The ever-present al-zanana flies overhead during the genocide, an omen of imminent explosions. Photo: Ghada Abu Muaileq 

On an ordinary school day when I was six years old, I looked up into the sky and saw an Israeli drone tracing strange shapes in the air. It was 2008, and this was my first tangible perception of occupation.

My friends and I didn’t yet grasp what it meant, so we’d stare at the sky, and make a game of guessing its patterns: sometimes a perfect loop, other times jagged lines or smooth curves. We didn’t know its name or purpose; we only knew that it never left, its relentless buzzing like a monstrous mechanical bee.

Then came the day I understood that its presence was ominous. On a December morning during recess at my UNRWA school, our principal abruptly rushed to us, her voice urgent: “Go home, now!” We were only children; we did not understand the danger until we saw the teachers’ faces as their eyes filled with terror at the buzzing growing louder overhead. In the panicked murmurs, we learned that the health center next to our school had been targeted for bombing.

That was the beginning of Gaza’s first war of my lifetime, lasting 21 days. The deafening explosion of rockets was something I had never heard before—a horror even worse than the buzzing drone that painted the sky. I would clamp my hands over my ears, trembling. My parents tried to calm me, calling them fireworks, but I knew better. Fireworks don’t turn buildings into rubble.

After that war, four years passed without rocket sounds, but al-zanana (the noisemaker), that ominous drone, never left our skies. With each birthday, my childish questions about it grew darker.

I was 10 when the bombs rained again in 2012, eight endless days during which Israel targeted our homes. I am still haunted by the images of civil defense workers pulling children my age from the ruins of a house that had been bombed with the whole family inside, the first massacre I saw in my life. I saw tiny bodies, still in pajamas, masked by blood and dust; I imagined myself in their place. At that moment, I understood two truths: These missiles didn’t just destroy buildings—they erased childhoods. And al-zanana? It wasn’t just watching. It had been guiding death all along.

Each war was worse than the preceding one. Two years later, in the summer of 2014, another Israeli offensive was unleashed, this one lasting nearly 50 days. The heaviest destruction targeted eastern Gaza, particularly the Shuja’iyya neighborhood where Israeli forces stormed in and massacred families inside their own homes. In central Gaza, we endured relentless airstrikes, though soldiers never entered our area. They terrorized us in other ways—calling our phones, telling us that we would suffer the same fate as Shuja’iyya’s residents.

By age 12, I already felt crushed under the weight of war. Being killed by the bombings seemed inevitable, but more scary than dying was not knowing how or when death would come. This terror was so strong that my friends and I would try to go to sleep when the bombing grew louder, because, in our childlike thinking, we thought that we would not feel any pain if we were killed while sleeping.

A fire caused by the bombing of a house in the writer’s neighborhood. Photo: Ghada Abu Muaileq 

At that age, I didn’t cry much. I found refuge from the external chaos in words. I kept myself busy reading stories and writing, pouring my fear and defiance into poems, stories, and the fragments of my life shaped by occupation. I have cried much more as an adult living through genocide.

You might think that Gaza residents have grown accustomed to war after three invasions in close succession, but that’s far from the truth. We are an educated, life-loving people and we have never adapted to destruction, nor have we accepted it as normal.

In 2021 the Israeli occupation responded to our defiance with yet another war, this time targeting Gaza City’s commercial and vital areas to paralyze daily life and tighten the noose. Even after that 10-day assault ended, the siege and restrictions remained, though the bombing resumed periodically with ever more lethal munitions.

On Oct. 7, 2023, I was preparing to go to my 8 a.m. lecture at the university when classes were suspended indefinitely. My friend Dalia and I were in our final year of study and excited to graduate. We looked forward to soon returning to our studies once the war ended, but this date marked the last day of ordinary life.

Within the first week of the war, my university was bombed to rubble. My beautiful memories of study and laughter with my friends were erased. The Israeli army occupied the road connecting the north and south of Gaza, cutting us off from our neighbors. I have not seen Dalia, who lives 20 minutes north of me by car, since the war began. Indiscriminate bombing killed people in their homes: our friend Tasneem, an outstanding student, along with several professors, including my lecturer Dr. Refaat Alareer, a famous poet and writer, and many of my own relatives. Even my grandfather passed away—not from an explosion, but from starvation, lack of medicine, and unbearable living conditions.

My city is now rubble and a grave for more than 50,000 martyrs. These losses have left scars in my heart that will never fade.

The sky still holds every war I’ve lived through—each drone, each explosion, each night of fear etched into its vastness. It is a reminder of the terror that has rooted itself deep in my heart.

And yet, I hold onto a quiet, unwavering faith: that I will have a better life, and that one day, children will look up at this same sky, clear and calm, asking no haunting questions—only wondering why it is so blue. And we will say, “Because it reflects the sea of Gaza.”

This article is co-published with Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.