Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

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We are about to close out three years and enter another since Israel invaded Gaza, but we are not leaving the war behind to begin a new life. We are entering yet another year without knowing when this war will end — or whether it will end at all.

The fear remains. The destruction remains. The threats remain. It feels as though each passing year does not bring us closer to an end, but closer to the possibility of another war.

Despite everything we are living through in Gaza, we understand what it means to live one day at a time — to hold on to every simple moment we can still have. Imagine planning for another morning, perhaps for the simplest of things: going out with the friends you still have, or taking your family to the sea in the morning, amid all this destruction, simply to experience a moment that feels like life.

Then, as you are planning that ordinary morning, you hear a statement from Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, who said on September 22: “If even one Israeli soldier or civilian is abducted, the city of Gaza — with its homes and terrorist towers — will be evacuated southward of its one million residents.”

Words like these are enough not only to disrupt your day, but to shake your entire future. The first question we asked ourselves was: Where would we go? Is there anywhere left for us to go?

3 Years Ago My Family Harvested Olives, Not Knowing It Would Be the Last Time

“Everyone is talking about how the possibility of an Israeli soldier being captured has become impossible, that it will not happen, and that it could be an excuse to provoke people in Gaza and pave the way for the war to return,” Haneen Salem, a photographer in Gaza City, told me. “I am certain something will happen. No one knows what, but there is a shadow of fear hanging over Gaza’s civilians.”

Even my father said, “Expect it to happen at any moment,” warning that we could be forcibly displaced yet again, especially because we are living through another difficult period in Gaza. The intensity of Israeli bombardment had increased in the weeks leading up to Katz’s statement, and warplanes had not stopped flying overhead at night.

Words like these are enough not only to disrupt your day, but to shake your........

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