Um Fadi writes to me from Gaza at night. All winter long, even in the hardest moments, her tone remained calm, never desperate. There were no diapers; without clean water she couldn’t wash Lana, who got sores and nasty infections on her newborn skin. In just a few months, she and her daughters were displaced ten times; Monday night was the eleventh.

I met her son and husband in hospital. The son, Fadi, suffers from an unidentified neurological disease, thought to stem from a genetic mutation after phosphorus bombs were dropped on Gaza while his mother was pregnant. He has never met his baby sister; he and his father were in Egypt on October 7 and have been unable to return to Gaza. Um Fadi and her little ones have wandered around Gaza for months. Once she sent me a video of Lana from when she had just been born, from her old home. The infant lay on the double bed, with the wardrobe mirror behind her and a 1930s-style door with a brass handle, soft light drifting in from the hallway: a real home, tidy and clean, the sort of peaceful place where one could raise children. Of all the images, that one brought the most pain.

The first time we spoke, this winter, she was living in a makeshift tent of blankets and plastic. When it rained, mud flowed everywhere, digging up canals where debris gathered. Later they fled again, sheltering in the ruins of a shattered house. She sent clips of the girls sitting amid piles of rubble under a sky that seemed itself covered in gray........

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