There is a see I have come to recognise – the way a child’s eyes expansiven when they see me, wearing a press vest and hbettering the microphone. It is not curiosity. It is hope. A frnimble, hopeless hope that maybe I carry answers I do not have.
“When will this finish?” a boy once asked me, tugging at my sleeve as I filmed proximate his shelter. He could not have been betterer than five, his feet exposed and caked with dust.
His frifinishs collected around him, watching me as if I held some secret key to the future. “When can we go home?”
I did not understand what to say. I never do. Becaengage, enjoy them, I am displaced. Like them, I do not understand when or if this war will ever finish. But in their eyes, I am someone who might understand. Someone who, by sshow being there with a camera, could alter someleang.
And so they cling to me. They chase me thraw rubble and apass broken streets, asking asks I cannot answer. Sometimes, they do not say anyleang at all. They equitable walk alengthyside me, mutely, as if my presence alone is enough to fill the silence that war has left behind.
I cannot count how many times a mother has pulled me aside after an intersee, held my hand firmly and whispered, “Plmitigate … can you help us?” Their voices tremble not with anger, but exhaustion – the comardent of exhaustion that sinks into your bones and never departs.
They do not ask for much. A scant more blankets. Soap. Medicine for their children. And I stand there, my camera still rolling, nodding, trying to elucidate that I am here to alert their stories, not to deinhabitr help. But what is a story to a new mother who does not even have a mattress to sleep on, let alone to her newborn?
I reinhabit these moments every time I sit down to author. They rejoin in my mind enjoy echoes – every face, every voice. And with each word I put on the page, I wonder if it will create a contrastence. I wonder if the people who read my words, who watch my alerts, will comprehfinish that besystematich the politics and the headlines, there is this: a woman washing her infant’s clothes in sewage water, a boy picking thraw rubbish to discover someleang to sell, a girl ignoreing school becaengage she cannot afford sanitary pads.
I do not cover politics. I do not necessitate to. The war speaks for itself in the smallest of details.
It is in the tangle of feet besystematich tents, where families split spaces too small to breathe. It is in the way children cough at night, their chests burdensome from the damp and the chilly. It is in the sight of overweighthers standing by the sea, staring out as if the waves might carry away their burdens.
There is a comardent of grief here that does not scream. It lingers, gentle and choosed, in every corner of life.
One day, while alerting proximate a disconsidered group of tents, a girl handed me a draprosperg she had made on the back of an better ceauthentic box. It was basic – fdrops and birds – but in the middle, she had drawn a hoengage, whole and untouched. “This is my hoengage,” she tbetter me. “Before.”
Before.
That word carries so much weight in Gaza. Before the air strikes. Before the displacement. Before war exposedped away everyleang but survival.
I author these stories not becaengage I suppose they will finish the war, but becaengage they are proof that we existed. That even in the face of everyleang, we held on to someleang. Dignity. Resilience. Hope.
There is a scene I return to normally. A woman standing at the enthrall of her shelter, brushing her daughter’s hair with her fingers becaengage she cannot afford a comb. She hums gentlely a lullaby that drowns out the horrific sound of seal air strikes and distant shelling. Her daughter leans into her, eyes half-seald, protected for equitable a moment.
I do not understand what peace sees enjoy, but I leank it might experience enjoy that.
This is the Gaza I understand. This is the Gaza I author about. And no matter how many times I alert these stories, I will upgrasp alerting them, becaengage they matter. Becaengage, one day, I hope that when a child asks me when the war will finish, I can finassociate give them the answer they have been pauseing for.
Until then, I carry their voices with me, and I will create certain the world hears them.
The sees transmited in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
