothes or books; he said he missed the place where he knew where to put his shoes before going to bed.

I remember the day we left our house, as I tried to decide in minutes what was worth taking with me. There wasn't enough time to think deeply, as everything was happening under the pressure of fear and urgency.

I took some essential items and left behind things I thought I could never part with before the war. As I was closing the door, I didn't think that I might not return the next day, or after a week, or even after months. I treated the departure as if it were temporary, as if the house would be waiting for me just as I left it. But I later discovered that the hardest thing I left behind was not the furniture or clothes, but the simple feeling that I had a place I could return to.

The sentence seemed small, but it stayed with me for a long time. That day, I realized that what we lose in war is not always the big things that appear in pictures, but small details that we only recognize their value when they disappear.

For the house is not just walls; it is a place where a child knows where to put his backpack, where the mother sits, and where the father waits for his children to return. When the house turns to rubble, it is not just the place that is lost, but also the small details that gave life its natural shape.

During my journalistic work, I saw how displacement has become more than just moving from one place to another; it has turned into a continuous state. A family packs what it can carry and leaves behind what it cannot, then starts anew in another place. After a while, the question is no longer, when will we return? Instead, it becomes harsher: is there still a place we can return to?

Children are the ones who reveal the extent of this change the most. The child who once knew school, playgrounds, notebooks, and friends now finds himself learning how to distinguish the sounds of danger, how to sleep in temporary places, and how to cope with the absence of things he thought were a natural part of his childhood.

When I talk to children, I am not just looking for the words they say; I also observe what they do not say. There are children who have grown up too quickly for their age, and children who no longer ask about the things they used to dream of, because the war has made their dreams smaller than dreams: a full meal, a quiet night, a safe place, or a day without fear.

As for the adults, their lives have become a series of daily calculations: how much money is left? What will we buy? What can we do without? And how can one continue to work when work itself is not available?

The war has not only changed the shape of houses; it has changed the meaning of stability. Stability has become knowing where you will sleep tonight and finding enough for your family for another day. Things that seemed ordinary before the war now carry a different meaning: a cup of water, a hot meal, a charged phone, an internet connection, a road that can be crossed, and a child who can sleep without waking up terrified. These are not marginal details; they are the small conditions that make up life.

As a journalist, I was not outside these transformations; writing itself has become more difficult. How do you write about people's pain while living part of that pain? How do you maintain a professional distance when you know that the story you write today may resemble your own story tomorrow?

Sometimes I would start writing a journalistic piece, then stop at a single sentence, because I know that behind it lies a whole life that cannot be summarized in a few lines. Perhaps this is why my relationship with journalism has changed; my task is no longer just to convey what is happening, but to try to leave an impact of what is happening, and to say that those whose names appear in the numbers are not just numbers, and that those who survived death are not necessarily okay.

War leaves behind losses that do not easily show in images of rubble: the loss of a sense of security, the loss of routine, the loss of expected future, and the loss of the ability to plan for tomorrow. Yet, amidst all this, Gaza continues to try to live: a woman cooks what she can for her family, a father searches for work, a young man tries to fix a phone, bike, or car, a child draws on a piece of paper, and a journalist goes out in search of a new story, and a mother tries to make her children's day seem normal, even if for just a few hours.

These details made me understand that life does not disappear all at once; sometimes it just shrinks and retreats to a very small space, then waits for an opportunity to grow again.

That is why I do not want Gaza to be reduced to just the image of a victim; Gaza is not just a place of destruction, and its residents are not merely survivors waiting for help. The problem is that war has taken away the basic conditions that make life possible.

Therefore, the reconstruction of Gaza cannot mean just rebuilding the walls; the walls can rise again, but what about the person who will enter it? What about the child who needs a school? The family that needs an income? The patient who needs treatment? The journalist who wants to work without fear? The woman who wants to regain something of her life?

After years of writing about Gaza, I no longer believe that the answer can be just a declaration of a ceasefire; life begins when a person can think about tomorrow without fear being the first thing on their mind, and it begins when a child has a future that goes beyond mere survival, and when a home has meaning that goes beyond a roof that protects from the rain, and when a person can plan for their next week without feeling that all their plans could collapse in an instant.

Perhaps this is why I continue to write, not because I believe that words alone can change reality, but because silence means that these years will turn into mere numbers in the world's memory.

I write because I have seen people who have lost almost everything, yet they still try to hold on to one thing: their desire to live a normal life. This, in the end, is the greatest paradox in Gaza; people do not ask for an extraordinary life, nor do they seek special privileges; they just want the life they had the right to live.

And Gaza has not lost its desire for life, but so far, life has not found its way to it.