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When I left Gaza in 2024, after six months of living through genocide, I wanted one thing above all else: to spare my only child a life spent permanently at war. I did not want him to grow up believing that the whole world looked like Gaza.

But I left more than fifteen nieces and nephews behind. Many were still too young to understand the world they had been born into. They were learning what a home was, what a school was, what it meant to be alive, at the very moment those things were being destroyed around them.

I spent the next year and a half in Cairo. It took me a long time to learn how to inhabit ordinary life again. Whenever I saw a garden, a playground, a school, or children playing freely and safely in the street, I could not simply enjoy the sight. Gaza was always there, beneath it.

A garden brought back the rubble. A school brought back the children who no longer had one. Even safety became a reminder of those still denied it.

There was a comparison I could not stop making: why could children elsewhere grow up among their families and the people who loved them, while Gaza’s children remained trapped in this unending cycle of occupation, bombardment, destruction, genocide, and hunger? How could a child starve to death in a world with so much food?

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I kept thinking about the children whose first understanding of life was taking shape inside the genocide. My niece, Elaf, was a year and a half old when I left. She was still at the beginning of everything.

Then her life changed entirely. A tent became her home. Missiles and bombs became the sounds she fell asleep to. Rubble shaped the landscape through which she was learning to see the world, and daily death shaped her first knowledge of life.

What could she know of the world beyond Gaza’s walls? What reason did she have to imagine that elsewhere, children slept without bombardment, lived in homes that stood, and went to schools built to shelter them?

I feared she would grow up believing that life in Gaza was simply life.

At first, I thought this was a danger facing mainly the youngest children: those born during the genocide, or too young to remember anything before it. But children who were two or three when it began, and are now five or six, are also learning to see the world as rubble upon rubble.

I hear it in their questions.

During a video........

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