There are many truths in Gaza that have been buried, and stories told to cover the deepest wounds. The things we women in Gaza do not say, but that have lived within us throughout these two years of relentless loss – because we had to focus only on surviving.
What the world calls “resilience” is less a virtue than a mask that spares outsiders from confronting the unbearable.
The women of Gaza never claimed that they were stronger than their burdens. It was the world that said that, weaving ready-made tales of our courage. What has gone unsaid in this narrative, however, is that patience is not a choice but a trap. Survival is not always heroism. It is a fractured existence, punctured by loss and betrayal.
We do not have the privilege of being “just women.” During war, each of us becomes a factory of life, and a daily shield against absence and death.
I live both faces of this city. One insists on life: I carefully arrange my clothes, spray my favourite perfume, as if heading to a celebration. The other steps out of a broken home into a world that looks unrecognisable.
When I walk through Gaza’s streets, my body absorbs the surrounding heaviness. The smell comes first: smoke, sewage, salt, and gunpowder carried on the sea breeze. Sounds follow: a vendor’s desperate call, children’s bare feet trudging through mud and dust, overcrowded carts honking as they carry dozens of passengers, laughter broken mid-air by the crash of a missile. Even the ground is restless, it makes a strange sound beneath my shoes as I walk on it, as if to remind me that I am treading over rubble, not roads.
Two years of my life have disappeared into a void of instability and shrinking horizons. Not only in terms of our job prospects and careers, but even the simplest dreams have slipped away, like that of becoming a mother someday.
Each morning, as I take the bus, I see women carrying infants in weary arms, mothers clutching milk bottles for babies they are not sure will have enough to drink the next day, others carry the schoolbags of the children who are no longer here. What does motherhood mean in a place where childhood is stolen before it begins?
On one bus journey, a young mother asked me to hold her baby while she searched her bag for a coin to pay the driver. Her body was thin, her eyes tired. “I haven’t slept since his birth,” she told me, “not because he cries, but because the planes never stop. Every strike jolts me awake, checking if he’s still breathing. He was born in a classroom turned shelter. Other displaced women helped me through labour. I brought him today hoping for free milk. I fear the water is too contaminated. His father and I cannot even afford diapers.”
How do you raise new Palestinian life when you’re surrounded by attempts to end it? Her task feels impossible.
The young mother reminded me of Um Mohammed, another woman having to make unthinkable choices each day. She wakes up at the crack of dawn to bake, only it’s not just for her family. Over time, her doorway became a makeshift bakery for neighbours and displaced families. Twelve hours of labour each day, often unpaid, sometimes rewarded only with a piece of bread or candy for her own hungry children.
We, the women of Gaza, are tired of explaining that we’re in pain. We are exhausted from standing before cameras for 24 months of genocide, as if we chose this struggle. We are weary of telling our stories to a world that pretends to listen but never hears. Sometimes, we only have silence as a refuge.
Media soundbites rarely capture the fact that our shoulders can no longer carry this weight. That we wish to wake each morning without the dread of water and bread running out, or the next airstrike ending it all. That we long for the freedom to be ordinary mothers, ordinary workers, ordinary women who laugh at trivial things unrelated to death.
For me, this is where the core of feminism lies, though the world rarely frames it that way when it comes to Gaza. We are human beings demanding the same rights women everywhere claim: to live without fear, to raise children safely, to have our labour respected, to have our choices honoured. The right to joy, to rest, to be vulnerable without shame.
If the history of this land is to be written, let it be written with the truth about what women in Gaza have endured.
I write and speak up about our reality not because I am an exception, but because the world must know what has been forced upon us. This is especially important whilst Western media fixates on the ceasefire as though the trauma of the past two years just went away. The genocide reshaped our lives entirely, and it stole from us the luxury of ever dreaming.
Eman Afana is a teacher and writer from Gaza. She founded Witness and Memory, an initiative that helps children and survivors use writing as a form of expression and documentation.
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