Is the goal for us to disappear? To go silent? To die slowly?

EVERY time we’ve reached the point where we think things cannot get any worse – the edge of our ability to survive, the limit of our suffering and despair – we’re surprised to find that it is still farther away, that every low point is followed by an even lower one. This time, hunger has returned to Gaza. And thirst has returned, too.

For more than 40 days, the crossings have been tightly sealed, choking off what little life remains. No humanitarian aid is allowed in. No food supplies. Nothing gets through – just soldiers, bulldozers, and tanks. Bread, water, and medicine are forbidden to us, but the skies remain open for bombs.

The store shelves are nearly empty, and the markets have lost their meaning. We spend hours searching for a bag of flour, a can of beans, anything we can eat. But prices are skyrocketing, and goods are vanishing quickly.

The profiteering merchants – rather than being part of survival – have become partners in our suffocation. Some of them hoard goods, waiting until the need becomes more painful, then release them at merciless prices. No one dares to object. Everyone is afraid, everyone is hungry.

Since it resumed a month ago, the war has not only been against our homes and bodies but against our souls. It is attacking us from within. We live without electricity, and without supplies. Our ability to communicate with the outside world is limited, and our ability to communicate with each other is also faltering because of the weight of everything we have endured. It’s as if we are being slowly erased as if the goal is complete collapse – not just of the place, but of us as human beings.

People have changed. Their faces have changed. Silence now outweighs speech, and tears are more frequent than anger. The number of martyrs is rising at a terrifying pace. The bombing is random – without warning, without reason. There are no safe zones, no moments of rest.

My family and I have not been forcibly displaced again, yet, but hundreds of thousands of others have. The partially destroyed house we are staying in is close to the areas that have been ordered to evacuate. I can clearly hear the bombing in Khan Younis and Rafah. Everything is terrifying. The sound is just too loud and too close. Fear has taken over me completely. More than once, I’ve felt like my heart was about to stop because of how intense the noise is.

We eat less. Our meals, consisting of just canned beans and peas, have shrunk, sometimes surviving on barely one per day. And since the water lines were cut in March, we’ve started to ration every sip we drink, fearing thirst as much as we fear the bombs. We measure water by the millilitre, sipping it in tiny gulps, trying to trick our bodies into believing we’re not thirsty.

Psychologically, this is the worst time we’ve ever lived through. The fear is deeper, heavier, and more persistent. It never leaves us. It’s not just the fear of death, but the fear of how we’re supposed to keep living like this.

Even sleep has changed. We sleep with our bodies, but wake up with exhausted souls – we drift off to the sound of warplanes and wake to screaming, to news of someone’s death, or to the dread that we might be next.

Yes, we’re still alive. But what kind of life is this? We try to hold on to what remains of our humanity, our dignity, a small dream of there being a light at the end of this tunnel. But the road is dark, and with each passing day, we lose pieces of ourselves.

‘May God let them forget Gaza’

This time, it feels as if all of Gaza has died – literally. There is no food left. Famine is spreading at a terrifying pace. Most bakeries – including the ones close to where we are staying – have shut down, and there’s no fuel to power anything.

We are forced to walk for miles and hours just to find the bare essentials. Even if we come across a donkey-drawn cart, the donkeys themselves look more exhausted than we are. I’m responsible for finding places to charge my family’s electronic devices and carrying water. Each of us helps, and we try to manage things together. Along the way, we meet people who mirror our exhaustion, our anxiety, our stunned disbelief at what our lives have become.

We write, we scream, we document. But who reads? Who cares?

One day recently, I was walking down the road working on a journalistic assignment when I saw an elderly woman, easily in her 70s, her back bent from fatigue. She carried a worn-out plastic bag and was wearing a tattered black abaya. She walked slowly as if the Earth itself was weighing her down with all its pain. I approached her, and reached out my hand to help. Suddenly, she began to cry. With a trembling voice, she said: “We are so tired. May God let them forget Gaza. May they just leave us alone.”

She wasn’t praying for rescue. She was praying to be forgotten, to be left alone. I felt a heavy weight in my chest – not just from her pain, but because I, too, have felt the same.

When the war resumed, a deep feeling consumed me; I didn’t want to write anymore. What’s the point? We’re being exterminated, killed, starved, and the world simply doesn’t care. We write, we scream, we document. But who reads? Who cares? Every day, we lose a part of ourselves. Not just a home, a friend, a meal, or a memory. We lose our belief that this world might care, or that life might one day return to what it was.

The future has vanished

Every now and then, I meet up with a friend at a small cafe in Deir al-Balah that has managed to remain open. With her, I don’t need to explain anything. We experience the same feelings, and we both know that language cannot describe this kind of pain. Yet, we keep trying.

She’s a doctor, and I’m a journalist. We sit together and exchange random thoughts. We talk about our exhaustion, share funny jokes and memories of life before the war, and comment darkly and sarcastically about the absurdity of what our lives have become. We both used to dream of studying abroad. Now, we dream about finding clean water to drink.

There is no moment of safety, no feeling of peace. I try to write, to document, to explain, but sometimes I feel words betray me. I write about the people, and I am one of them.

Since the war resumed, the future has vanished from our conversations. Everything has stopped in the present. She saves lives, and I document losses. Both of us know the weight of the responsibility we carry. We live day by day, hour by hour, in a fragmented time that belongs neither to the past nor dares to be the future.

I wake up every day – if I even sleep at all – with my heart racing, as if something terrible is about to happen. There is no moment of safety, no feeling of peace. I try to write, to document, to explain, but sometimes I feel words betray me. I write about the people, and I am one of them. I write about fear, while fear lives inside my body. I write, but deep down, I keep asking: For how long? And why? And is anyone even listening?

I feel like my body is no longer mine. I move, I speak, I write – but everything inside me is shut down. Sleep has become a broken nightmare. I close my eyes to the sound of warplanes and wake to the pounding of my heart. I touch my face, and my limbs, just to make sure I’m still alive. Sometimes, I don’t breathe deeply – not because I don’t want to, but because I’m afraid the sound of my breath will break the silence before an explosion.

I try to appear strong because so many around me – my mother, my father, my sister – are counting on me to hold it together. Work, too, demands that I stay strong. When I meet people and listen to their stories – stories of loss, hunger, survival – I have to hold myself together, to absorb their pain and turn it into words. I can’t afford to collapse in front of them. I owe it to them to witness, to document, to speak.

But the truth? I’m writing this now with a trembling heart and shaking hands because I’m exhausted from screaming inside my head.

How do I write about this hell?

Since the war resumed, my life has lost its shape. My days have become chaotic – like the endless stream of news, like the bombing that never sleeps. I follow the ceaseless flow of events. I can barely find the time to think, or breathe, or process what’s happening around me. Everything feels disordered, and in the middle of it, I move like someone trying to grasp handfuls of sand.

What exhausts me most is the lack of water. There are days when I’m forced to go without bathing. This deprivation of the simplest form of cleanliness unsettles me. It feeds into a sense that I’m trapped in a scene that keeps repeating endlessly. Everything loops: the bombing, the hunger, the running, the fear, the news, the helplessness.

I’ve written so much. I’ve told you about what we see, what we live through, what we lose every single day. But in the end, even words exhaust me. The truth wears me down.

Every time I pick up the pen, I feel I’m carrying a weight in my chest. How do I write about this hell? How do I describe the indescribable? Sometimes, I just want silence. To shut everything off, to deny this reality, to be an ordinary person – not someone expected to carry and deliver pain.

But then I think again: If I don’t write, who will? Who will say that we are hungry? That we are thirsty? That we are being bombed, besieged, and abandoned?

Writing sometimes protects me – it gives me a voice when I feel like I’m suffocating.

But at the same time, it drains me, because it forces me to face everything I try to escape from inside myself.

I’ve written so much. I’ve told you about what we see, what we live through, what we lose every single day. But in the end, even words exhaust me. The truth wears me down. And I’m left alone with the questions that never leave me: Is it normal to be afraid to take a sip of water because it might run out? To dream of a simple meal? To long for a sound that doesn’t carry destruction?

Is it normal to endure all this pain, as if we are not even human? Who decided that Gaza must exist outside of logic, outside of mercy, outside of time? Is the goal for us to disappear? To go silent? To die slowly, without our death bothering anyone? Who understands this pain? And who can explain to us why?

Edited by Eric Reidy.

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The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.