From childhood to adulthood, Refaat Ibrahim recounts a life marked by repeated war, displacement and loss – a personal testimony of a generation growing up under siege in Gaza.

The war in Gaza is not merely the one that began in 2023, but an unending policy of suffering that Palestinians have endured for 77 years under Israeli occupation and its crimes. I have lived this suffering since I was born on March 21, 2001. Today, I turn 25, having witnessed five wars and dozens of military escalations.

These wars were not passing events. They shaped the course of my life and carved the contours of my inner world, not only for me but for entire generations of Palestinians.

In 2008, at the age of seven, I lived through my first of these bitter experiences during a war that lasted 21 days. It was my first experience of displacement. Yet the moment that remains most vivid in the memory of that child I once was is the sight of a helicopter raining bullets over our land planted with roses. In that moment, my young mind could not comprehend the crime.

What had our flowers done to deserve being killed by gunfire? I took shelter behind the root of a massive olive tree, following my uncle’s advice as he tended the roses, as though that tree were my only refuge in a world beginning to lose its sanity.

That was only the beginning of a life in which death became a constant shadow. In the second war in 2012, I once again tasted the bitterness of displacement and........

© Pearls and Irritations