Gaza’s Rubble Is the Grave of Our Future

Credit...Samaa Emad Abuallaban

Ms. Abdulfattah is a writer who lives in Gaza.

Rubble is everywhere. In Gaza, there’s more than one kind. Towers that once held dozens of families have been reduced to hills: broken slabs stacked in layers, steel bars twisted through them like exposed nerves, concrete pancaked over furniture. Sometimes, the remains of a home lean at an angle, like the Tower of Pisa. Other buildings are hollowed out from below, the lower floors erased while the upper floors hang in a crooked pause, held up by some stubborn rebar and luck. The streets narrow into corridors of debris. People walk more slowly, watching their footing, scanning for something steady before their next step.

It isn’t just the sadness of what was demolished. Seeing endless piles of concrete brings a second layer of violence — the violence of being forced to live with destruction. Rubble doesn’t just destroy the past; it erases the future. It forces your mind to stop imagining, to stop thinking, to stop dreaming about life after today.

It has been six months since the cease-fire was announced in Gaza, when the war was officially stopped. But it hasn’t stopped, not really. The Israeli airstrikes are less constant, but they still kill us — there was a drone strike that killed a man and injured a child just this week. When I talk to people abroad, they ask me if I can still hear Israeli drones at night. Once, I tried to record the buzzing as one hovered above my home, proof of the sound that has become a part of Gaza the way the sound of my own breathing is a part of me.

War, in and of itself, has become indivisible from Gaza: It’s in the landscape, in the harsh conditions that make up our days, in our bodies. Outside the strip, people speak about the future: about reconstruction, about a “new Gaza.” I’ve seen renderings that imagine it as a city like Dubai, with glittering seaside skyscrapers. But from here, it’s hard to imagine the new Gaza. The war does not feel finished. It continues to live within us. We can’t escape it.

In some places, the rubble is a grave. Amjad al-Af came to the pile of rubble next to his home last January, when the first cease-fire was announced. The 23-year-old was still injured — his leg had been crushed under concrete and some of his skin seared off from the heat of a bomb — but he wanted to use the opportunity to find his family. Or rather, the bodies of his dead family. This is how we spend cease-fires in Gaza: We clean what’s left of our destroyed homes and try to retrieve the bodies of our beloved.

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