Abdullah Hany Daher
Jewish Currents / January 22, 2026
In Gaza, rain once meant renewal. Now it is only a reminder of the slow violence we are living under.
Once we waited eagerly for rain—and when it came, we opened our windows without fear. Rain meant land, growth. It promised renewal. We spoke of it as something generous.
Now, when we hear that rain is coming, we do not even look up. We look at the ground, at the tent, at the night, which is preparing itself to be long.
My father listens to the forecast, and we begin calculating who will sleep, who will stay awake. Whether the tent will hold against the wind. Whether the stakes will loosen. We arrange our worries as if order might give us control, but when the rain arrives, it is indifferent to our preparations.
Once it starts, the water rises quickly—subtly at first, then spectacularly. We stand still. It reaches our knees. What should I do? I ask myself. Laugh? Cry? Sit down? The rain overtakes sense. The body freezes before the mind has time to decide.
Around you: A family huddled together, seeking shelter inside a space too small for fear. Someone trying to save blankets. Someone lifting a child from the ground. A child who cannot sleep. A child in wet clothes. A child who does not understand why this sound, once calming, now signals danger.
Gentle rain—a story we used to tell. I think of the child who never heard it.
I tell myself that this will pass. That it is one night. That morning will come. But another voice inside me asks whether it really will. Once, the two voices argued. Now they are too tired for that. They press me from each side, and I am suspended between the commitment to endurance stoked by the promise of a better tomorrow and the resigned feeling of doubt. I try, and fail, to understand what we are facing. Understanding requires energy we no longer have.
On rainy nights, I watch my father. His silence feels heavier than the rain. I wonder how many times he reminds himself to remain steady, how often he contends quietly with failure, then, just as quietly, begins again.
After a harsh storm some time ago, I called my aunt to ask how things were. She laughed before I could finish the question. Her husband and son had spent the night holding down the tent stakes so their paltry protection would not fly away. She tried to make it sound light, almost absurd, something we could laugh about. But the joke abruptly yielded to memory’s true texture. Then she cried.
The storm winds carry questions with no answers. Houses that survived months of bombing, walls that withstood nights of explosions, fall without warning. The destruction the bombs failed to cause, the long aftermath often completes. People die because the wind decides a house is no longer a shelter. In Gaza, danger is no longer an event but a condition.
When, for a moment, things calm, we feel uneasy. As if it is temporary by nature. As if calm is undeserved. Silence feels suspicious. Dry earth feels borrowed. We feel something like guilt. We do not ask for much: a night that passes, ground that holds, morning that does not begin with counting losses.
Morning always comes. It offers not relief, but continuation. After the rain, we dry what we can. We check on each other without asking questions that might break us open. We stand up. We gather what remains.
Abdullah Hany Daher is a Palestinian writer and journalist from Gaza; he documents the human stories of war, aiming to preserve voices that the rubble cannot silence
