Gaza is — was — a beautiful city on the Mediterranean Sea with high buildings and history found in every corner, lining each street, and echoing through every building. In Gaza, everything bears witness to the past. Gaza has always offered a life, simple for the lack of luxuries it offered, but satisfying for the routine that it offered us as a measure of happiness.
I could once open my eyes in the morning without the sounds of bombs and constant worry about what to eat for the next meal or the days to come, and this gave me an appreciation of my routine.
That predictability defined my happiness: attending my training course, watching my favorite Korean series on the internet, playing web games that were cherished in their mundaneness. Chitchatting with my friends for hours and dropping in on relatives for a cup of tea yielded little discoveries beyond the trivial, but they were the humdrum of the days that I loved so dearly. Even my ongoing job search gave me hope and vision for the future, though I could not always find what I was looking for.
The list that filled my routine and gave me happiness is too long to write here. I could tweak it once, here, and there, with new sub-routines suitable for the day — but that is all in the past. Life is now unpredictable, turbulent, and chaotic. The routine that once bred comfort and internal peace is long gone. A curtain has fallen over my routine.
The black routine, as I call it, is a survival routine in Gaza. There can be no happiness in the process of trying to stay alive with your family. You are dead both on the inside and outside, a body walking without any soul.
The sound of bombs deafens us all day and night in Gaza. Fathers and brothers leave their tents-turned-into-homes on a daily march to Al-Bahar and Al-Kiwat Streets in the hope of earning meager funds to feed their families. Their lives become the target of snipers or they fall victim to shelling, and many do not return home.
An unbearable stench emanates from mountains of trash on the streets while polluted air sickens every man, woman, and child. There is no medicine, and the three ghosts of hunger, disease, and destruction trade places with each other, lurking too closely behind every Palestinian.
The ghost of hunger and uncleanliness
Hunger is always the first to cast its oppressive shadows on us. We become used to eating insufficient portions or having only bare bread to eat. I have not felt my stomach full once in the last eight months, but the little we eat is a blessing and we thank Allah for it, because many of us don’t have anything to eat.
Preserving food for the next day is futile without electricity and we have resorted to rotten bread, rotten tomato paste in food, and expired food. The Palestinian body becomes weaker every day in this war. The ghost of hunger is never far.
And this brings me to the routine of washing clothes by hand, which is the only way to maintain cleanliness. With very little water and soap and no electricity, we scrub and rinse the clothes until our hands ache. The black smoke stubbornly envelops the clothes and makes them so dirty and difficult to clean.
Bringing clean water to drink is another unwelcome routine that damages our health and ruins lives in irreversible ways. Fathers, brothers, and children go to donation centers that offer water for free, but this water is not for drinking. Many wait endless hours for their turn to take water in gallons and bring it home. The Israeli Occupation always seems to be waiting to attack until there is the largest number of people at these centers, to maximize the death toll.
Where our mothers and sisters took great pride in cooking delicious meals, this too has become dangerous and unsatisfying because there is no gas in Gaza and we cook on an open fire raging from an old tank and burn anything in it. Paper, cartons, plastic, and wood are tossed inside in lieu of fuel and the smell of burning pollutes the air and sickens us.
Taking a shower in cold water in winter is another routine I have come to deplore. We can take limited showers due to the scarcity of water and those scant drops are cold and biting in winter. They cleanse us on the outside while attacking our immunity to disease on the inside.
The ghost of hopelessness
But the worst losses are those of once-beloved routines that existed in our minds. The routine of saying “I wish” has disappeared from our vocabulary. The Palestinians wish for life to be normal, to have electricity, to have the internet, and to revel in the array of dishes that our mothers taught us to make. The wishes remain but the hope that they could be granted has died and our souls tire from wishing without results.
Remembering the blessings before the war, when we could savor different kinds of foods at nearly normal costs, of sweets and vegetables, and the quiet lives that Palestinians once lived: This is a lost routine, too. Instead, we have grown accustomed to another remembrance, of the loved ones we lost to bombs and weapons. My uncle, the brother of my mother, was killed by Israeli weapons. Every person in Gaza has lost at least one member of their family. When will this tragedy end? Is it that Palestinian souls aren’t important enough to be saved?
Pets as predators
The affection we carry for our animals is now overshadowed by a fear of what our pets are capable of doing for their survival. Cats and dogs scavenge for food in the trash but turn into predators when they cannot find enough of it. The cats use their claws and the dogs their teeth to rip bags of food from our hands.
My brother witnessed a woman carrying fish in a small plastic bag and the cats caught the scent immediately and pounced on her. The poor lady dropped the bag and became frantic until some men came to her rescue and shooed away the cats that had turned into monsters for that woman.
I have always loved cats but they have become our competitors for food and have no qualms about attacking us. These very pets we played with are now devouring the meat of our dead neighbors whom we cannot bury in decent graves because of the bombs and Israeli occupation.
Routines that bring no joy
My routine brings me a bitter taste nowadays. I cannot walk on the streets because of the mountains of trash that line them and the sound of bombs that echo through them. I stay at home praying the five prayers, eating one little meal at 4 p.m. with the whole family so as not to feel hungry for the rest of the day. I read some verses of the Holy Qur’an with my family about the principles of war to find some solace and protect our home. The bombs disrupt every night’s sleep after Alfager’s prayer and fill it with nightmares.
Is it our fault that we Palestinians do not see happiness? Are our souls not dear to the world? Though we are humans, we can’t live like humans in this war. We convert animal food into flour and eat rotten food.
What will happen next? An entire people now waits for death through starvation. While Israeli bombs kill us, not one Arab and Muslim country has stood by our side to stop this genocide.
Is it not our right to live a quiet life filled with routines as does the rest of the whole world? Is the idea of human rights a lie, something we study at school but that has no applicability or real meaning?
The world must stop lying and end this war. We cannot stand this anymore. We want the routine of happiness to return to us once again.
