we are not numbers
emerging writers from Palestine tell their stories and advocate for their human rights
War steals everything, but nothing prepared me for the moment I lost Batoul and her family.
My young friend Batoul. Photo provided by her relatives
On the morning of October 7, 2023, a little after 9 a.m., I lost all means of communication—no charge on my phone, no electricity, no internet. Life came to a complete standstill. It was as though I had suddenly fallen into an abyss. We were displaced. Days passed before I was able to recharge my phone again.
The following July, we were allowed to return to our home. My father told us with a sense of relief, “Ahmad, our neighbor, said he’ll charge our phones every day. Pack them in a bag.”
Ahmad Abu Daqqa’s house had solar panels. What a treasure in a time of darkness.
“He’ll charge our phones every day.” That simple sentence energized my day. My brother Sami began going to Ahmad’s shop to charge our phones daily.
It had been so hard to do anything for so long, but now that my phone was charged I enjoyed that infinite and instant satisfaction of being connected to anyone, anywhere in the world.
A month later, I desperately needed the internet to complete an important task. I asked my father to speak with Ahmad, and he said his daughter would meet me in the street and take me to the house.
It was an opportunity I could not pass up. When I reached the street, I saw Ahmad from afar. He called out to me and handed me an internet card. “Wait for Batoul, she’ll take you,” he offered.
Within a minute, a girl with soft, silky hair and wide eyes appeared in her purple pajama pants. I immediately warmed to her friendly manner and shy inquisitiveness. She was full of life and her sociability was evident.
Batoul walked beside me, her curiosity unquenchable, and asked, “Where’s your house? Are you in a university?”
I answered, “Our house is across the street, and as for the university, I graduated in 2023.”
Then I asked in return, “What about you? Which grade are you in?”
She giggled as though she did not want me to recognize the age gap between us, “I’m in seventh grade.” Her cheerfulness and radiant smile defied the rubbled state of the neighborhood and the streets in which we were all living.
I’ve always had a few carefully chosen friends. I’m not fond of meeting new people. But the war and repeated displacements we endured left me no choice but to expand my social circles. I never imagined that a 13-year-old girl would touch my life so deeply—that I’d feel incomplete without her. Batoul brought hope to my grayest days simply by showing me the unrestrained curiosity and innocence of her youth.
When we arrived at Batoul’s house, her mother, Aisha Qudeih, welcomed me as though she’d known me for years. “Why are you late, Batoul?”
Batoul laughed, “I was getting to know Fatena on the way!”
We went up to the third floor where they had prepared a table, chair, and charging cable for me. I felt like one of the family and sat down to work, but Batoul’s inquisitions were in full gear. Her questions were all threaded together in one rambling long sentence to spur as much conversation out of me in the short time I was there. She jumped from subject to subject, trying to decipher everything she could about me. My answers only widened her curiosity.
She rattled off one question after another: “How old are you? What’s your major? Do you love translation?”
Aisha interjected jokingly, “We rarely have visitors, but that doesn’t mean you talk non-stop, Batoul! Let Fatena finish with her tasks.”
I laughed and said, “It’s okay, I’m happy.” Such moments were so few and so fleeting during this war.
An hour later, Aisha brought me tea and biscuits, and offered, “We wish to have you for lunch today.” When I said I was fasting—as a normal duty and not for Ramadan, she insisted with motherly tenderness, “Put them in your bag and eat them at iftar. You must visit us again so you can have lunch with us.”
I left their house feeling I had met the kindest neighbor in Aisha. As I was leaving, she once again suggested warmly, “Make it a habit, come anytime.”
And Batoul, walking me out, continued breathlessly with her questions: “Where’s your house?”
I pointed, and she smiled, “Then I’ll see you from my window!”
On April 3, 2025, during Ramadan—the only time I truly felt alive after a year of war—it finally seemed almost safe to walk around our neighborhood without fearing death. A humanitarian truce had been declared.
I needed a quiet place to take an exam, and the only home I could consider was Ahmad’s—his was the only house in the neighborhood with electricity from solar panels.
My father called our neighbor and said, hesitantly, “I feel ashamed to ask again …”
Ahmad interrupted him, “Abu Sami, don’t say that. Our home is hers. Tell your daughter to come anytime.”
And so I went, this time with my mother. Batoul greeted us with laughter, spraying perfume in the air, “Welcome, Fatena!”
She hugged me and gathered some cushions to add to my comfort.
“Why are you worried?” she asked me innocently, sensing my anxiety.
“I have an exam,” I replied.
It felt strange to feel the same pre-exam nerves and knots in my stomach as I had before the war. It was as though the destruction had not yet made us immune to stress.
Batoul sprang into action as though she were my guardian. She quickly expelled her siblings from the room she had prepared for me: “No one comes in! Fatena has an exam!”
Then in hushed tones, she urged them, “Pray for her, she’s starting her test.”
A neighborhood prayer space had opened for classes during the ceasefire, but that day Batoul skipped her class and treasured habit of memorizing the Qur’an. She was afraid I might need something while she wasn’t there. I remember how she stood like a protector over me.
On my second visit to Batoul’s home, I photographed the light resting softly on the walls, just as she instructed. Photo: Fatena Abu Mostafa
The electric sockets always worked in Batoul’s house. This felt strange, as though it were a normal day. Batoul told me, “Take a picture of the light and the socket!” I laughed and took a picture of the light as she instructed me.
After I finished my exam, she looked at me thoughtfully and said, “You know? The way you wear your hijab is so pretty. I will copy you!”
With a twinkle in her eyes, she continued her sisterly adoration. “I’ll study your major and become a translator like you!”
She took my book and tried to read from it. “Look! I read the word correctly, right?”
I laughed with all my heart, ever amused by Batoul’s readiness for adulthood.
Her mother sagely added, “Look, Batoul. A woman’s university certificate is her weapon.”
As we were leaving, Batoul begged her mother to let her visit our house before Eid. But Aisha, not wanting to impose on my family, reined in her daughter’s excitement, “We’ll go on Eid—hopefully the war will be over by then.”
Batoul pleaded, teasingly trying to test the boundaries her mother had set out: “But Eid is far away, please, let’s go before.”
I promised Batoul that I would bring her to my house before Eid. But Eid came and neither she nor her mother would ever visit.
On April 18, 2025, I woke up to the buzzing of the damn drones—and more frighteningly, to my parents’ alarmed voices, “The army gave new evacuation orders!”
I could not think about the evacuation route or the place we would go to. My first thoughts were, how will I charge my phone? Where will I get the internet?
Then suddenly Batoul’s words rang eerily in my head: “Eid is far away, I want to visit Fatena before Eid.”
My fears began to mount as sinister thoughts slithered into my ears. Will they evacuate? Will I see Batoul and Aisha again?
My father called Ahmad to check in on him and ask him about his plans but Ahmed seemed resigned, “We’re tired of being displaced. We’ll stay. Send your phones if you want them charged,” he assured my father.
My father decided to stay as well.
The unabated shelling would soon begin and, yet, I was comforted by the knowledge that, like us, our neighbors had not evacuated.
At iftar, the bombing was worse. By midnight, I felt my heart tightening. “Something bad will happen,” I told my mother.
A loud explosion followed. It was so close that I was certain our home had been hit. But we were spared.
There were no screams, only the sound of shrapnel ricocheting around us. Minutes later, someone called my father.
I could see the shock grip my father’s face and I urged him to tell me what had happened. He would relay the most devastating news I had ever heard.
“Ahmad, his wife, and their four kids were martyred.”
I couldn’t believe it. I was afraid to even look out the window.
I didn’t sleep that night. In the morning, when I looked outside, I saw only rubble. Ahmad’s house was gone and my neighbors’ bodies lay crushed and buried under the fallen debris for over a week. Even the neighborhood dogs were howling in grief.
April 18, 2025: When I looked outside I saw only rubble. Photo: Fatena Abu Mostafa
Since then, I have not been able to sleep. I see Batoul’s family circulating through my mind as though they are still living next door and going about their business. Batoul is laughing, studying, and dreaming about becoming a grown-up. Aisha had dreams. She wanted her children to study and to succeed, just as she had once hoped for herself.
When their bodies were finally extracted from the debris, they were disfigured beyond recognition. I couldn’t say goodbye to Batoul or see her kind face again because it was shredded. I couldn’t hug her one last time. I couldn’t take her to see my home as I had promised.
A month later and I still see them everywhere. Every time I look at the internet. Every time I pass the street where Batoul first saw me. I cry when someone says “Eid.”
I’m angry at myself for not bringing her to my home sooner.
Her grandmother told me they didn’t leave the house after my last visit.
War steals everything. It steals the fresh air we breathe. It steals the comfort from our eyes and spreads fear and death across the sky, turning them into a style of life. It steals innocent childhoods and dreams that were never given the chance to be born—just as Batoul’s was stolen.
Nothing prepared me for the moment I lost Batoul and her family. They had been acquaintances to me before the war but we had become drawn to each other during the darkest of days when war paralyzed our lives and severed us from the outside world.
Every time I write now, Batoul’s words come to me: “I want to be like you, Fatena.”
Their home was the only light in the darkness of war. They taught me to cherish every moment with loved ones. I wish I had known Batoul and her family before the war.
Batoul is a symbol of every child whose dreams were killed; her mother was a symbol of hope and strength; her family and her house were a sanctuary.
I wrote this story—their story—to show the world that in Gaza, there are souls who love life.
When dreams are snuffed out by missiles, memory fights to keep the dreamers alive within us. Batoul wasn’t just a child I met in the war. She was a child with dreams and ambitions, a delayed hope, a future never realized. Batoul had wanted to grow up—but death came first.
And today, as I write about her, I fight to keep her alive in words—just as she remains alive in my heart.
