aseelsehwel

On the 9th of October 2025, I was browsing the news, my eyes exhausted from all I had witnessed, when a headline stopped me in my tracks. It spoke of a horrific massacre that had befallen an entire family. The report was full of harsh details: the family’s name, the street, the landmark near the house that had been razed to the ground. My eyes passed over the words as if they were describing a place I didn’t know, a name that meant nothing to me, and stones I had never touched. It never once crossed my mind that this place, this name, this rubble, belonged to my friend.

And when I read the details of the victims, I was shocked further: 73 people, between martyrs, wounded, and missing. The number carved itself into my mind like a knife, but it still hadn’t connected itself to the one I loved. It was just a distant number, separate from her face, her voice, her name.

Nothing occurred to me.

Perhaps the war has forced us not to connect events, as if the mind switches off a part of itself to protect itself from collapse.

Long days passed, and my messages to her never returned. I convinced myself that her phone was broken, or that she was in an area with no service, or perhaps just exhausted. It didn’t occur to me that there was a bigger reason, and a crueler one.

And all that time, that massacre I had read about, concerning some family, held her among the martyrs. But my mind refused to grasp that truth. It kept treating the news as just another crime in the ledger of pain, one that had nothing to do with me.

A full month passed. And on an ordinary day, resembling all the days before it, the sentence that split my soul in two was spoken to me: “Your friend… and her entire family… were martyred.”

I heard the words but didn’t understand. They struck an empty vault inside my head. They faded before they could settle. I didn’t connect anything to anything. I couldn’t believe that the massacre, whose details I knew by heart, was the very crime that erased their existence, while I had believed it concerned strangers.

And forty-one days after her martyrdom, another massacre was committed in the same manner. At that precise moment, I realized the truth, as if someone had pressed a hidden button inside me. Everything came rushing to the forefront: the date, the place, the number, the street, her face.

It was as if the entire reel of my life started playing around me all at once, and I suddenly saw what I hadn’t seen before. That massacre carried their name.

And the house I hadn’t paid attention to was her house.

Oh, the heart’s regret. How did I not know? How did I read the news again and again, and my heart not recognize the place my soul knew before my eyes ever saw it?

I remember that night well. Ambulances and civil defense were prevented from reaching the place. No one was able to enter to rescue those who remained alive. And I don’t know if my friend was martyred instantly, or if she bled alone in the darkness of the house, waiting for a breath that would never come.

I hope she didn’t wake up to the pain, that she left quietly, without realizing she was fighting for her final breaths alone.

This is my story. The story of a friendship extinguished as homes are extinguished in war, And the story of an incomplete survival… I don’t know what to do with.

In Gaza, pain is not measured in tears, but in the hours a kidney patient waits for a drop of water or a flicker of electricity that never stays steady.

Here, life is not life as others know it; it is a long pause between the beeping of machines and the quiet fear that everything might suddenly stop.

In crowded hospitals, patients sit on cold metal chairs, faces pale, eyes following the nurse as if she were a faint beam of light cutting through the dark. The lights fade before treatments are complete, and clean water is scarce, heavy with salt and effort. Food suited to their condition feels like a distant dream, and bottled water, a rare treasure, demands more than one person alone can give.

Finding a specialist is like chasing a thin ray of light through a long night; only a few remain able to work amid the ruins. Those who can be reached come after a long struggle, after knocking on countless doors and waiting through days that steal from life as surely as disease steals from the body.

These people endure the unbearable, yet they smile. In the face of death, they offer life — as if it were all they had left. They share a cup of water, console one another without words, and show that unity can achieve what might seem impossible.

My father fights the battle of life itself in quiet depth — a visible fight carved into his tired body, felt in every breath he takes, as his body slowly wears under constant fatigue, and each passing day demands ongoing treatment just to keep breathing and enduring. I walk beside him along this long path of exhaustion, carrying some of this weight for him, and learning from his quiet resilience that hope does not need a voice to survive.

This is how kidney patients live in Gaza, on the edge of life, between rising pain and the scarcity of everything. And yet, they are still here: breathing despite helplessness, enduring with a quiet patience that teaches the world that humanity still lives, even when forgotten, even when suffering hides itself in the shadows.

If you are able to help, any donation can help ease my father’s daily suffering, cover his medications, and assist him in visiting the doctor for necessary tests. https://chuffed.org/project/138285-help-sehwel-family-with-their-medical-treatment

We carry our homeland in our eyes, even as we walk away from the cities that once held us. Every street we left behind still whispers our names, and every house still echoes with the voices we could not take with us.

We did not leave because we wanted to. We were forced to leave. Pushed away from our own doorsteps, from our quiet mornings, from dreams that were growing gently inside us.

We did not abandon our homeland, we are still within it. But we became displaced inside its borders, moving through its wounds, searching for a place where the heart could breathe without fear, only to find that no corner felt safe, and every space we turned to seemed empty.

In this departure we did not choose, we carried nothing but trembling bodies and heavy memory. We left keys hanging on doors, photographs waiting on walls, school notebooks open on lessons that never finished, and dreams frozen in the middle of their story.

And as we left these pieces of our lives behind, home after home fell, and the streets that once knew our laughter became narrow corridors for escape. The silence of the abandoned streets pressed down on us, reminding us of what had been lost.

The camps we were told were temporary became lasting places, weighed down by time. Our bodies found shelter there, but our hearts remained at the door of the first home… knocking, though no one answers.

And with this constant displacement, one companion stayed with us: fear. It slips into the smallest moments, in bread lines, in the quiet hours before dawn. It rides the sound of aircraft, it lives in the silence where a familiar voice once was.

And yet, despite everything, we continue. We lift one another when we fall, holding on to the light that still shines within us, and to the whisper that says: we will endure, we will continue, no matter what.

What we ask for is simple — painfully simple: A roof that does not collapse, a door that is not shattered, and a child who can sleep without knowing fear.

We are not numbers, we are not headlines, we are not a story told today and forgotten tomorrow. And we simply want to live — just live — in peace, in dignity, in the homeland we loved, and still love, despite everything.

When I heard the prisoners were to be released, a fragile pulse stirred inside me — trembling, defiant, reaching for a light I thought had been lost forever. I did not know them, yet I went. Perhaps to witness survival against the unimaginable. Perhaps simply to breathe the same air as those who had returned from the shadows.

They stood in a silence so heavy it seemed to bend the light around them. Their smiles were hesitant — like doors that had forgotten how to open. And in that moment, I realized: freedom itself can be fragile.

We who survived war thought we had endured the worst — the bombs, the hunger, the endless waiting. But their stories shattered that belief.

They spoke of nights drenched in cold water while they slept, of wrists bound until flesh gave way, of blows that dragged them into darkness, stealing consciousness itself. Days passed without food. Empty stomachs, weakened bodies, wounds left to fester.

Forced into impossible choices — lose a limb or lose life — their minds grew fragile, silent, speaking only through eyes and slow movements, haunted endlessly by echoes of torture and hunger. Days without time: no dawn, no dusk, only darkness devouring memory.

Threatened with their families’ lives, denied sleep, confined in cells so small that breathing became an act of defiance. Their eyes told stories that words could not. They had walked out, yes — yet part of them remained behind. Free, yet prisoners of memory.

I smiled at one of them. He returned it slowly, cautiously, as if relearning the language of being alive. His hands trembled as he reached for a cup of water, and in that trembling, I saw the price of freedom.

That night, sleep would not come. Their faces lingered in the dim light of my room. We are all prisoners in some way —of what we have seen, of what we have lost, of what we cannot forget.

Even in the deepest shadows, a thread survives — trembling, battered, but unyielding. From their eyes to ours flows a single truth: to hope after everything is the fiercest rebellion of all.

I live where the sound of silence is broken only by war.

The world outside my window moves on without me—laughing, learning, loving, growing—in colors I cannot touch. Here, the streets are hollow bones. The schools, silent graves. Time itself lies shattered beneath dust and rubble.

I watch others from afar—chasing dreams I cannot reach, climbing ladders I cannot touch, celebrating victories that sound like whispers from another life. They wake without fear. They plan without hesitation. They move through a world that no longer belongs to me. And I… I measure my days by the tremor of explosions, by the moments when the sky feels ready to collapse.

War steals more than homes—it swallows the ordinary: quiet mornings, free laughter, hands meeting without trembling. I walk in my mind, I learn, I love—but always slipping away, always behind glass, always elsewhere.

Every time I look outside, the ordinary becomes alien. Freedom feels like a ghost. Life moves on without me—beautiful and cruel, a language I can see but never speak. Every heartbeat reminds me that the world I once knew is gone, and I wander only in its shadow.

Every morning, the wind circles my tent like a restless ghost, tearing me from sleep. It does not whisper comfort — it screams a harsh truth: I am still here. Not by choice, but because the occupation drove us from our homes, turning them into rubble and leaving me with nothing but this cold tent for refuge.

My body is here, but my soul never left the place that once held my laughter, my silence, my peace. I miss the warmth of my home — the sunlight spilling through familiar windows, and the small joys I once took for granted: quiet mornings, fleeting smiles, the fragile moments that made life whole.

Each gust of wind reminds me of what we lost, and each night the cold carves its way into my bones, as if searching for the warmth it once knew. Yet even among the ruins of our lives, our will endures.

They took everything from us, yet our memories remain — fragments of life that still warm our hearts, and the stubborn hope we cling to until life returns once more.

I was walking down a street that had once been full of life—shops open, children laughing, neighbors chatting. Now, it was a graveyard of rubble and dust. The air was thick with smoke, stinging my eyes and filling my lungs with the taste of fire and fear. Every step stirred memories of what this place had been, and the contrast was unbearable.

Then I saw them. Children. Some missing an arm, some missing a leg, some missing both, yet their small bodies moved through the debris with a courage that seemed almost impossible. Their eyes—wide, searching—asked questions no child should ever have to ask: Why me? Why here? Will anyone see me?

A boy sat on the curb, rolling a broken toy car over the cracks. His laugh was fragile, sharp, yet it was still laughter. Nearby, a girl balanced on a fallen beam, her small feet gripping the splintered wood as if sheer will could hold the world together. The wind whispered through the shattered buildings, carrying tiny sounds: a bird fluttering, a child’s laugh, a dog’s bark—reminders that life insists on persisting.

Amid all this destruction, a heavy weight pressed on my chest—anger, helplessness, and sorrow all at once. How could the world go on as if nothing had happened while the lives of these children were unraveling? Here, innocence had been stolen, replaced by nightmares, and screams had become the language of survival.

I sat beside a boy who tried to smile at me. I couldn’t return a real smile. Tears welled in my eyes as I realized words could never reach the horrors his soul had witnessed. All I could do was place my hand gently on his shoulder and whisper, “You are not alone.”

Nearby, a little girl sat on the edge of a shattered doorway, clutching a twisted piece of metal as if it were a toy. Our eyes met for a moment, and in her gaze, I saw an entire world of stories—a world torn apart before it even began.

And yet, even here, life refused to surrender completely. Hands reached for each other. Children shared scraps of food, comforted one another, whispered small jokes that were almost like songs. The smallest gestures of care emerged from the chaos, fragile sparks of humanity in a world determined to erase it.

I walked on, carrying their faces in my mind, their courage in my soul. Even if the world looked away, I promised myself I would not. Every life, even the smallest, every cry, even the quietest, mattered. Their stories demanded to be remembered. Their laughter, their tears, their survival—proof that even in the darkest ruins, life insists on being seen, felt, and honored.