Reem A. Hamadaqa
Mondoweiss / February 2, 2025
Many of us are returning to northern Gaza, gasping for life. We have no choice but to stand up and recover. But what does this mean for our martyrs? Will they go back home too?
I went to sleep on the night of October 6, 2023 thinking about the long day I would have the next day. I was planning to teach my eighth-grade students the grammar rule ‘used to’ so that they could describe stuff they used to do in the past, but do no longer more. After that I would have to run to my three-hour lecture to present my presentation about ‘translating dialects’ that I had been awake the whole night preparing. The main question I was going to speak about was the distinction between the translatable and the untranslatable, or what to keep and what not.
Of course, I did not give either presentation.
It feels like I went to sleep on October 6 and woke up on the morning of January 19, 2025, the day the ceasefire was announced. I am suddenly back in life these tiring 466 days, full of killing, starving, and displacing Gazan people.
It seemed those days would never come to an end. “After the war ends, I will do so and so;” “If the war ends, I promise I’ll …” These were my family’s slogans the whole time we managed to ‘survive.’ It ended. Yet after uprooting my parents, siblings, and relatives. It came to an end, though.
In the war’s first days, countless displaced relatives and friends started popping up at our house in Gaza City. One family after another arrived due to the barbaric explosions. Seven kids, six women, and ten men were in our house, and the numbers grew by the day. My 80-year-old grandma ran under the rockets and bombs. Another hajja. We slept on the floor: three families, many children, and scared faces. Another five kids, scared. Dozens of children and women.
Each day, Gazans received Israeli warnings to leave their houses, and empty their neighbourhoods. Brutal bombarding forced people to evacuate under rockets and sheer fear. We resisted for 40 days, experiencing every single type of bomb, rocket, missile, tank, and other weapons we didn’t even know. Every war has felt like our first experience with one, but surviving this one was really an impossible mission.
‘Eat less, drink less,’ were tips we had to follow. No drinking water. No bathrooms. No laundry. We somehow got used to electricity cuts; rockets might light the sky for seconds. It seemed that there were many aspects of life that became “used to.” My students could have spent days using everyday examples to apply their new grammar rule.
But we did not get used to it. We were obliged to leave our houses, to leave our city. Frightened, we were besieged at a UNRWA school by the Israeli tanks and bulldozers. Tired, we walked for six hours the whole way from Gaza to Al-Nuseirat camp, facing the sun heat, and the soldiers. Humiliated, we started an endless journey of displacement.
My family has unknowingly slept its very last night at our house. My mother baked us bread and Manaqeesh, prepared us breakfast for the last time. My sisters tidied up their room for the last time. The Israeli tanks surrounded the neighbourhood. Amid the sounds of explosions and the smell of gunpowder, my father opened the windows a little bit so that they might not break from the bombings, and closed our house’s door, for the last time. He made sure all were safe. He bid his house a last farewell, unknowingly.
Abu Muhammad, who lived in the opposite house, did the same thing, closing the door and assuring his family was safe. Abu Mahmoud, our other neighbour, needed kidney dialysis for weeks, but could not receive it because the hospitals were already surrounded by tanks and bulldozers and soldiers, and the roads monitored by military airplanes and bombs. He made sure his family was OK and closed his house door as well. For a last time.
We were displaced. And now you can imagine how much stuff a frightened displaced person could take out of her/his house? One bag. We have been cold, afraid, displaced, and hungry since November 2023.
Breaking news constantly reported stories of residential homes being bombed on top of the heads of its residents. Families we knew. All gone under the rubble. Our turn came, too. In a supposed ‘safe’ zone in the South, designated as ‘safe’ by Israel, we were killed. My family’s tragic and untimely death was the result of not ceasing fire earlier.
Israel kept shedding more and more of the Palestinian blood, slaughtering more fathers and mothers, and killing more children. It killed my whole family. The family with whom I left Gaza City for a ‘safer’ place, as Israel demanded, was slaughtered. Fourteen people, my sister’s babies, my mother, my father, my sisters, and my grandma: two children, seven women, and five men were killed. Israel kills Palestinians no matter what age or gender. It does not matter at all if they were a fighter or not.
Abu Muhammad, his wife, and their eldest son were killed, too. In the ‘safe’ south, they were killed. Again, Israel sheds the Palestinian blood, no matter what. Wouldn’t their lives have been saved if the fire was ceased earlier? They left four daughters and three sons fighting life alone. Abu Mahmoud died, too, from his illness, needing a medical treatment he could not get. But what if the fire was ceased long ago? Long ago before our forced displacement, long ago before our killing, long ago before our slaughter?
Our parents and our neighbours were not allowed to die in their houses, in their beds. And their houses which magically survived endless massive bombarding will not be welcoming back its residents. Some neighbours, like mine, were tragically killed, leaving behind ‘sole survivors’ in their families with physical and psychological wounds and pains of loss. Others were killed in their houses, or due to bombarding in the neighbourhood. Others were kidnapped at the checkpoint, and haven’t been seen since, leaving behind families, loved ones, and kids.
Living in shattered tents, summer and winter, we hardly found food and water. Scorched by the sun and drowned by the rain, we experienced heat and flies and coldness. All our possessions and blankets were soaked by rain, and our kids were sick, cold, and hungry. People in the tents yearned for a ceasefire agreement for too long. Each evening, they started screaming and rejoicing, hoping to stop this genocide. The morning of January 19, 2025, was the unfulfilled dream for tens of thousands of martyrs. Now it is time for Palestinian families to reunite with their beloveds in Northern Gaza.
My childhood friends and I will be coming back home, parentless with shattered souls. We evacuated seeking safety but will come back all alone, looking for shattered memories.
But those of us who lost our families will still meet our loved ones, our homeland, our houses, and our neighbourhoods where we were raised. We will love them even more, and feel a tie to land even more.
But now I don’t think I could return and present my ideas for my presentation on translation. We have been screaming our lungs out for 466 days and nights. Now I do not know what is translatable and what is not. Or what we shall keep and what we shall not.
In my presentation I wanted to use the translation of dialects to explore the nuance of language and how cultures and identities intertwine. Yet, the genocide imposed on my people in Gaza has shattered all my interpretations. Our stories were left unheard, and the world failed to translate our cries into action. Language should have united the world in response, but instead, we went unheard. We shouted. We hoped. We prayed. We tweeted, wrote, and sang. The problem was no longer language. Gaza’s suffering revealed a world that simply was not listening.
Alaa, my nephew, took his first steps at our house and left Gaza City when he was ten months old. As his father started talking about the house we left behind, his room, and his toys, the little boy stood up and firmly told his dad, “Daddy, stand up, let’s go now!”
We are going back, gasping for life. Recovering and standing up again are our only choices. Until our lives matter, until the Palestine cause matters, we will continue our struggle. But when will our martyrs go back home?
Reem A. Hamadaqa is translator and writer in Gaza
