Nour on the shore of Deir Al-Balah, just after the ceasefire was broken, taken on the day they had planned to watch the waves in peace. Photo: Shaimaa Abdullah Abu Ghadayen

A classic verse couplet aptly captures a Gazan sentiment: “My love,” it says, “all of this is destiny’s decree; we hold no power here. We were simply born into this sorrow.” It seems to be speaking to every Gazan who knows of no peace in concept and no salvation in form.

On October 19, 2025, I woke up in my tent in Deir Al-Balah. It was Sunday, which was a weekend for foreigners, so I decided to consider it a holiday as well and not go to Twix Café, the place where I sit for hours browsing emails and writing for magazines to share stories from marginalized voices in Gaza. In fact, that day I called my friend Shaimaa to go to the beach with me, a half-hearted attempt to alleviate the burden of loss we had endured in September when I lost my favorite place in Gaza, my home, and became homeless.

My friend agreed, and we met two hours later in Deir Al-Balah market. We bought some fruit, nuts, and boxes of noodles, just because the market had become flooded with them for some unknown reason.

The crowded Deir Al-Balah market was full of life. The air was bittersweet, reminding us of those we had lost to famines and massacres at aid truck locations. How they would have wished for this scene of food items inside the markets instead of vehicles!

When we arrived at the seashore, we began to chit-chat, longing for what we lost and what was new to us after the recent invasion of Gaza. The last time I met my friend Shaima was in August 2025. Israel had invaded western Gaza again in September, and so we had a lot of stories of displacement to share. I still had not recovered from leaving Gaza City for the first time and being uprooted to the South on September 17, 2025.  The endless series of hardships that spilled out of our hearts had left us exhausted, and we sat for a moment in silence.

The sound of a missile suddenly shook the ground beneath us.

The plumes of grey smoke rose from the missile’s trail, and though I couldn’t actively smell it, for a fleeting moment, the missile’s scent imprinted itself into my awareness. The mind never truly forgets; the distinctive sound and smell welded together, forming a grim reel of brutal memories.

My body trembled with fear, and I could feel my face contort in agony, like an infant convulsing from fever chills. The family at the table by the seaside next to ours was tuned in constantly to the news via SMS messages, like every Gazan, so was one step ahead of me with the latest and relayed what they had just read. The bomb had exploded in front of Twix Café, they told us. 

Twix Café, where Nour used to sit with her keffiyeh, representing Palestine in online conferences. This place holds countless memories of fear, anticipation, hope, and the long wait for a ceasefire. Photo: Nour Abo Aisha

My fears were becoming more intense. I desperately texted my sister to check on my family. Our tent stood on the same street as Twix. Thank God, they were fine. I breathed a sign of relief when she confirmed that the shelling had rocked the area at the uppermost side of the street and was a long distance away.

My voice was cracking as questions flooded out of my mind. Why was the café bombed? What is pushing Israel to violate the ceasefire nine days after the agreement and the guarantee of mediators?

I browsed the news channels to find out what was happening and found a snippet from an unknown source. It read, “Targeting at the door of Twix Café, three martyrs were killed,” omitting the names of the martyrs. My Palestinian friend Ilham, who lives in Germany, texted me, fearing for my safety, because I had often recounted the endless hours I linger at Twix Café. Shaima tried to ease my anxiety, and I recall my words of resignation, “We came to the beach to recover from the war. The war is back.” The day we had passed on the shore had ended without realizing my overly optimistic intentions to forget the war. I returned to my tent before sunset, more morosely than I had left it.

My biggest fear as a journalist was transforming into reality. What if I had been at the Twix Café and become part of the breaking news? “An independent journalist and a number of citizens were killed,” the article would have read, without anyone naming names. What if I would have been the subject of the news instead of being its broadcaster? 

The bombing brought to mind the Al-Baqa Café massacre, committed on June 30, 2025. The explosion had swallowed dozens of lives, mainly artists, engineers, and writers. Their deliberate targeting had become the focus of news outlets, and everyone talked about it for months. 

But now, no one mentions that massacre or even its martyrs. As Mahmoud Darwish said, “Forgotten, as if you never were.” Will the day come when we, the reporters, will talk about the life on the Gaza Strip and the return of the infrastructure and street life? When will news of life replace news of death and salvation? 

I was confused, and the more questions I asked myself, the more muddled became the answers. A new chaos was brewing inside of me, and I could not calm down. I prayed to Allah that the nights of war from which I had miraculously survived would not return. We had paid the dearest price for life with our blood, through hunger and with the loss of our homes. Would these dire times return? We had believed that after dozens of failed negotiations, this fragile truce had taken hold. The possibility that war had returned to Gaza made it a sleepless night

The southern Gaza Strip area would experience continuous and heavy Israeli shelling up to the next morning. Contrary to reality, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the war had not returned and that the truce had resumed. This is when I realized that there was no salvation for the Gazan. The Gazan dies waiting for survival because he is locked in a box; as the saying goes, “How painful it is to live in a box and die in a box.”

In Gaza, you cannot separate pain from your daily routine. Every day is a direct reaction to a trauma that lives on and by your side.

When I returned to my tent, I jotted down what happened to me, as if my job as a journalist had become to narrate my pain so that a future Wikipedia post can feed on the Palestinian trauma. I had to document all of these unrelenting horrors so that my articles would top the Exclusive Eyewitness first-hand account section. But what if I did not write any of this? Who would tell the truth?

During my studies in Romantic literature at university, one of my greatest ambitions was to write a poem in the Romantic style and become that poet who sits in the arms of nature and muses about love. But in Gaza, you cannot write about love. Perhaps you write instead about the absence of your lover in the occupation prisons, or about the lover who mourns the martyrdom of her lover, or about waiting for love that never comes.

As for that nature, it has turned to ashes and leaves us only the sky to admire. I long to see the colors of nature, and my eyes are numbed by the greyness around me. That starkness disturbs and hurts me.

In Gaza, for as long as we listen to the buzzing of the drones, death becomes the only topic to write about. After a while, love changes its home, and the birds abandon the dens. Will the day come when we, the reporters, will talk about the life on the Gaza Strip and the return of the infrastructure and street life? When will news of life replace news of death and salvation?

Resistance is now no longer just existing during a genocide but the fight to recover in the midst of ceasefire violations. We are trying to heal while being constantly murdered and so we are even denied the freedom to heal. What remains is the freedom to tell stories, to speak with a rebellious voice.

I fear I will pay the price for my words, as was the fate of Ghassan Kanafani, whose novel “All That’s Left to You” cost him his life. “And only one of us can remain: you, the colonizer, or I,” as he wrote.