There is a look I have come to recognise – the way a child’s eyes widen when they see me, wearing a press vest and holding the microphone. It is not curiosity. It is hope. A fragile, desperate hope that maybe I carry answers I do not have.
“When will this end?” a boy once asked me, tugging at my sleeve as I filmed near his shelter. He could not have been older than five, his feet bare and caked with dust.
His friends gathered around him, watching me as if I held some secret key to the future. “When can we go home?”
I did not know what to say. I never do. Because, like them, I am displaced. Like them, I do not know when or if this war will ever end. But in their eyes, I am someone who might know. Someone who, by simply being there with a camera, could change something.
And so they cling to me. They follow me through rubble and across broken streets, asking questions I cannot answer. Sometimes, they do not say anything at all. They just walk alongside me, quietly, as if my presence alone is enough to fill the silence that war has left behind.
I cannot count how many times a mother has pulled me aside after an interview, held my hand tightly and whispered, “Please … can you help us?” Their voices tremble not with anger, but exhaustion – the kind of exhaustion that sinks into your bones and never leaves.
They do not ask for much. A few more blankets. Soap. Medicine for their children. And I stand there, my camera still rolling, nodding, trying to explain that I am here to tell their stories, not to deliver aid. But what is a story to a new mother who does not even have a mattress to sleep on, let alone to her newborn?
I relive these moments every time I sit down to write. They replay in my mind like echoes – every face, every voice. And with each word I put on the page, I wonder if it will make a difference. I wonder if the people who read my words, who watch my reports, will understand that beneath the politics and the headlines, there is this: a woman washing her infant’s clothes in sewage water, a boy picking through rubbish to find something to sell, a girl missing school because she cannot afford sanitary pads.
I do not cover politics. I do not need to. The war speaks for itself in the smallest of details.
It is in the tangle of feet beneath tents, where families share spaces too small to breathe. It is in the way children cough at night, their chests heavy from the damp and the cold. It is in the sight of fathers standing by the sea, staring out as if the waves might carry away their burdens.
There is a kind of grief here that does not scream. It lingers, soft and persistent, in every corner of life.
One day, while reporting near a neglected group of tents, a girl handed me a drawing she had made on the back of an old cereal box. It was simple – flowers and birds – but in the middle, she had drawn a house, whole and untouched. “This is my house,” she told me. “Before.”
Before.
That word carries so much weight in Gaza. Before the air strikes. Before the displacement. Before war stripped away everything but survival.
I write these stories not because I believe they will end the war, but because they are proof that we existed. That even in the face of everything, we held on to something. Dignity. Resilience. Hope.
There is a scene I return to often. A woman standing at the entrance of her shelter, brushing her daughter’s hair with her fingers because she cannot afford a comb. She hums softly a lullaby that drowns out the horrific sound of close air strikes and distant shelling. Her daughter leans into her, eyes half-closed, safe for just a moment.
I do not know what peace looks like, but I think it might feel like that.
This is the Gaza I know. This is the Gaza I write about. And no matter how many times I tell these stories, I will keep telling them, because they matter. Because, one day, I hope that when a child asks me when the war will end, I can finally give them the answer they have been waiting for.
Until then, I carry their voices with me, and I will make sure the world hears them.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
