Missing Title

Othman Hussein

Was Gaza a stable place over the past two decades before the nakba, the catastrophe, of October 2023?

What’s different about this war—this genocide—is that it is approaching its third year and has not stopped for a single day. It has reduced entire cities of ours, such as Rafah, to rubble. Massive numbers of people have been wounded or killed; many are still missing. The number of casualties of this insane war remains unknown, but at the time of writing it has exceeded 200,000 people.

The word ‘death’ and its derivatives have become a part of everyday language, the most common words used by people in Gaza. The repercussions of all this death are now what gives life meaning, what makes life real. Our entire society is haunted by these details.

In every conversation between two people, death joins in as the third interlocutor. The word death, or some variation of it, is present in every sentence uttered by the two. 

The gruesomeness of the situation does not give us the time and space needed for contemplation, for crafting a composed, aesthetic text. And yet we have no choice but to try to rise—however slightly—above the ugliness of the world and the atrocities that have been inflicted on us.

Even sounds have become a part of this cultural fabric. The buzzing of drones has become implanted in our minds. ِEvery so often it swells to a brazen roar, and a moment later I hear the sound of a distant warplane. A missile streaks across, lighting up the darkness for a flash; and then, in the unseen background of this scene, we hear the noise of a massive explosion that sets the sky ablaze and releases an enormous cloud of dust. 

The buzzing of surveillance drones can be heard around the clock. This has become the permanent soundtrack to our lives, along with the sound of missiles and explosions. They have not gone quiet in all these years. They would become almost routine, if not for their sheer intensity and brutality, their presence in our immediate vicinity.

And yet, despite the harsh circumstances and devastating traumas, we continue to adapt to new developments, to the constant state of emergency that daily life has become. We have developed our capacity to withstand pain, to continually find our way back to some semblance of inner balance.

Listening to the sounds of explosions without having a huge reaction, for example, is an attempt to shield ourselves from anxiety and distress.

On top of all that, constant displacement comes along to rob us of the last of our humanity. Displacement means moving on foot in harsh climate conditions with the little luggage we have left, carrying our children and supporting the elderly, while encountering corpses all along the road and trying to avert our eyes.

To be displaced from your city to the unknown is a brutal, painful experience; even more difficult is to be displaced from one unknown to another. You put your luggage down on a patch of bare earth, less than nine square meters, squeezed in between two tents, among the sea of tents that fills the hills of al-Mawasi along the coast of Rafah and Khan Younis.

I spent the rest of the night with my children in a makeshift structure that resembled a tent. We put our rags down and prepared a space that could contain our chaos and our uncertainty. I was back at Bareej Camp. 

One morning, I headed out to the market in the camp to buy some things. It was crowded in the early hours. Suddenly, the entire place exploded. Dust turned day into night. I couldn’t see or hear anything. Everything happened in an instant; the poet Imru al-Qays used the word ‘ma‘an’ to describe this—simultaneously—as he compared the speed of his horse to a rock dropped from a great height.

Everything was ablaze. The flames illuminated the scene and through the haze I could see corpses. Some were still intact, others in pieces; the place heaved with screaming and blood. Time had come to a standstill. The cloud of dust began to dissipate and I saw children without heads, limbs without bodies, featureless remains. I was alive, but I had no idea how.

And because I had survived, I had to help transport the wounded.

I returned to my family streaked with blood and mud. They said thank God for my safety. But in the next moment, the phone rang and I received news that my niece had been martyred while nursing her daughter in a tent. Twenty women and a child, murdered by tank shells in Mawasi Rafah. Their tents were burned down, their bodies blown to pieces. Besan, my brother’s daughter, was among those killed. But what astonished everyone was that her child, less than a year old, was cradled in her mother’s arms and survived without a scratch.

The day never ends. Death strikes over and over again; all the events play out in the same grim patterns; the hours stretch on, losing all meaning.

Displacement leads to a tent, and the tent is always wedged in between two others. The inhabitants of these tents have lost all sense of privacy, and some aspect of their humanity has been lost with it.

The tent is my home, and my neighbors live with me, but in their own tents. The tents are our temporary homes and are open to one another. There are no secrets between their inhabitants. When I have a drink of water, my neighbor in the next tent calls out, “Sahtein! Enjoy!” When my daughter calls me and I don’t respond, I hear my neighbor from two tents down yelling: “Answer the girl!” Even intimate relations between a married couple or lovers happens within our earshot. There’s nothing we can do about it; we’re not trying to listen on purpose. Life has imposed things on us that modern societies have never experienced before. 

Human experience in the Gaza Strip has become a unique paradigm of the ways in which life is created and meaning constructed under extremely exceptional, protracted circumstances. Daily life is no longer a set of marginal details; it has been transformed into an ongoing existential act of resistance, through which the individual must constantly redefine themselves, their time, and their environment.

Gazan society has been completely dismantled and crammed into settlements living in tents: 80% of the people of Gaza are now living in this way. The amalgam of people thrust into these perilous and relentless conditions is trying to recreate some kind of social fabric, but according to a new vision dictated by the realities of the current situation, under the pressure of all this historical, political, and social upheaval. The people of Gaza are resisting everyday, fighting for survival. It requires enormous life force to try to overcome these unnatural conditions with natural means.

Narrative approaches reflect the details of daily life: not just describing reality but contributing to a reconstruction of it by deconstructing the relationship between the individual and their shapeshifting reality. Narrative here becomes a tool for meaning production; small details are recalled as a form of silent resistance in the face of disintegration and uncertainty. Daily life is no longer marginal; it becomes a center in which strategies of adaptation and reconfiguration are manifested.

In these exceptional circumstances, meaning is reconstructed through intricate and complex processes, as individuals reorganize their relationship with time, memory, and the body. Time has lost its usual course, and is transformed into a state of limbo between war and not-war, where the present coexists with the simultaneous possibilities of rupture and continuity. Memory becomes a tool with a dual purpose: it preserves what was and reinterprets it in a way that supports the capacity to persevere. Meanwhile, the body—as a site of experience—withstands the burdens of exhaustion and anxiety, and becomes a focus of the daily narrative of suffering and sumud, forebearance.

The current moment—a moment that is suspended—reveals a constant tension between stability and change. It cannot be reduced to the binary of war and peace, but must be understood as an intermediate state in which the forms of life and meaning are constantly reconfigured. Every detail becomes an act that carries a depth of nuances, reflecting the quest of individuals to reclaim some measure of control over a volatile reality.

Understanding daily life in Gaza thus requires moving beyond descriptive approaches and towards a critical reading that reveals the dynamics of meaning production under pressure, wherein the individual self intersects with social and political structures. Daily life here is not just a reflection of reality, but an ongoing process of reshaping it, redefining the meaning of existence under exceptional circumstances.

Translated from the Arabic by Wiam El-Tamami