There’s a look I recognize – the way a child’s eyes widen when they see me, wearing a press vest and holding a microphone. It’s not curiosity. That’s hope. A fragile, desperate hope that I might be carrying the answers I don’t have.
“When will this end?” – a boy asked me once, pulling my sleeve while I was filming near his shelter. He couldn’t have been more than five years old, barefoot and covered in dust.
His friends gathered around him, watching me as if I held some secret key to the future. “When can we go home?”
I didn’t know what to say. I never work. Because, like them, I am displaced. Like them, I don’t know when or if this war will ever end. But in their eyes I am someone who might know. Someone who, just by being there with a camera, could change something.
And so they cling to me. They follow me through the ruins and down the broken streets, asking questions I can’t answer. Sometimes they don’t say anything at all. They just walk beside me, quietly, as if my mere presence is enough to fill the silence that the war left behind.
I can’t count the number of times my mother pulled me aside after an interview, held my hand tightly and whispered, “Please… can you help us?” Their voices tremble not with anger, but with exhaustion—the kind of exhaustion that seeps into your bones and never leaves.
They don’t ask for much. A few more blankets. Soap. Medicine for their children. And I stand there, camera still rolling, nodding, trying to explain that I’m here to tell their stories, not deliver aid. But what about a new mother who doesn’t even have a mattress to sleep on, let alone her newborn?
I relive those moments every time I sit down to write. They repeat in my mind like an echo – every face, every voice. And with every word I put on the page, I wonder if it will make a difference. I wonder if the people who read my words, who watch my reports, will understand that beneath the politics and the headlines there is this: a woman washing her baby’s clothes in sewage water, a boy picking through trash to find something to sell, a girl skipping school because cannot afford sanitary napkins.
I don’t do politics. I don’t need it. The war speaks for itself in the smallest details.
It is crowded under tents, where families share spaces too small to breathe. It’s in the way children cough at night, their chests are heavy from dampness and cold. It is in the eyes of the fathers who stand by the sea, staring out as if the waves might carry away their burden.
There is a sadness there that does not scream. It lingers, softly and steadily, in every corner of life.
One day, while I was reporting near a neglected group of tents, a girl passed me a drawing she had drawn on the back of an old cereal box. It was simple – flowers and birds – but in the middle she drew a house, whole and intact. “This is my house,” she told me. “Ago.”
Ago.
That word carries so much weight in Gaza. Before the airstrikes. Before the shift. Before the war, he took away everything except survival.
I am not writing these stories because I believe they will end the war, but because they are proof that we existed. That despite everything, we held on to something. Dignity. Elasticity. Hope.
There’s a scene I keep coming back to. A woman stands at the entrance to her shelter combing her hair with her fingers because she cannot afford a comb. She softly hums a lullaby that drowns out the terrible sound of close-in airstrikes and distant shelling. Her daughter leans toward her, eyes half-closed, safe only for a moment.
I don’t know what peace looks like, but I think it might feel like it.
This is the Gaza I know. This is the Gaza I am writing about. And no matter how many times I tell these stories, I will continue to tell them, because they are important. Because, I hope that one day, when a child asks me when the war will end, I will finally be able to give the answer they have been waiting for.
Until then, I carry their voices with me and will make sure the world hears them.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
