I used to see the early sunrise from my bedroom window. I was delighted to awaken to such a scene every morning: radiant light breaking through the purple sky. What could be better before a long day of learning at university?
I cannot forget how spirited I felt when I set off every morning to go to campus. I would first take a moment on my balcony and fill my lungs with the Mediterranean breeze and the freshness of my grandmother’s guava trees. Then I would walk out of our building under the shade of those trees, taking in the nature around me and the other students on the street, of different ages and many in school uniform, on their way to their classes.
I never imagined that one day I would be deprived of these joys and of my human right to education, which have been stripped away by Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.
My two years at the Islamic University of Gaza were the best of my life. I still remember my first day there, how warmly the faculty and administrators welcomed us into the institution. My initial indecisiveness over which major to study was quickly replaced with a passion for literature. Each morning, I walked past the tall trees that graced our campus and took in the twittering sounds of the songbirds that perched high in the branches. The elderly guard who spent decades serving the university greeted the students every day with a smile.
The Islamic University of Gaza, a place of learning and growth for me and so many others, has been reduced to rubble after Israel bombed it over and over. I saw the pictures on the news. I felt I no longer knew the place where, not too long ago, I had wandered through the halls and verdant squares. Israel might have erased my university, but nothing can erase the peaceful images that are fixed in my memory.
After Israel targeted my place of higher learning, I went into a state of denial. I refused to accept that my university was gone and that I could never add to the collection of memories I had created there. I began to believe that Israel was at war not just with Hamas or the Palestinian people, but with our most intimate recollections — and especially our collective memory.
My university holds spiritual significance for each and every Palestinian in Gaza, as every Gazan family can boast that at least one of its members has studied there. Its destruction has not affected me alone but has left a collective wound in the souls of all its students and their families.
I was in the first semester of my third year when Israel started its genocide against my beloved Gaza. That semester, I was studying poetry, Romanticism and Elizabethan literature. I especially enjoyed attending poetry classes with my late professor Refaat Alareer.
Professor Refaat, as we called him, was always strict with us in class, but he was also very kind. During his lectures I used to sit in the front row, just opposite his lectern, with my eyes open wide, hoping to visually capture the pictures he painted for us with his words. I felt moved with each class, transformed somehow as a human being. I especially loved his teaching of Shakespeare’s sonnets, for he had a rare ability to connect international literature to Palestinian literature. If we were ever “stuck” in Gaza, unable due to Israel’s restrictions on our movement to go anywhere, then professor Refaat’s lectures transported us all to a different world. Some days, I would spend three hours compiling my notes after his class, holding on to each word he said and savoring it.
Alas, the semester with professor Refaat was cut short. I attended only eight of his lectures before Oct. 7, which were not enough for a deep dive into his boundless knowledge and experience. Yet I stand among the generation of writers he has inspired, always encouraging us to navigate our way by writing the first words that came to us. In one class, I remember him talking passionately about the power of documentation, of writing down the minutiae of the reality in which we found ourselves — even when it was terrible; especially when it was unimaginable. It was after attending his lectures that I came to believe that my own story matters, and that with it I could perhaps someday guide someone in this wide world to take a stand on the side of justice. His mentorship awakened this power from deep within me, and he taught me how to use it.
In our final class together, my dear teacher opened his lecture with an extract from a book he edited: “Gaza Writes Back.” With a spark in his eye and a tremble in his voice, he stood still in front of us all and read:
There is a Palestine that dwells inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be revived: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of the word “occupation” no longer connotes the death, destruction, pain, suffering, deprivation, isolation, and restrictions that Israel has injected into this word.
“Gaza Writes Back” is a compilation of essays authored by Gazans, the result of a collective labor of love that professor Refaat shared with Palestinian youth, the students he taught over the years.
At the time, I thought it was a little odd for him to start his class that way, because we were not accustomed to such openings. But quickly I came to realize that my teacher’s most important wish had nothing to do with him, rather it was for Palestine to be free. And so from the start of the semester, I worked hard to pull together ideas about the piece, a poem, that I wanted to write and contribute to the ongoing collective anthology that my teacher oversaw.
Professor Refaat was killed in Israel’s bombardment. His loss is a blow to the Palestinian psyche, much like the loss of the great Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani in 1972, who was also killed by Israel. Then and now, it is evident that Israel fears those who write the truth. These two thinkers were killed because they spoke up. Of professor Refaat I have nothing left but my handwritten notes from his lectures.
On Nov. 11, after the war started and I stopped going to university, after my family and I stood fast for 29 days resisting displacement, we were forced out of our home. The Israeli tanks closed in on our neighborhood. Israeli snipers took their positions and were ready to end our lives. The monstrous sounds of war were getting closer and louder. My mom asked us to pack our bags with a few essentials, believing in her optimism that we would be back home “after a few days.” She didn’t know then that we would be away from home for more than 300 days and counting. It had not occurred to her that she would be displaced several times over after being forced out of our home, or that on several occasions she would escape death by what seemed like a miracle. On the day of our displacement, and with heavy tears, I went to my room, opened my tall wooden closet and froze in place, staring, unable to take anything. I wished I could have stuffed all of my belongings into my miserable evacuation bag, but I could not.
My eyes settled on a pink woolen blouse that my grandmother had crocheted years ago for my aunt, who was close to the age that I am now. But I decided not to take it. I didn’t expect that I would spend the cruel winter in a place that is not home and that I would long for its warmth. My gaze then settled on my school awards, and a wave of memories flooded my senses. But those, too, I would leave behind. I then looked at the poems that I had written and placed on my desk. I couldn’t leave those behind, I thought, not after the hours upon hours I had spent mulling every word and stanza.
So I packed them up in a hurry. There were tens or maybe hundreds of rockets suddenly dropping from the blue sky. “Get out of the house!” My father shouted in the loudest voice I had heard him use. I rushed through our apartment along with my siblings, each with our bags. We moved fast, our backs bent so that the Israeli snipers wouldn’t shoot at us through the window. We feared death. And this fear has followed me through the dreadful passage to the so-called safe zone in the south of Gaza. Still today, I fear death just the same, because it seems to hover so close to me at all times.
On Dec. 8, 2023, it had been two months since the Israeli genocide started against the civilian population of Gaza, my family among them. We had no internet connection at the place where we were sheltered, and the cellphone signal was very weak for me to place a call or receive a message. It was excruciating for us not to know anything about the loved ones left behind — and whether they were still among the living. I used to place my phone on the windowsill in the hopes of capturing some cellphone signal, so that I might receive a message from someone, from anyone, with news.
In our new existence on the run, securing the most basic necessities has become a cause for great celebration. I remember receiving that first portion of flour after going hungry for nearly a month. But as the genocide drags on, what we have by way of necessities continues to dwindle, and at times even to vanish. We can barely find anything to eat because Israel allows only a minimal number of food aid trucks to reach the south. We have been lucky to have access to small portions of aid while people in the north of Gaza have been left to starve to death in their own homes, apparently forgotten, or maybe ignored by the world.
Suddenly, I heard a notification sound coming from my phone, and I rushed to the window to check it. My hands quivered. My heart sank. I had spent hours trying to send and receive messages to no avail. And now that a message had come through, I felt only fear. It could be news that my loved ones were well and unharmed, I told myself, not necessarily that one of them had perished. So I found the courage to open the message. It was from Reem, my friend from university. We used to share the same desk in professor Refaat’s lecture hall.
“Prof. Refaat was murdered,” read the message.
Shocked and devastated, I immediately withdrew from the room where my family was gathered. My eyes filled with tears, my heart pounded and my body shook. I rushed to my notes from professor Refaat’s lectures and read them, over and over. And for some time reading those words felt like it could bring him back to life.
After a long while, I went out to search for an internet connection to confirm the horrible news and learn the details: How, when, where? I wanted to know if he was targeted while he was alone or with his family. Unfortunately, I didn’t find answers to my questions — only confirmation that he was dead. I saw that Alshaymaa, professor Refaat’s eldest daughter, had posted on Instagram that she gave birth to a healthy baby boy, a bittersweet announcement as she lamented the loss of her father. “Do you know, my dearest dad, that you are a grandfather now? Yes, father. This is your first grandchild, AbdulRahman, he’s more than a month old. I have always visualized you holding him between your arms, but I have never imagined that I would lose you so early, even before meeting him,” she wrote.
Is that our fate as Palestinians in Gaza? Do we always have to leave early before realizing the lives we deeply longed for and deserved? Is the world bored with our sad stories and heartbreaking endings?
Enraged, I ask why. I need answers. Why am I not home? Why am I not receiving an education anymore? Why do we die searching for drinking water? Why should parents go hungry to feed their children? Why do our children have to learn how to take responsibility so very early? Why should we lose our body parts — our legs, hands or heads? Why should our babies die before they are even born? I am about to lose my sanity.
Israel killed Alshaymaa, her husband and their newborn, AbdulRahman. Perhaps it is some consolation to think that, there in heaven, professor Refaat can hold his grandson in his strong and compassionate arms. There in heaven, perhaps we Gazans will have happy and fair endings. There in heaven, Gazans are alive forever.
I can’t help thinking of these three generations, their lives snuffed out too soon. I can’t understand my own feelings anymore. In fact, I no longer know for sure whether I am still feeling at all. I am tired of death, numb to losing people who were once among the living.
On July 15, 2024, while scrolling through Facebook, I came upon a post from another dear friend, Ayah Shamaa. Ayah was mourning her sister, Rama, who had been killed six months earlier. I wept at once. I couldn’t believe that the calm kind Rama was dead and that I would never see her again in our university classes or anywhere else.
At that moment, I understood my fear of going back to the university despite it being the very thing I longed for the most. I have always feared returning to class to scan the faces of my fellow students and find out who among them was missing — faces that I used to see every morning in the halls or in the corridors, young people who were passionate and kind. We studied together, laughed together and, for what in retrospect seems like a short time, I thought we would graduate together. Rama was quiet in almost every class we shared. She didn’t speak up a lot, but when she did, her ideas were thoughtful and filled with insight. She had a calm demeanor at all times.
According to Ayah, who recalls that fateful event, it happened like this: Rama, Ayah and their three sisters had been gathered at home with their parents. The five sisters were sitting on the ground together late one night, chatting and reminiscing. Rama had made them some tea, as was her habit when she wanted to cajole them into staying up late with her. Ayah was telling a story and looking at Rama, who was snacking on nuts and laughing. Then a sudden explosion ripped through their building. Rama was killed instantly, it seems. She was killed before hearing the rest of Ayah’s story, before she had stopped laughing. It took the first responders over 12 hours to recover Rama’s body from underneath the rubble, from beneath the concrete column that had smashed her head. After they pulled her out, they found a nut in her mouth, bloodied and unchewed.
I can’t stop thinking about her spending those 12 hours dead, alone in the darkness.
How many more lives must Israel end? How much more tragedy should my breaking heart endure? They killed the elderly, smiling guard from campus. They killed the teacher, the students and the chancellor. They bombed the buildings of my university and reduced it to rubble and ash. They left thousands of aspiring young people without a graduation. They uprooted the trees and burned the red roses that had grown tall in the students’ square.
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