Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu with U.S. President Trump, in the White House. Screenshot from White House video

The day the war on Gaza was announced again, I was sitting at my desk, trying—as always—to focus on my studies amidst the chaos in my mind. A cool breeze slipped through the window, but it wasn’t just any breeze. I felt its chill touching wounds I thought had healed—or maybe I had only convinced myself they had.

Would this feeling ever leave me, or was it here to stay, as permanent as the sky that never quiets above us?

I tried to shake it off, to drift into my messy thoughts and sort them out somehow. I kept trying until I laid my head on the pillow—but I couldn’t close my eyes. The weight in my chest wouldn’t let me. So I reached for my laptop… and I wrote.

Not because I knew what to say, but because silence was heavier than words. I didn’t write a diary entry, or a poem, or even a story. I wrote a letter. A letter to someone far away—someone who would never hear me, but whose actions echo in every corner of my broken city.

So I began:

Donald Trump, you came back… and war came back with you.
Is it a coincidence? Or was it too much for you to see Gaza trying to live again?

[I remember typing those words with shaking fingers. I wasn’t writing to you as a man, but to what you represent: power, distance, indifference.]

How can someone so far away—so protected—have the power to turn our world into rubble with a single decision?

You claimed you wanted peace, but your peace was merely an illusion drenched in blood—just another hollow political speech, like always.

[When I wrote this line, I was thinking of my neighbor’s house. The little girl who used to play in the alley—whose voice was replaced by sirens and silence.]

Peace, in Gaza, is not life. It is a pause between bombings.
We are told to have hope, to believe in words—but words have never protected us.
Tell me: Is “peace” in your dictionary made of children’s body parts?  Is “peace” in your world built on death and destruction?

We are human.
Children burning. Families buried beneath the bloody red sky.
Dreams bombed before they are even born.
Can you hear our voices, or have they faded into the noise of politics?
Or is the only sound that holds your attention the missiles funded by your treasury?
Is your greed, inhumanity, and power so intoxicating that you want to build your Riviera on the bodies of our ancestors?!
You want rich criminals like yourself to bask on the skulls of Palestinian children?

This, after you turned our sacred land of Palestine into 50 million tons of debris!

[My tongue, for once, didn’t try to speak—as if it knew words wouldn’t matter. Because in your world, words are weapons, too. Your speeches never stop… perhaps so that our destruction never stops, either.]

I survived physically from the first chapter of the war—the one I thought was my end.
But it was only the beginning of a longer chapter, one I never chose to be in.
People say, “you’re lucky to survive,” but they don’t know that sometimes survival is the heaviest burden.  I carry the war in my breath. In my flinches. In the armor my soul wears, even in moments of silence.

It seems that these wishes disturb you.
It seems that Gaza’s healing unsettles you more than its ruin.
Why is a child drawing a sun on the wall seen as a threat?

You fear our will to smile again more than you ever feared our cries.
And these dreams you try so hard to kill—they won’t die.
They will haunt you.
They will rise in your sleep and turn into the nightmares of your own dreams.
Because stolen hope never fades… it only grows teeth.

Do you know how it feels to watch your homeland turn into ashes?
Because I do.
The streets I used to walk have turned to gravel and smoke.
The scent of fresh bread replaced by the stench of burned flesh.
The school I dreamed of returning to—gone.
The window in my grandfather’s room—shattered like time itself.

Do you know the feeling of regretting not walking more through your city’s streets—as if you could’ve memorized them better before they vanished?
Do you know what it means when the photos we took to preserve joy become triggers for grief?
Do you know how it feels to watch your memories evaporate?

I saw mothers scrolling through names, not tucking in blankets.
I saw a boy holding his school bag in one hand, and his sister’s torn shoe in the other.
Dreams don’t just burn in Gaza—they are buried alive.

You were far away.
Shielded by the walls of the White House, issuing orders with the press of a button, as if death were just a game in your hands.
Do you sip coffee while missiles land?
Do you flip through briefings while mothers dig with their bare hands?

I was here—in the wreckage you signed off on. I wasn’t a number.
I was a girl counting her breaths while the walls shook.
I was a voice trapped between sirens and dust.
I was the silence that followed a scream that didn’t make it out in time.

This is my message—and the message of every Gazan—to you, and to the world that chooses not to see:

We are not illusions. We are not background noise.
You can destroy our homes, but you will never own our voices.

Is power the ability to decide who lives and who dies?
Because even then—you don’t stop.
You control not only our death, but how we die.
You decide the size of the missile. The hour it hits. The house it crushes. The story it erases.

But no empire can erase the truth.
No fire can silence a soul that refuses to break.

We are here, and we will remain.
Even if you demolish our homes, even if you shatter our dreams—our voices will haunt you.
The truth will chase you.
No one escapes the blood of the innocent—not even the President of the United States.