A ceasefire has finally come. After 15 months of relentless genocidal war, we are finally able to breathe a sigh of relief. Many of us have also been able to return to our homes or what is left of them.
While we enjoy our bomb-free time, the world appears to be engaged in a fierce debate about who won. Is Israel triumphant? Or is Hamas the one that can declare victory? Or are the heroic Palestinian people the winners?
I am a nurse, not a pundit, so I have no answers to offer. But let me tell you, dear reader: The world should not be deceived by our survival. Staying alive in Gaza is not synonymous with heroism. Escaping death is not a victory. We barely made it. Tens of thousands of Palestinians did not.
The genocidal war closed time into a circle. There was no beginning or end, no destination that we were moving towards. We just kept going in a circle, every day, returning to the beginning.
Every day, every family had to go out in search of drinking water, water for washing, food and something to make a fire with – the very basics. All of these took hours to obtain – if they were obtainable at all. Bread – what we thought was a given, a right – became a struggle to find. Families ran out of money. Aid organisations ran out of rations. At some point, even bug-infested flour and expired canned food became a luxury.
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This circle was broken only by illness or death. People would break the routine to bury their loved ones and grieve.
The outside world saw many images and videos of the violent deaths of Palestinian children, women and men at the hands of the Israeli army. But they did not see the other, silent, painful deaths of the chronically ill or those infected with treatable diseases.
We had people with infections die because of the absence of antibiotics. We had people with kidney problems die because at some point dialysis was only available from time to time and only in very few medical facilities. These deaths were not added to the official genocide death toll, and yet many of them were preventable.
In the alleys of the displacement camps, one would see the grieving survivors, sobbing or sitting silently. After escaping death, they too would go back into the circle of time.
After so many months of collective loss, oppression and longing, it felt like there was no more room in the heart for more escape from death. I, like many other Palestinians, became frighteningly calm, numb.
Not that long ago, we had been filling the earth with noise, smiles and life. We had been carrying within us our big dreams and hopes. But we could no longer recognise ourselves. “We are not like us. We are not us!” we thought.
The collective suffering was so absolute, so overwhelming that it felt there was no place to seek comfort, no one to tell what was happening on the inside because all were in that same dark place.
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But the funny thing about mass pain and mass death, dear reader, is that they push you to cling onto life, despite everything – especially despite your occupier. Everything in Gaza called for your death, but you learned to make life out of it.
Indeed, we are no longer us, but we are not dead. New versions of us have been created to continue the struggle, to live more.
In the endless circle of time, people would still find ways to feel satisfaction or a sense of purpose. I did so by volunteering as a nurse at a makeshift clinic and going on long walks in search of coffee. These were my acts of defiance, of living.
Starvation took a toll, but I tried to see the other side of it. I often had a laugh that I finally achieved the weight loss I had so desired and had never managed to reach with all the healthy diets I had tried in the past.
I saw the white invade my mother’s hair amid the harsh life in a tent. But we had a laugh about it, too. I knew these colours would not defeat her. She loves colours and is the most skilled woman in subjugating them to fit her.
After 15 months of hell, we have emerged from our shelters and tents to see apocalyptic scenery. We are still counting the dead pulled from under the rubble – identifiable only by a shoe or a shirt.
I look through the destruction and I see us, the survivors. Death did not defeat us, not because we are heroes but because we are people who love life. Dear reader, is clinging onto life a victory?
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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