By Mohammah Mhawish, contributer to A Land With A People
On the morning of Sunday, Jan. 19, I turned to my son, Rafik. He was building something with blocks, his small hands working furiously to stack them higher and higher. I watched as the tower wobbled and fell. He laughed and started over again. He kept rebuilding, and it kept falling, over and over. I could feel it inside me, somehow — joy and sorrow fighting for control, just like my son’s toy tower. One moment, his laughter lifted me; the next, the weight of everything we’d lost crushed me.
Rafik’s tower reminded me of Gaza. Amid the ceasefire, people will return to their homes, not knowing if they are still standing or if they will find only rubble. Some homes, like his tower, might still have a few pieces left — a wall here, a doorway there — but the rest will be buried under an avalanche of destruction. But they will begin again. They will dig through the debris, piece by piece, rebuilding what they can. It isn’t hope in the traditional sense. It is a stubborn refusal to give up at a time when the world keeps knocking them down. Rebuilding Gaza will take more than bricks and mortar. It will take resilience, patience and a collective will to rise again, despite the impossible odds, and it will take remembering what was lost while holding on to the belief that what comes next will still be beautiful.
In Gaza, we’re born with the wit to master Advanced Drone Escape 101 and How to Breathe Through Dust 202. By the time this war began, I was already a seasoned student. I had passed the tests five times already, miraculously surviving five destructive wars in just 25 years. So I was familiar with the drill: grab your documents, your children and whatever food you can carry, and run. But knowing the drill doesn’t make it easier. It doesn’t stop your hands from shaking as you pack your son’s backpack with diapers and water bottles instead of toys. It doesn’t stop your heart from pounding as you count the seconds between the whistle of a bomb and the impact, as you wonder if this will be the one that finds you.
The first days were a blur of noise and chaos. The smell of burning flesh poured down the streets, and the sound of drones buzzed overhead around the clock. And the dust — God, the dust. It coated everything, It turned the world into a monochrome nightmare. I would wake up with it in my mouth, in my hair, in my lungs. It was everywhere. I remember wiping it off my son’s face, his wide eyes staring up at me. “This is not the world I wanted for you,” I would say.
I remember interviewing a family who had just lost their home. The father stood in the rubble, clutching a broken vase, and said, “We will rebuild.” His voice was steady, but his hands shook. I wanted to scream, “Why should you have to rebuild? Why is this your burden to bear?” But I didn’t. Instead, I nodded and took notes, as if his pain were just another story to file. Later, I would write about his resilience, his determination, his hope. But, at that moment, all I could think was, “This is not resilience. This is survival. And survival is not enough.”
The world watches Gaza as if it’s a dystopian reality show, applauding our resilience while doing nothing to stop the suffering. They don’t see the father who wakes up screaming because he can still hear the bombs. They don’t see the mother who feeds her children one meal a day and calls it a feast. They don’t see the child who draws pictures of houses with red roofs and smiling suns because it’s the only way they can imagine a world without war.
One night, as I crouched in a makeshift shelter in northern Gaza with my family, I heard a voice outside. It was my neighbor, Um Ahmed, holding a piece of bread. “I thought Rafik might be hungry,” she said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to share your last piece of bread in the middle of a war. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. Instead, I took the bread and thanked her. I swear to God, I pretended her kindness was not a knife to my heart. That night I lay awake, listening to the sound of drones and wondering how much longer we could endure. The answer, it seemed, was forever. Because in Gaza, we are not allowed to stop.
The sound of explosions has been my heartbeat since I was born. I was just a few months old when the Second Intifada began in 2000. Now, 25 years later, I’m living through the same miasma of war, death and survival all over again. Before I fled Gaza, I would always tell my son, “It will be over soon.” But it wasn’t. It never is. Even back then, I knew the world wasn’t fair. I didn’t have the words to explain it, but I felt it in the way his mother’s voice cracked when she sang him to sleep. War was never just an event in Gaza. It was the air we breathed, the water we drank, the ground beneath our feet. It was everywhere, and there was no escape.
By the time I was 8, I had already lived through my first war. The 2008 war was the first time I saw a body. It was a neighbor, a man who used to sell oranges on the corner. His cart was still there, overturned, the fruit scattered and crushed underfoot. I remember the smell — sweet and rotten. It was like death had a flavor. I remember thinking, “This is what war does. It takes the ordinary and makes it grotesque.” Abu Sami had a laugh that could fill a room, not just another statistic on the news, or a name on a list of the dead. To me, he was the man who gave me free oranges when I was a child, who always had a joke and a smile. War didn’t just take his life, but his humanity, crushed in a body bag.
The 2012 war was shorter, yet louder and more brutal. The 2021 war was longer but no less devastating. By then I had my firstborn, Rafik, and the fear was different. It wasn’t just for myself anymore but for him. I remember holding him during the bombings. Knowing the history of where I, his dad, was born, the history of this place, I knew that war was not an exception but a rule. My son looked up at me with wide eyes, trusting me to keep him safe, and I felt the weight of that trust like a stone in my chest. I wanted to tell him that everything would be okay, that the world was a good and just place, but I couldn’t. Because in Gaza, the world is not good or just. It is cruel and indifferent, and it will break your heart if you let it.
And now, this war — the longest, the cruelest, the most personal. It began as it always does: with a sound. The first bomb fell in the early hours of Oct. 7, 2023, shaking the ground beneath my feet and sending a plume of smoke into the sky. I remember standing in the street, my press vest heavy on my shoulders, and thinking, “Here we go again.” I looked at my son. As his face turned familiarly pale, I felt a surge of anger — not just at the bombs, but at the world that allowed this to happen. Again. And again. And again.
I was a journalist by then, and for the first time, I saw the war through the lens of my camera. It was easier that way, to hide behind the camera, to pretend I was just an observer and not a participant. But there were moments when the facade cracked. I remember interviewing a family in Jabalia, a town in northern Gaza that had been flattened by Israeli bombs. The mother was holding a photo of her son, who had been killed the day before. She thrust it at me, her hands shaking, and said, “Tell the world what they did to him.” I took the photo, but I didn’t know what to say. What could I say? That the world already knew? That it didn’t care? That her son would be forgotten as soon as the next headline came along? I wanted to scream, to tear my hair out, to do something — anything — to make them see. Yet there was nothing I could do to ease their pain. I must have seemed like some kind of hero to the father, someone who could bring his son back. But in truth I was just another father, scared and terrified for my own son. I wasn’t an Avenger. I was just a man who tried to hold on to hope while the world crumbled around us.
As a journalist, I am expected to document my own genocide with impartiality and professionalism. But there is nothing professional about survival. Reporting from the ground, I faced the harshest of circumstances — constant targeting, starvation and displacement. Every day was a battle: dodging bombs, scavenging for food and moving from one makeshift shelter to another, all while trying to document what we were enduring and tell the truth of what was happening. The weight of survival and the responsibility of bearing witness often felt unbearable, but I kept going.
The days here are long and empty. I spend hours scrolling through photos of Gaza, trying to go back in time. I can still smell the sea, salty and sharp, carried on the wind as the sun dipped below the horizon. I can still taste my mother’s maqluba, rich and comforting, the rice perfectly spiced, the chicken falling off the bone. No matter how hard I try, I can never quite replicate the taste of home in exile. These are the things I miss the most — the ordinary, the mundane. The things I took for granted now feel like fragments of a life I can never reclaim.
“We will return soon,” I tell Rafik, but I don’t know if it’s true. How can I explain to him that home is not a place but a feeling? That Gaza is not just a city but a part of us, a part that can never be taken away, no matter how far we run?
Even our moments of connection with home from afar have become bittersweet. Like the time I met another Palestinian in an old Cairo cafe, and we spent hours talking about home. We didn’t need to say much. The pain was in the silence, in the way we both looked away when the conversation turned to the future. Because as uncertain as the future is, hope is fragile. We talked about the smell of jasmine in the spring in Gaza City, the sound of the waves crashing against the shore, the taste of zaatar fresh from the street vendors. These memories were anchors, tethering us to a place we could not return to, but they were also torturous. They reminded us of what we had lost.
On Sunday, I stood on the balcony of my home in exile in Cairo, holding a cup of tea that had long gone cold, and waiting for the ceasefire in Gaza to take effect. For those still there, it was the silence that announced it. The sudden absence of fear, the stillness after 15 months of bombardment, starvation and displacement, left me suspended. The initial calm was so profound, I was told, it felt unnatural and oppressive: no drones, no jets, no explosions, just the faint hum of seemingly distant traffic and the muffled voices of people in shock. On the news, people stood holding their breath as if they were waiting for the next explosion. This time, silence was louder than bombs. The quiet dragged me back to memories of all that we had lost and forward to the uncertainty of what might be ahead.
I tried not to let exhaustion overshadow joy for my people in Gaza, despite knowing too well that silence is not peace. It’s the absence of war, and there is a difference. The world has permitted us to stop dying, at least for now. And maybe this is worth a sigh of relief. Around me were my two sons: Zain, 3 months old, born into exile from a genocide, too young to know what it is; and Rafik, 3, old enough to know he survived one. I watch them play, and my heart is torn between gratitude for their safety and grief for the home they may never know. Scrolling images of celebrations on social media, Gaza’s destruction stared back at me, and one image caught my eye: a child’s drawing, scrawled on a piece of paper that had somehow survived the bombs. It was a house with a red roof, a smiling sun and a family holding hands.
I was thinking of everyone I know in Gaza — my neighbors, my friends, my family. Were they celebrating? Mourning? Or were they too exhausted to feel anything at all? I wanted to call them, to hear their voices, but the lines were down again. It’s strange, in a way, how war twists even the simplest things into impossibilities: a phone call, a hug from afar, a moment with the people you love.
I see resilience in the way my sons laugh, in the way they play, in the way they still believe in a better tomorrow. And I see it in myself, in the way I keep writing and telling our story, even when it feels like no one is listening. Because the world may forget us in the pause between the bombs, but we will not forget ourselves. We will not let our story be erased. I think of the child’s drawing I found in the rubble, the house with the red roof and the smiling sun. I think of the child who drew it, and I wonder if they are still alive. I wonder if they still believe in the world they drew. I think of the call to prayer, echoing through the streets at sunset and telling us that even in the darkest times, there is still faith.
How can we ever return to “normal” after the bombs have stopped falling? Even as the ceasefire brings a fragile pause to the devastation, the heartbreak remains. My dear friend from college, Hasan Abu Sharkh, was killed today, just four days into this supposed peace. An Israeli sniper shot him in eastern Rafah as he attempted to return to his family home. Hasan, to me and to everyone who loved him, was a voice of laughter that cut through the hardest days. He was a source of kindness in a world that offered so little of it. We studied side by side, and we dreamed of futures far from this war and leaned on each other through the unspoken weight we all carried. I was writing this story when the news of his killing came, and it shattered me. My hands froze on the keyboard, and I was unable to process how someone so full of life could be reduced to another victim of this nightmare. Hasan was cruelly taken from us, from me, like so many others before him. His life didn’t end amid the chaos of war but in its quiet, devastating aftershock.
Hasan was the textbook definition of a nerd. He juggled two majors at once: English Literature and English Language Teaching Methodologies. His whole life was ahead of him. He told the worst jokes — the kind that made you groan — but we laughed because we loved him more than we loved the punch line. During late-night study sessions in college, he’d cook the most questionable dishes and we’d eat them anyway, not because he was a good cook, but because we were starving. He’d launch into the most tedious stories about his favorite movies first thing in the morning, and we’d listen because, according to him, that’s what “loyal friends” did.
None of that — not his bad jokes, his terrible cooking or his boring stories — justifies a bullet to the head. Not when he was just trying to see his home again after 15 months of carnage. Not when he’d escaped death so many times before. He deserved to live. He deserved to keep being our endlessly annoying, irreplaceable best friend. And now, in these moments of so-called peace, Hasan’s absence makes it clear — there is no going back to “normal.”
The ceasefire isn’t peace. It’s just a pause, and pauses don’t heal wounds, they just give you time to feel them. Our trauma now remains as fresh as the day the war began. We are expected to be grateful for exile. To the world, we are seen as lucky, not punished. After all, we are now “safe.” They slap a label on us: “Survivors.” But what the world doesn’t understand is that we are human beings, not just symbols — of resistance, of endurance, of persistence — that survival is a miracle and safety can never replace home. We are ordinary people who are too fragile to keep living through the extraordinary. I know that wish is just that — a dream. And no matter how vivid, dreams can’t bring back what’s been lost.
Read the full article at New Lines Magazine
A Land With a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism, edited by Esther Farmer, Rosalind Petchesky & Sarah Sills.
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