Long before hunger lays claim to the body, it loosens the scaffolding of language, erasing clarity, dismantling rhythm, and leaving behind the fragile debris of thought. What begins as a coherent paragraph soon dissolves into fragments, until all that remains is the involuntary tremor of a mind too starved to hold meaning. And so, before my language deserts me entirely, I write this, less to be understood than to remain traceable, to leave behind the shape of thought before it slips into silence...
Living in Gaza now requires a choreography of absence. We don’t walk; we drift. We don’t eat; we search. We don’t sleep; we remain alert, ears tuned to the sound that will send us running. Survival is a ritual of adaptation in a world that offers none. And yet, in the midst of these broken routines, I still encounter moments that remind me of our stubborn humanity. A woman tears her last piece of flatbread in half and offers it to her neighbor. A child draws bright flowers on a wall blackened by fire and soot. A grandmother recites Al-Fatiha over boiling water, though she knows there is nothing to add to it. These gestures are not illusions. They are acts of resistance. In a place where institutions and systems have collapsed, it is the human gesture—freely given—that preserves the sacred...
Hunger reveals truths no one seeks. It strips away every comforting illusion and shows what remains when there is nothing left to lose. I have learned that dignity is not a possession, but a practice—it emerges in the way one endures, not in what one owns. I have come to understand that memory, too, is a form of defiance. To name one’s pain, to record it faithfully, is to refuse erasure. I do not seek pity. Pity flattens. It turns Gaza into an object, a cautionary tale, a headline too often repeated to provoke response. What I seek—what I insist upon—is remembrance. Not simply of the hunger, but of the minds it has clouded, the hands that tremble over a final cup of tea, the eyes that scan the sky not for stars but for signs of fire...
And when the world finally turns the page—if it ever does—let it not say that Gaza was silent. Let it not imagine we vanished without speaking. We spoke with mouths filled with dust. We sang, even with broken teeth. We prayed from fractured knees. And though the world may have looked away, let this much be remembered: we named the hunger. We bore it. We endured. Let that remain.
~ from Arablit.org July 23, 2025
