Mohammed’s story, straight from Gaza

Mohammed is a Medical Student from Gaza. He has continued to survive two years of bombardment, like he survived the four other assaults on Gaza in the last 20 years. He is a strong, courageous, and kind person. Here is a story from Mohammed.

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We Are the Ones Who Haven’t Died… But We Are Not Alive

Gaza has nothing left but the sea. Literally… the sea not as a passage to safety, but as the last refuge for those with no shelter, a body of water over which a tent might be stretched, or where the remnants of our dreams might be hung like drying laundry.

The sea has become the final stretch of geography still open to an idea, a hope, a scream… a postponed escape.

It is now the last waiting room.

All the roads are sealed.

The borders are shackled.

The sky is torn apart by warplanes, and the ground is soaked with graves already dug.

We no longer even have a corner where we can bury our grief… for even weeping has become a luxury.

We now live in a theater of constant death a single scene repeated in painfully slow motion: A woman sobbing over her son’s corpse.

A man digging a grave with his bare fingers. A child searching for his mother under the rubble.

A father collecting the limbs of his children in a black plastic bag.

This is not fiction… this is our daily reality.

We live under an occupation that sees our deaths as security measures, and our erasure as a strategic goal. We are the ones who live with the feeling of “awaiting execution” not metaphorically, but literally.

We await an airstrike, a missile, a shell… We wait for the phone to ring with that dreadful voice: “Evacuate… your home will be bombed in five minutes.”

It’s as if we’re standing in a long, orderly line for death… waiting our turn, anxious, terrified and sometimes, numb. Have any of you ever slept in the open air after your house was bombed? Do you know how it feels to be starving for three days with no bread? Then to hear, from a Hebrew news channel, the announcement of “the full occupation of Gaza,” As if declaring the end of life itself: “We have achieved full control… the ground operations have met their goals…” As if they’re telling the Gazan who buried his loved ones with his own hands: “Prepare to have what’s left of your soul ripped out… we’re not done yet.”

But no one moves. No word. No cry. No statement of condemnation. Not even a whisper of objection in a closed diplomatic room. As if we never existed. As if this small coastal strip was never home to real people. As if our death is just a background scene in an old film that no longer stirs any emotion.

The months passed, then years, and the cycle keeps spinning. Blood, siege, bombing, destruction, funerals, starvation… then it starts again. If the killing had stopped in the first few months, maybe something could have been saved. But now? Now we live on a land unfit even for regret. Gaza today is a barren wasteland.

The scent of ash never leaves. Sad shadows wander the city’s ruins. Streets that once pulsed with life are now maps of disappearance. Homes became craters. Its people — ghosts, not human. Time in Gaza doesn’t move forward. It loops endlessly, like a broken water wheel. You ask yourself: When will it end, Gaza? Will you end before we do? Or is our end closer than yours? Many of us have lost the ability to write, to speak, even to cry. Language itself can no longer carry this weight of sorrow.

I, who once wrote to breathe, now fear the letters the phrases suspended between the line and suffocation. I no longer wish to share what is happening around me. Why? Because writing was once proof that I still wanted to live.

But now… nothing tempts me to go on. I am now a living corpse, stuck in place waiting only for the heart to stop, for the breath to break free. We’ve lived long enough to watch children grow old, Mothers wither like flowers pressed in the dark, And young people turn into broken silhouettes. Hunger broke us. Fear chained us. Oppression crushed us.

And yet… we did not die. But we’re not alive, either. We exist somewhere between a dream and nothingness, Between a life that no longer feels like life, and a death that never fully arrives. We are a people drained, crushed, exiled from our very selves. Still, we hold onto our names. We register our newborns. We count our martyrs. We sing to the camp. And we celebrate when a single truck of aid escapes the blockade. We are the ones who haven’t ended… But we do not live. We are the shadow left behind in the corners of the rubble. We write and speak not because someone is listening, But because silence terrifies us more than the bombs.

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