we are not numbers
emerging writers from Palestine tell their stories and advocate for their human rights
Those who survive the genocide will return to houses that have been reduced to rubble, and yet the city will remain alive in its people.
Schoolboys on the corniche by the Gaza Sea, before the war; to imagine a future is the dream of many Gazans. Photo: Mariam Mohammed Al Khateeb
“What comes after a genocide?” This is the question whispered in shelters, in hospital corridors, and among the ruins of our homes.
What will life look like if this genocide ever ends? Will it truly end? If it does, what kind of life will remain for us to return to?
Yet before all of this, the most haunting question persists: Will it truly end?
By “end,” I do not mean only the halting of bombs, but the ending of a lifelong suffering that has marked every Palestinian generation. How will the fear we carry inside our very souls ever be lifted—the fear that has been with us since birth and has become our eternal shadow?
In Gaza, survival is not living. It is waiting. Waiting for the next ceasefire, for a loaf of bread, for water to drip through broken pipes, for the electricity to blink back on for a few hours.
We wait to hear if loved ones survived the night. We wait for life itself, though it never truly arrives.
During these long intervals of waiting, neighbors sit together and argue about what comes after the war. Will rebuilding our houses restore what has been lost? Or are walls nothing more than hollow shells once the souls within them are gone?
Voices rise and fall, but beneath every discussion lies a silent fear, a fear that everyone tries to escape—that Gaza, as we knew it, may never return.
After losing his only son, Abu Yousef stared at the ruins of his house and shared his thoughts with me. “The Gaza I knew will not return,” he said, “Even if the war stops, we are already broken from the inside.”
Sadly, his fear is not unfounded. Even if the genocide ends, where does the survivor return to? To a house reduced to rubble? To a city whose landmarks have vanished into the dust? Will we remain trapped in an endless search for substitute homes—phantom places that offer us the barest chance of survival while drowning us in bitterness and disillusionment?
To whom will the orphaned children return? To whom will the mothers of our martyrs return? How can a world that has collapsed entirely be reordered? What else remains in our hearts besides disorientation and loss?
There is a strange dissonance between those inside Gaza and those outside.
We Gazans measure time not by calendars, but by massacres, by the silences after airstrikes, by the faces that vanish from our neighborhoods and families.
For those outside Gaza, time flows forward, steady and unbroken. For us, time collapses inward. Days bleed into one another, indistinguishable, like pages left blank by fire. Survival is not a full life. Rather, it is a suspended, fragmented, and broken existence. It is an afterimage of what life used to be.
While the world wakes, goes to work, and plans for the future, our days collapse into queues for food, nights without sleep, and the unending sound of drones.
A displaced young woman spoke to me from the school shelter where she now lives. “My cousin in Europe calls me and asks what my plans are after the war. I don’t know how to answer her. Plans belong to people who believe in tomorrow.”
There is a constant tug-of-war between the instinct only to stay alive and the dream to give life some meaning.
Dreams outside Gaza move forward. Here, all our dreams remain suspended. Some are buried with the dead. Some hover in the sky like unfulfilled promises. Some are delayed until the chance, if it ever comes, to leave Gaza. Each day is fragmented into seemingly borrowed hours of life that stretch out thinly between one death and the next.
To eat, to drink, to breathe—that is instinct. But to write, to love, to imagine a future, that is the dream.
Sometimes even the dream can feel like a betrayal, though. One survivor I spoke to confessed, “I feel guilty for dreaming of studying again while people around me are starving.”
And yet, without dreams, survival loses its shape. Deferred dreams embody both loss and resilience; they are wounds, but they are also seeds that insist on surviving.
Fear is a constant shadow in Gaza. It lurks behind every sound of jets, every rumor of famine, every silence when a loved one doesn’t answer their phone. But alongside fear, there is still hope. It is fragile but it is unyielding.
Ahmed, whom I met in Deir Al-Balah, told me his dream: “I just want to go back to school and play football with my friends.” His words, as simple as they are, reveal how hope still survives even in our smallest desires.
Fear and hope coexist here, intertwined. Fear keeps us awake. Hope keeps us human.
What does it mean to live on after so much death? Will Gaza ever return, or will it exist only as a memory forever etched in time, a place that once was and can no longer be?
Perhaps life after this genocide will not resemble what came before. Perhaps life will be forever haunted, fractured, and surreal. But even if this is the case, our city will remain alive in its people, if only as a story, a dream, or a scar carried forward.
As I write this, I know one unsettling truth: In Gaza, we will not only survive the war; we will also survive its afterlife.
