I was sleeping when my phone pinged. “Ohood, do you have the internet or not?” Shaimaa texted me on WhatsApp. It was the day of Shaimaa’s Palestinian history exam, but her internet was out.
“Yes,” I told her, “but it’s weak.”
At the start of the semester, Shaimaa had been worried about the internet being cut off and as a result not being able to study or complete her assignments for the courses we were taking online from Islamic University of Gaza. I asked her to send me the links so that whenever I had internet, I could open them and download the assignments and lectures for her.
I told her to be ready to go somewhere else and finish the exam in case my connection was cut off. I finished my own exam at 11 a.m., then made myself a cup of tea and prepared to help Shaimaa with hers. At 11:20 a.m., I called her and joked, “Put on your abaya and shawl just in case.” She laughed and loved the suggestion so she went and put on a blue abaya and a pink shawl and sent me a photo — she looked beautiful.
A deep friendship that started online
Shaimaa Hani Hussein has been my university friend since 2020. I met her when I was a first-year student, and due to the circumstances of COVID-19 and the lockdown, it was impossible for us to meet in person at that time. However, she was always close to me, and I always felt that she was a beautiful and determined person. She was always enthusiastic about graduating from the Faculty of Arts with the highest marks. Whenever I needed advice or had an important decision to make in my life, I would turn to her. I would often tell her, “I love the way you think, Shaimaa, and I love your determination and love for life.”
After the COVID-19 pandemic ended, we met at the university. It was a very different meeting because, although she was my close friend, we had never met before. I hugged her, and she told me how excited she had been for this moment. Our relationship remained strong. Every conversation with her was about her mother, father, and family. She would often say, “I am nothing without my family.”
She would tell me about her father, who was very kind and was always the first to congratulate her on her birthday.
On October 7, 2023, the war began. Throughout October, I would call Shaimaa to check on her. Although the area where she lived, Al-Bureij in the southern Gaza Strip, was supposedly a safe zone according to the occupation forces, she would cry from fear and tell me about the constant shelling.
I lost contact with her in mid-November, due to the internet outage. On January 15, 2024, I managed to get an internet connection, and I found that Shaimaa was online. I felt a great sense of relief and reassurance. I sent her a message to check on her, and she surprised me with a message I did not expect: “I’m not okay, Ohood. My brother is critically injured and now in intensive care. A few days ago, we went to his funeral, but luckily, my mother noticed he was still breathing, and he was transferred to the hospital again.”
I was overwhelmed with emotions, unable to understand how to feel — should I be happy that my friend is OK and that nothing happened to her, or should I be sad and cry for her pain over her brother? I tried to calm her down and reassured her that he would be fine soon.
We stayed in constant contact, and every time I asked her to pass my greetings to her family, they would send their greetings back to me.
In mid-June, the place I was staying in became very dangerous, so we had to evacuate quickly. I lost contact with her for two days. When I managed to get a signal, I saw that Shaimaa had tried several times to contact me and send messages to check on me. I informed her that we were safe, that we had left our place of refuge and moved to my cousins’ house in Beit Lahia. She said, “May Allah bless and protect you.”
Two hours later, she messaged me again, saying, “I’m checking on you. My father said that the house is open for you and your family at any time, and whenever you want to come to the south, you can stay at our house.” I was moved to tears by his words and thanked him. His kindness echoed the description Shaimaa had always given of her father — of someone with a kind heart.
A while later, I was speaking to Shaimaa on WhatsApp when her father asked her, “What are you busy with?” She told him that she was talking to me, and he asked her to pass his greetings to me. Shaimaa then sent me an audio message of her father deciding how he would make space for me and my family in their small house, which consisted of three rooms. He was asking his sons to empty a room and prepare it for us, even planning to build a bathroom for us. I smiled, touched by his kindness, and told her, “May Allah protect the house and its inhabitants.”
Shaimaa often expressed her deep fear, feeling that something bad was bound to happen to them soon. She would say, “I hope Allah doesn’t test my patience by letting anything happen to my family.”
Recently, fear has been weighing on Shaimaa. “Ohood, I’m so afraid of October [the one-year anniversary of the start of the aggression],” she would say. “I’m very scared for my family.”
The Palestinian history exam
In our Palestinian history class we studied ancient and modern history, from the Cannanites to the Balfour Declaration and the Nakba (the catastrophe), when Israeli occupation began. We knew the history well, and we were living through it now all over again.
At 11:30 a.m. on exam day, I logged into her university account using her username and password. I contacted her via WhatsApp, as it requires less internet bandwidth compared to the browser used for the test. I opened her exam, read her the questions via WhatsApp, she answered, and I entered her responses. Halfway through, I joked, “It seems like you’ve studied well, Shaimaa.” She laughed and said, “Yes, indeed. I studied all night.” We continued with the exam, and as soon as it was over, I said, “My dear Shaimaa, we finished the exam. May Allah bless you with full marks.” I ended the call to study for my exam the next day.
I opened my book, but suddenly, I felt a suffocating sensation, and I couldn’t explain why. I quickly closed the book and opened WhatsApp to check on Shaimaa. Before I could send my message, she beat me to it with a shocking message: “Ohood, my father has been martyred.”
I felt a shock, and my suffocating feeling intensified. I replied, “Are you joking? Please tell me you’re joking, and that your father is okay.” How could he have been martyred? Just a few minutes ago, we were talking, and everything seemed fine. But then I remembered — we’re in Gaza, and it’s natural to lose a loved one at any moment.
I cried, and when I saw a video on social media of Shaimaa bidding farewell to her father, my sorrow grew even more. She still looked beautiful, just as I had seen her last on October 5, 2023. She was wearing the same abaya and shawl she had worn for the exam.
I wished I could go to her and hold her tightly to comfort her, but how could I? The occupation has placed a barrier, many kilometers long, separating me from my dear Shaimaa.
Refusing to run from challenges
That evening, I called Shaimaa again because my mother wanted to check on her. I told her, “Do you have an exam tomorrow, Shaimaa? What do you think about not taking it, and we can send an excuse to the university because of your father’s martyrdom? You can take it later.”
With unwavering determination, Shaimaa replied, “No, Ohood. I will study now, and I will take the exam. I will get an excellent grade. My father always told me to keep going, to face challenges, and not to run from them.”
I hung up, astonished by her determination. In every situation, she had shown me that nothing could stop her. But her insistence on taking the exam proved that nothing could stand in the way of her dreams.
Indeed, the next day, she took the exam (again, with me reading her the questions over WhatsApp, she dictating her responses, and me typing them into her account) and got an excellent grade. After finishing, she said to me, “I want to graduate, Ohood, and dedicate my graduation to my father.” Shaimaa had always dreamed of graduating and joining the graduation procession, fulfilling her father’s dream of seeing her wear the graduation gown and holding her diploma with her head held high.
Shaimaa lost her father, but her determination and resolve did not falter. For two months, she lived in a displacement tent lacking basic necessities like water and electricity in Rafah. When I would ask about her situation, she would say, “I’m fine. The only thing I miss is seeing you all safe.”
