The Story of Nour Jaber, Coming to us from Gaza

I am not just a number, nor a fleeting image on a news screen

I am a girl from Gaza my life has been written through pain and loss.

But I still write. Not because I’m always strong,

But because I’ve lived long enough to know that silence kills the soul more than bombs do.

War didn’t enter my life it uprooted it.

On the first day, I had just woken up and was preparing a simple breakfast with my mother.

Then suddenly… the ground shook, we heard the missiles.

And from that moment, from the very first day of war, we left our home.

There was no longer a house.

No warmth.

Only a tent, and a memory that suffocates every time planes roar overhead.

We were displaced… again and again.

Each time, I carried a smaller bag than before,

As if I were training myself to shrink my dreams…

My little sister, the one who used to draw flowers on her bedroom walls,

Now wakes up to the sound of explosions.

She asks me, “Will we die today?”

And I… I have no answer to give her.

In the south, we endured suffering I still struggle to describe.

But when we returned to the north, to the place that was once our home,

It wasn’t a return it was another collapse.

I pitched my tent beside the ruins of our house,

As if searching for a shadow of my memories.

But rubble has no mercy.

And hunger is cruel.

I didn’t expect the place I longed for would make me weaker.

Hunger gnaws at my body.

Defeat settles inside me not from bullets, but from emptiness.

My brother goes out daily in search of food.

He heads to the so called “aid points,”

But they aren’t for help they’re for death.

I watch him risk his life.

I can’t stop him.

War made him a man.

But his heart is still a child’s.

With every step, my heart walks with him.

My prayers fill the sky with his name.

One night, he returned from a distribution point empty handed.

The hunger in our eyes spoke louder than any word.

I sat on the ground, looked up at the sky,

And asked it: Does anyone hear us?

Then I answered myself: I will make them hear…

Even if it’s only through words.

I began to write.

I never imagined my words would travel.

But I wrote everything I felt

The cold inside the tent,

My sister lowering her voice so the planes wouldn’t hear,

The hunger I couldn’t silence in my stomach,

My dream of returning to school,

Of one day writing a novel that carries my name not the name of war.

I stopped searching for happy endings,

And started searching for meaning in all this.

Why must we live through pain like this?

Why has the world remained silent for so long?

In the north, I saw a closed restaurant.

A sign above it read: “Enjoy.”

I laughed not out of humor, but with bitterness.

Enjoy what?

Destruction? Hunger? The sorrow built up in every soul?

Even joy has become a dark joke.

And yet… I am here.

I write.

I breathe through these words.

I share the photos I’ve taken at every moment,

So no one can ever say we were just “side events.”

We are history. We are truth.

And our voices will never be erased.

I still dream of studying.

Of writing.

Of seeing a campaign I once launched succeed

Of watching my sister survive this war.

Of waking up to a day where she asks, “Can we go play today?”

Not, “Will we die?”

Even if that dream is delayed,

I will not stop writing.

Nor speaking.

Nor documenting every moment.

This post is not the end.

It’s the beginning of truth-telling.

I am not a victim.

I am the narrator of the story…

And my testimony is too powerful to be forgotten.

Nour 💗

FOLLOW NOUR’s Substack Here: Nour’s Substack

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