Ala’a Sbaih graduated with a degree in English and French literature. Oct. 7 was the day when one of her dreams didn’t come true, as she was supposed to travel in the first week of that month to Italy to perform in a play, a Palestinian adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. The show was canceled, and the actor playing the hero of the play was killed in an Israeli airstrike. “As Gazans,” she writes, “we’re people whose stories aren’t complete and whose ambitions aren’t realized, and everything we try to build anew is crushed from its root after years, and the end of our path is always known.”

Current as of March 2024