No service. Photo: Sara Awad

I remember exactly where I was on June 11, 2025, when I heard the news. I was in the market, trying to find something—anything—to eat, in a place where food has become a memory, forcing us to swallow whatever will sustain us another day, edible or not. A vendor looked up, his face pale, and said, “The internet has been cut off throughout Gaza.”

Everything went quiet. Not just the voices, but the air itself. We all stood there, me, the vendor, and the other Gazans looking for food, like me.

It only took a moment, but in that moment, it felt like I could hear everyone’s thoughts crashing in at once—how will we reach our families, our loved ones? How will we call for rescuers if we’re buried under the rubble? How will the world know what is being done to us? How will we retain our sanity by escaping for a few minutes the suffocating war around us? How will we hold on to time, to place, to ourselves, when even our voices have been silenced?

I recovered quickly from my frozen state. I told myself it might just be a small issue with the network and that the internet would come back, as usual. I started searching for more information.

When I heard that the attack had targeted Al-Tawam neighborhood, where the main internet hub is located, and which had recently become a buffer zone for Israeli soldiers, I knew it was a serious and deliberate aggression against our connection to the world. No one can access that area without an Israeli permit, and those are nearly impossible to obtain.

As Gazans, displacement has always been one of our deepest fears. And we’ve come to recognize a pattern—every time the internet is cut, it is followed by large-scale killing and forced displacement. That’s why the moment the connection was lost, many of us feared what might come next.

No more news was coming in. Telegram channels had gone silent, and there was no internet to reach them anyway. This blackout was not random, it was deliberate. They wanted to keep us from witnessing the approach of the Madleen, a rare ship of solidarity sailing through a sea of indifference. For a brief moment, it pierced the global apathy, stirring something that looked like hope. Its journey was more than symbolic, it was a crack in the wall of stillness.

“How lucky I am to have an eSIM on my phone,” I whispered to myself with a triumphant smile. I climbed to the rooftop of my house, and held the phone up to the sky, but my screen was as black as the rest of the world. No bars, no messages, no signs of life. That was the moment it sank in—I was completely cut off from the world. No way to reach or be reached.

Cut off from the world, as hunger and death crept through our streets like dark cold shadows, our isolation was complete. A total paralysis swept through every part of our lives, and I mean that in the deepest, truest sense.

Reduced to reading paper texts by candlelight. Photo: Sara Awad

Where silence ends, I begin

It is 12:10 a.m. on Tuesday June 17, 2025, as I write this. I am sitting in what is left of my room, staring at the barely standing walls. “What a meaningless life we are living… will I die and no one will know?” I asked myself.

This feeling of dying and no one knowing is one I cannot escape. Six days of disconnection in my part of Gaza—enough to be swallowed by it. What haunts me most is the thought of becoming a number in the death toll, just another unnamed body among hundreds of thousands.

It’s awful when a random 20-something-year-old Israeli soldier, barely an adult, has so much power that they can fire a rocket into the infrastructure that connects a city of 2  million people to life itself. The ridiculousness of the idea—a young person holding the power to control our very existence with the push of a button—makes me want to laugh. And I think of the Arabic saying: “شر البلية ما يضحك” (shar il-baliyah ma yudhik)—the worse the calamity, the funnier it gets. In 2025, someone so young can make a world meaningless with a single click. Slowly, my laughing fit fades and my blood begins to boil at the deliberate cruelty being inflicted on us here in Gaza.

Does the outside world know this is happening to us? Do they notice that the flood of horror on their screens has gone quiet? Do they wonder why the videos stopped, why the images of shredded bodies, of bones pushing through the skin of starving children, eyes wild with hopelessness, no longer interrupt their scroll? Or do they feel relief? Do they thank God for the break from the discomfort our misery brings them, the guilt, the burden of witnessing us die in real time? Do they worry at all? Do they even care?

This isn’t new. A similar thing happened at the start of this war. They cut our last line to the outside world, then they opened the gates of hell all at once, letting their wrath fall like fire from a scorched sky—civilians killed, homes flattened, lives erased, death… death… and more death.

And the world, wrapped in blissful oblivion, saw nothing, said nothing, did nothing.

Only later, when a few images made their way through the noise and reached the unreachable, did the world, so long unshaken, begin to stir. Posts were shared. Our names. Our faces. Our deaths. Protests erupted. Vigils were held. Aid was attempted. Art was made. Debates were sparked. Public resignations were offered. For a moment, it felt like the world was watching.

But nothing, none of the world’s gestures, had the power to make a dent in the hell that was, and still is, unfolding in Gaza.

Hiding the hunger

The Israeli Occupation Forces returned with something even more brutal. As if the bombs were not enough, they returned with something colder, slower: the deliberate choke of starvation. The siege has tightened, and hunger has become their quietest, cruelest weapon.

We have been living on the edge of famine since the very beginning, counting crumbs, rationing hope, and surviving on will. And now, they want to silence even our hunger. So they cut the internet to crush the growing solidarity demanding the opening of the borders and the delivery of urgently needed aid. They stopped the images. The cries. The truth.

There is no food here. We die, day by day, not from fire alone, but from emptiness—empty plates, empty hands, empty gestures.

Still, I find myself hanging onto hope, are those same people watching now? Are they still posting? Or has Israel finally succeeded in severing even that last fragile thread that connected us to the living?

I took a deep breath and decided to turn this offense into a double-edged sword. I will not let them win the battle. While they come to crush us with tanks and bombs, with surveillance that watches every breath, propaganda that twists every truth, control over every corner of the media, and finally silencing the internet, I choose to fight with my pebble, just like David did, with the only weapons I hold within my reach. My words.

Editor’s note: Since Sara completed writing this piece in mid-June, internet blackouts have occurred repeatedly. Sometimes a full disconnection covers the entire area where she lives; other times there are random locations with a stable connection, and she spends her entire day seeking them out.