-
One Year Away From Home
In just two weeks, it will be a full year since I left behind everything I once called home—my family, my friends, my camp, the streets that carried my memories, and my entire world. A world I belonged to. A world I helped build, piece by piece.
Leaving wasn’t a simple choice. It was one of those decisions that breaks something inside you. To pull up the roots of your life and step into the unknown, not for adventure or opportunity, but in search of refuge. In search of something so basic—safety. A life where my children could grow without fear. A place where we could exist without being hunted. A place where life would be valued.
I left behind the home my husband and I built stone by stone. We poured our love into it, our dreams, our late nights, and the early mornings. I left behind our olive trees, the palms that swayed in the afternoon sun, the tiny flowers I tended to with care—watching them bloom made me feel, in some small way, that life was still beautiful.
I left behind my work, the rhythm of my days, my extended family, the warmth of their presence, the sound of their laughter echoing through our gatherings. I left behind my memories. My roots —the things that shaped who I am.
Nearly a year has passed, and still I hold onto a thread of hope—that this relentless haunting of my people will end. That the destruction will stop. That the buildings, the hospitals, the schools, and the streets where memories once lived won’t continue to be reduced to rubble or erased.
But nothing has changed.
The killing continues. The devastation spreads. And life, for us, remains suspended in a kind of meaninglessness that words can’t capture.
What breaks me most is not just what we’ve lost but who.
So many lives have been stolen—entire families wiped out in a glimpse of an eye. Children who once dreamed of becoming doctors, teachers, artists—now buried under the same soil they played on. Their dreams were silenced before they even had the chance to begin. Their laughter replaced by sirens and silence. Their futures, erased.
And for those who remain, it was not easy, starvation has become a daily terror. Parents watching their children cry from hunger, unable to offer anything but prayers. Mothers skipping meals to feed their little ones. People lining up for hours, hoping for a piece of bread, a drop of clean water, some proof that the world still sees us.
During previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, I used to write—words of hope, of thirst, of the quiet dreams of everyday people who only wanted to raise their children in peace. To watch them grow. To live a normal life.
But nothing is normal in Gaza anymore. In fact, it’s the farthest thing from it.
I still find myself wondering—when will Palestinian lives matter? When will we be seen, not as statistics or threats, but as human beings with hearts that break, with dreams that deserve to live?
When the free world will wake up, and when our voices will be heard loudly to make people act and stopped this hearted.
