A ceasefire has finally come. After 15 months of relentless genocidal war, we are finally able to push a sigh of relief. Many of us were also able to return home or what left.
While we appreciate our time without a bomb, the world seems to be engaged in a fierce debate on which has won. Is Israel triumphant? Or is Hamas the one who can declare victory? Or are the heroic Palestinian people the winners?
I am a nurse, not an expert, so I have no answers to offer. But let me tell you, dear reader: the world should not be deceived by our survival. Staying alive in Gaza is not synonymous with heroism. To escape death is not a victory. We barely did it. The tens of thousands of Palestinians did not do so.
The genocidal war has closed time in a circle. There was no start or end, no destination to which we were heading. We continued to go to a circle every day, returning at the start.
Each day, each family had to go out in search of drinking water, water for washing, food and something with a fire – the bases. All of this took hours to get – if they were obtained at all. The bread – what we thought was a fact, a right – has become a struggle to find. The families lacked money. Help organizations lacked rations. At one point, even the flour infested with bugs and expired canned food have become luxury.
This circle was only broken by illness or death. People would break the routine to bury their loved ones and cry.
The outside world has seen many images and videos of the violent death of Palestinian children, women and men in the hands of the Israeli army. But they did not see the other silent and painful death of chronic patients or people infected with treatable diseases.
We had people infection to die because of the absence of antibiotics. We had people with kidney problems because at some point, dialysis was only available from time to time and only in very few medical facilities. These deaths were not added to the official assessment of the deaths of the genocide, and yet many of them were avoidable.
In the alleys of the travel camps, we would see the mourning survivors, sobbing or sitting silently. After escaping death, they would also return to the time circle.
After so many months of collective loss, oppression and desire, it seemed that there was no more room in the heart for more exhaust of death. Me, like many other Palestinians, I have become frightening, numb.
Not so long ago, we filled the land with noise, smiles and life. We had transported our big dreams and hopes in us. But we could no longer recognize ourselves. “We are not like us. We are not! We thought.
The collective suffering was so absolute, so overwhelming that it had the impression that there was no place to seek comfort, no one to say what was going on because all were in this same Dark place.
But what is funny about mass pain and mass death, dear reader is that they push you to hang on to life, despite everything – especially despite your occupant. Everything in Gaza called for your death, but you learned to make it life.
Indeed, we are no longer us, but we are not dead. New versions of us have been created to continue the fight, to live more.
In the end of time, people would still find ways to feel satisfaction or a sense of objective. I did it by volunteering as a infirmarian in a fortune clinic and making long walks in search of coffee. These are my acts of challenge, to live.
Famine has wreaked havoc, but I tried to see the other side. I have often laughed that I had finally reached the weight loss that I wanted so much and that I had never managed to reach with all the healthy foods that I had tried in the past.
I saw white invade my mother’s hair in the middle of the hard life in a tent. But we also laughed. I knew that these colors would not go. She loves colors and is the most qualified woman to submit them to agree.
After 15 months of hell, we emerged from our shelters and tents to see apocalyptic landscapes. We always have the deaths drawn under the rubble – identifiable only by a shoe or a shirt.
I look through destruction and I see us, the survivors. Death has not defeated us, not because we are heroes but because we are people who love life. Dear reader, is it hung on life a victory?
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.