Why I won't stop telling Gaza's story | Media

I already recognized an expression – the way a kid's eyes widen when he sees me, wearing a reporter's vest and holding a microphone. This is not curiosity. This is hope. A fragile and desperate hope that maybe I carry answers I don't have.

“When will this end?” a boy once asked me, tugging on my sleeve as I photographed near his home. He couldn't have been more than five years old, and his feet were bare and covered in dust.

His friends gathered around him and looked at me as if I held the secret key to the future. “When can we go home?”

I don't know what to say. I never do that. Because, like them, I am also displaced. Like them, I don't know when or if this war will end. But in their eyes, I was someone who might know. Someone who can change something just by holding a camera.

So they just clung to me. They followed me through ruins and broken streets, asking questions I couldn't answer. Sometimes, they say nothing. They just walked quietly beside me, as if my presence was enough to fill the silence left by the war.

I’ve lost count of the number of times my mother has pulled me aside after an interview, held my hand tightly, and whispered, “Please…can you help us?” Their voices trembled, not with anger. , but because of fatigue – the kind of fatigue that goes deep into the bone marrow and never goes away.

They don't ask for much. Cover yourself with extra blankets. Soap. Give their children medicine. I stood there, camera still rolling, nodding, trying to explain that I was here to tell their story, not to provide aid. But what kind of story is that to a new mother who doesn’t even own a mattress, let alone her newborn?

I relive these moments every time I sit down to write. They replayed in my mind like echoes—every face, every voice. Every word I put down on paper, I wonder if it will have an impact. I wonder if people who read my words and see my reporting will understand that behind the politics and headlines, there is something like this: a woman washing her baby's clothes in sewage, a boy rummaging through the trash. Sell, a girl misses school because she can't afford sanitary napkins.

I'm not involved in politics. I don't need to. War speaks for itself down to the smallest details.

It sits at the foot of the clutter under the tent, where the family's shared space is too small to breathe. This is the way children cough at night, their chests feeling heavy from the dampness and cold. The fathers stood on the beach, staring into the sea as if the waves would carry away their burdens.

There's a sadness here that doesn't scream. It is gentle and persistent, lingering in every corner of life.

One day while reporting near a group of neglected tents, a girl handed me a drawing she had made on the back of an old cereal box. The drawings were simple – flowers and birds – but in the middle she painted a house, complete and untouched. “This is my house,” she told me. “forward.”

forward.

This word has such power in Gaza. before the air hits. before displacement. Before the war, everything was stripped away except survival.

I write these stories not because I believe they will end the war, but because they prove our existence. Even in the face of everything, we still hold on to something. dignity. Elasticity. hope.

There is a scene that I often think back to. A woman stood at the door of the shelter, combing her fingers through her daughter's hair because she couldn't afford a comb. She hummed a lullaby softly, drowning out the horrific sounds of close air strikes and distant shelling. Her daughter leaned against her, eyes half-closed, safe for now.

I don’t know what peace looks like, but I guess that’s what it feels like.

This is the Gaza I know. This is the Gaza I write about. No matter how many times I tell these stories, I will continue to tell 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 will 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 the editorial position of Al Jazeera.