My beloved mother, I started writing this play during the first month after your death.
I gathered my words and my pain to shed in this text, but my tears would suffocate me, and I would close the file.
I came back there two months later, then six, then at the end of the year, but I still couldn’t finish it.
Whenever I turned around, I bore new burdens, a new sorrow and new tears while war was launching into our lives, adding sorrows.
Once, I opened the file crying, between Joy and Heartbreak, with news that you had waited so long to hear: a cease-fire had been announced. But you were no longer there, and I also closed the file that day too.
Now I bring my strength to write this on the first anniversary of your death.
Eulogating our loved ones is not a choice, it is a form of conservation.
A war without your prayers
Can you imagine, mom – War stopped, only to come back with even more force?
Today in brand 570 days.
The murder, bombing and displacement do not have enough. Now people are starving.
How can I explain this, as much as I miss, I am relieved that you don’t have to see these unimaginable days?
In our family home in the north, there is only one half-bag of flour left. They keep it frightening and try to make it last. The food can be exhausted and the fight to find food is daily.
I can imagine your agony if you called us now, fearing that we will die of hunger.
Many have made hungry to death, and thousands of people are aligned in charity kitchens and community food stations. Crossings have been closed for more than two months, with food, drugs, help – all prohibited by Israel.
Mom, my tears often beat me, my fear that this war continues even more without your prayers, your constant prayers for our security and our protection, which I say every day now.
Life is difficult, and although some things can be endured, the war without the prayers of a mother seems particularly unbearable.
Mom, I went to our family home in the North. The whole house was burned, broken – except your room, your clothes, your belongings.
We have gathered them and kept them as treasures that always wear your perfume. We prioritize them in case, God does not like it, we must flee again.
Recently, I thought of your last days in the USI, how I had a hard time staying on my feet, to distract myself with work.
But it was a false escape. This is the conclusion of a year of sorrow.
Disease, displacement and loss of war
My mother died on May 7, 2024.
That morning, we woke up with images of tank the border crossing of Rafah while the Israeli assault on Rafah began. The only way to get out of Gaza was blocked; We were trapped.
Then, like a love at first sight in the middle of the darkness of this day, came the death of my mother’s death in Egypt, five months after her medical evacuation there.
We cried, for her and because we, like thousands of others, pay the price for simply existing in this besieged land.
We were refused a last farewell to the one we loved. Denied funeral, denied burial, denied condolences. Everything we could do was cry and pray.
My mother suffered from pulmonary fibrosis, a serious respiratory disease. She needed an oxygen pump, electric, which meant that any power outage putting life in danger.
Since October 7, I had the impression of living several wars. Electricity was cut at the start of the war, the generators gradually stopped working and the health system collapsed.
We moved it to Gaza City, from our family home to my brother’s house, then at my aunt.
Regardless of the implacable Israeli strikes, it needed the same thing: a place on the ground floor and a reliable source of power, such as solar panels. But just as she settled, Israeli orders would come, expeling people to the south.
So we went to my grandfather’s in Deir El-Balah, Central Gaza. We teased my father that he had made a “strategic” decision marrying someone from the south – if not, our trip would have been even more difficult.
But the bombs followed us. An expulsion prescription was made for a house next to my uncle and we ran, bearing the oxygen tank and supporting my mother.
The crises came one after the other: contaminated water that injured its kidneys, a shortage of gas to cook for it, drugs that flow, then we lacked electricity for its oxygen pump.
She had trouble crossing the nights when the electricity was out, trying to breathe until the sun was rising and the solar panels could work.
The oxygen tank became that of my brother and my daily companion – we took it to the Al -Aqsa hospital to fill up to the announcement of the hospital that it had no fuel and could no longer use its oxygen stations.
The only solution was that mom left Gaza via patient travel lists – anyway possible.
We did everything to get her name on the list, with my sister Mayar as a companion, and miraculously, it worked and she left on December 6, 2023 – in an ambulance with a license to cross the border.
I said goodbye to my mother, and it was the last time I saw her. I cried that day, when the ambulance was walking away, worrying that it was the last time.
We did not know that the disease was not his greatest enemy – it was fear and psychological torment caused by war.
In each call after reaching Egypt, his face and voice were pale and trembling, the result of countless unsuccessful attempts to reach us due to network failures that lasted days.
We tried to tell him not to worry, that we were alive.
But asking a mother to ignore her overwhelming fear for her children and grandchildren living through the genocide. She spent her days glued to the news, toasting my sister for the news, in particular about Deir El-Balah.
For her, I sneaned on the roof of the hospital to get a network on my ESIM, hide behind barrels of water near the dangerous eastern border, and send a message to my sister: “We are ok. Tell mom that we are well.”
And his voice would come back like a lifeline in a noyal soul, thanking God and begging us to pay attention.
She told me not to go to the hospital, not to put myself in danger.
We have traveled long distances to connect to the internet near a hill by the sea, moving to the left and right to catch a just signal to send the same message: “We are ok, Mom. Don’t worry.”
We sent him photos, and when the signal was strong enough, we made vocal calls.
But the world around my mother in Egypt has moved in one direction, while she moved to another – her heart, her spirit and her soul always here with us.
Survival soaked with fear
It was not the disease that killed my mother, it was the sorrow, the distance and the concern that exhausted her and stole his will to live.
My mother died with a single wish in her heart: that war would end, and she would see us again, alive and safe. But death was closer than this wish impossible.
Mom, in a few months, the war will enter her second year, and she is only becoming more brutal.
The days have become heavier in your absence.
Every day, I was in front of the victims’ bodies in the hospital, looking at people to break down to the news of the death of their loved ones. I looked at their tears, their cries, their last farewells.
Sometimes I envied them, they at least had to say goodbye, while my heart was crying for them and with them.
Mom, we, tormented in this country, are in a free death festival for all.
Mom yesterday, they bombed a school full of displaced people. In a moment, they killed more than 30 people.
The world has accustomed to our mass death on live broadcasting. But who said we used to it?
Mom, there is no rest, not today, and not in those to come.
How can we continue to live when we die slowly? The only thing that comforts us is that those who left are finally at peace.
This death, as cruel as it is, is more merciful.
Mercy to your soul.
And patience to our hearts.
Sleep in peace, in comfort and security.