Before Everything Fell Apart
When people outside Gaza say the war is over, nineteen-year-old Nour Al-Ajla doesn’t know what to make of it.
“Maybe it’s over for them,” she says quietly, “but not for me. My war still wakes me every morning, and from the burden I carry every day.”
Before the bombing began, Nour lived in Al-Shuja‘iya, in a small concrete house with two rooms and a narrow space before the door where she used to play. One room was for her parents, and the other she shared with her three brothers and three sisters. At night they would lie side by side, talking until sleep came—about school, about who got in trouble that day, about nothing in particular.
“I can still see it,” she says. “The small window, the smell of the cooking from the neighbors, my father sitting outside on his plastic chair. It was small, but it was home. I used to draw on the ground with chalk. The walls had cracks, but they were our cracks.”
When the war started, no one thought it would last. “It always stopped before,” she says. “You wait two nights, three nights, and then the noise ends. We thought it would be the same this time.”
But it didn’t stop. The air filled with smoke and metal. A missile hit near their street, shattering windows. “We knew then we had to leave,” she says. “My mother said, ‘Take what you can carry.’ So we took almost nothing.”
They went on foot to the Al-Zaytoon UNRWA school, which had turned into a shelter. “There were families everywhere,” she remembers. “Every classroom was full. We slept on the floor. The windows were broken, and the air smelled like dust and fear.”
The bombing didn’t stop there either. One night, the sound was closer than before—a deep explosion that shook the walls. “It felt like the ground moved under us,” she says. “We couldn’t see anything at first. Just dust and people screaming.”
When it cleared, her father was lying on the floor, bleeding from his head.
“I froze,” she says. “I wanted to help, but my hands wouldn’t move. My mother was shouting his name, over and over. I tried to press my scarf on the wound, but there was too much blood. I felt useless—like my body had betrayed me. I kept thinking, do something, do something, but I couldn’t. I just watched, and that still eats at me.”
There was no ambulance, no signal, no way to reach anyone. They waited through the night.
“At dawn,” she whispers, “he took one deep breath and then he stopped. That’s when I knew he was gone.”
They covered him with a blanket. “We couldn’t bury him,” she says. “We left him in the tent with others who had been killed. I didn’t want to look, but I kept looking.”
The next morning, her mother said they had to move again. “We walked away,” she says. “I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. If I did, I think my legs would stop.”
Loss and Flight
They joined the line of families heading south. “It was like the whole city was walking,” she remembers. “Old men, children, mothers carrying babies. The ground was covered in dust and ashes. The smell of smoke followed us everywhere.”
When they reached Al-Nusirat, they found space in another shelter—another school. “We thought maybe it would be for a few days,” she says. “Days turned into weeks.”
That’s where she saw Ali—her husband. When he found out she had gone south, he came after her, wanting to be with her despite the small disagreements they’d had before. He knew she was pregnant, and when he saw how crowded and dirty the school was—full of people and disease—he decided to rent a small apartment for them.
They didn’t have much time together, but they tried to make a life in that small space. They cooked lentils over a tiny fire and held on to each other, trying to find some peace in the middle of chaos and uncertainty.
“We argued once,” she says, a faint smile crossing her face. “It was something small, I don’t even remember what. I cried, he got quiet, then he came back and said, ‘I can’t stay mad at you, the world is already mad enough.’ And that was it.”
A few weeks later, the army dropped leaflets over Al-Nusirat refugee camp, ordering another evacuation. “The paper fell from the sky,” she says. “Everyone ran to pick it up, and it said we had to leave again. My hands were shaking when I read it.”
After reading the leaflets, Nour’s mother and Ali decided to move to Deir al-Balah. But after they left, Ali decided he wanted to go back to Al-Nusirat to bring food and the rest of their things. “He said, ‘It’s close. I’ll come back in the morning.’ I was five months pregnant then. I remember telling him to be careful. He smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back before you miss me.”
In the morning, he decided to return to Al-Nusirat to bring back food and blankets. “He said he’d be back before noon. He called me when he got there. His voice sounded tired but calm. Then later that day, my phone rang again.”
She lowers her eyes. “A voice I didn’t know said, ‘Your husband is in Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.’ That’s all. I didn’t understand. I asked, ‘Is he alive?’ They said, ‘He’s martyred. He is dead.’”
Her mother went to the hospital to find him. In his pocket she found a small folded paper: a list of debts—money he had borrowed to buy things for the baby and for her.
“When I heard that,” Nour says, “I couldn’t breathe. I kept asking, how can life take everything again? First my father, now him. How do I keep going?”
She sat on the ground, unable to move. “I felt like my body stopped working,” she says. “I couldn’t stop crying for the love that I have lost, and for my baby who will come to this world not knowing a father.”
After Ali’s burial, Nour stopped talking for a while.
“There was nothing to say,” she tells me. “When you lose too much, even your words leave you.”
Her mother tried to pull her back into the rhythm of the camp. There were children crying, lines for bread, the endless shuffle to the water tank. Life in Gaza does not stop even when your heart does. “You still have to fetch water, wash clothes, feed whoever is left,” Nour says. “Grief doesn’t give you a break from surviving.”
Love Amid the Rubble
Months passed. The war slowed, though the air still trembled with distant shelling. Nour’s belly grew heavier, rounder. “Every time she moved inside me, I thought, maybe she’ll bring back a little light,” she says. “But then I remembered—her father wouldn’t be here to see her.”
She gave birth in Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, in a room dimly lit. The machines around her barely hummed. Outside, the echo of shelling rolled through the night, but inside there was only the sound of her breathing and the nurse’s quiet words: “Push, habibti, push.”
“It was a natural birth,” Nour says. “No medicine, no power. Just pain, and faith.”
When the baby came, she was small but fierce, fists clenched as if she had fought her way into the world. “When I held her,” Nour says, “I cried in a way I hadn’t cried before. Not the kind that breaks you. The kind that reminds you you’re still alive.”
She named her Maria.
“When I held her in my arms,” Nour says, “I felt something shift inside me. She was the light that lightened my world. After everything I had lost, she gave me a reason to breathe again.”
Nour stayed with her mother in Khan Younis, in one of the orphan camps that had grown out of tents and broken walls. Together, they raised Maria and cared for her three younger brothers–all of them still children, all of them fatherless. The camp was always noisy, always full–crying children, tired mothers, men searching for food or water. But inside their small tent, there was tenderness.
Nour would sing to Maria at night, songs her own mother used to sing when Gaza still had quiet evenings. “She smiled early,” Nour says, a faint trace of joy crossing her face. “Every smile felt like a promise that there would be another morning.”
But raising her wasn’t easy. There was no steady food, no milk, no diapers. “Sometimes I used pieces of old cloth,” she says. “Sometimes she cried from hunger and I couldn’t do anything but hold her.”
Still, she endured. “I told myself that every day I kept her alive was a victory,” she says. “Maria was my reason. She was the proof that love could survive even here. She was the sun that shined my dark world.”
A year and a half passed. Nour was still living with her mother who also raising orphans, helping to raise her three orphaned brothers and two sisters. “It wasn’t a life,” she says, “but it was something close to it. Maria would crawl on the floor, laugh when I blew on her face. I used to forget the world when I looked at her.”
But peace never stayed long.
One afternoon, Ali’s mother came to the camp. Her eyes were tired, her hands trembling. She sat beside Nour and looked at Maria for a long time before speaking.
“She said she missed her son,” Nour recalls softly. “That she wanted to keep Maria for a while—to see her grow, to feel close to Ali again. I thought it would be for a few days. I wanted to be kind. I didn’t want to hurt her.”
But the days turned into weeks, and Maria never came back.
“When I went to ask for her,” Nour says, “she told me Maria would stay with her. She said I was too young, that I didn’t know how to raise a child. I begged her. I cried until my voice broke. But she closed the door.”
Nour went home and sat on the cold floor, listening to the quiet. “The sound of that door closing still lives inside me,” she says. “I lost my father. I lost Ali, and then I lost the only light that was keeping me alive.”
She stopped eating. Her body weakened; her voice became small. “Sometimes,” she says, “I would wake up at night thinking I heard her crying. I would reach beside me and there would be nothing. That emptiness—it never leaves.”
Time passed, but in Gaza time doesn’t heal—it only hardens. Nour continued to live with her mother, helping care for the younger children. Her brothers fetched water; her mother stood in line for aid. “We survived by routine,” Nour says. “You stop asking when things will change. You just wake up and start again.”
Relatives began to whisper. “They said I was too young to stay alone,” she says. “They said I should remarry, that it was better for me and for my family.” Nour refused at first.
The Child, the Hunger, and the Second War
After the first ceasefire, Nour met Taha.
Gaza was still in ruins, but there was a strange kind of calm—the kind that carries both relief and fear, because everyone knows it won’t last. They saw each other a few times in the markets and near the aid lines. He would nod, sometimes offer to help carry what she had. “We didn’t talk much at first,” she says. “But I saw kindness in his eyes—the kind that doesn’t need words.”
They spoke more as days passed. Both had lost people; both were trying to find a reason to keep going. “He told me he understood what it meant to wake up every day afraid, and still want to live,” Nour says.
When Taha proposed, there were no long talks or ceremonies. “He said we could build something small together,” she recalls. “Not much, but something honest.”
They married quietly in Gaza City, while the war still raged and famine crept closer. “There was no gold, no party, just bread and tea,” Nour says. “But for a little while, I thought maybe God was giving me another chance.”
Soon after, famine struck Gaza harder than ever. There was no food, no flour, no sugar—nothing to eat.
Taha began going to Al-Nabulsi, where the aid trucks came in. Everyone knew it was dangerous. “He knew it was a trap,” Nour says. “A way to humiliate us, to make us crawl for food, to show us that even our hunger could be used against us. But he went anyway. There was no other choice.”
He went to bring home a single sack of flour—just enough to make bread for the two of them. He managed to return a few times, carrying the sack on his back, his clothes covered in dust. But each trip became riskier than the last.
Then the Israeli army dropped leaflets on the northern part of Gaza, warning people to leave again.
Nour still keeps one of those leaflets folded inside a small plastic bag. “When I held it,” she says, “I couldn’t stand on my feet. I was drained from living in constant displacement—from Al-Shajaʿiya to Tel al-Hawa, from Tel al-Hawa to west Gaza by the sea—and now we had to leave again, to the south. I asked myself: did we not finish all this suffering already? From displacement to hunger to agony and loss? Why does it keep coming?”
She and Taha left together for Khan Younis, carrying what little they could—a few blankets, a kettle, and a Quran. But in Gaza, it didn’t matter where you went; the suffering followed.
The famine was still striking hard. Even in the south, there was no food, no flour, nothing to eat. So Taha went to Kafr Moraj, near where the aid trucks were entering. He hoped to bring something back. The trucks, held for hours at checkpoints, were never allowed to deliver food in any fair way. “They didn’t let the aid reach the people who deserved it,” Nour says. “They made hunger another kind of punishment.”
Taha went anyway. He told Nour he might not return, but he couldn’t watch her starve.
For four days, he didn’t come back. His brothers searched everywhere—in hospitals, in the lists of the wounded, among the dead lying unclaimed. Nour spent those days half awake, half dreaming, afraid to say his name out loud.
On the fourth day, one of Taha’s relatives called. He said someone who looked like Taha had been seen at Nasser Hospital. The brothers ran there, praying it was a mistake. But when they arrived, they found him lying still on a metal stretcher, shot by an Israeli sniper.
He had been killed while trying to bring home a sack of flour.
“When his brothers came back carrying him on their shoulders,” Nour says, “I collapsed. I felt the world close again. I was left alone once more to face this unjust life.”
She sat beside his body, her hands trembling. “He promised me,” she says quietly, “that when the war ended, he would help me get Maria back through the court. He said we would start again, the three of us—me, him, and my daughter. He said we would live a peaceful life. But all of that ended.”
When they buried Taha, the sky was low and gray. The air smelled of smoke and dust. Nour couldn’t cry at first—her body refused.
“I felt like my tears had dried long ago,” she says. “There was only this silence inside me, heavy and endless.”
When she went back to the tent that night, she couldn’t speak. Her mother held her and said nothing. Around them, the camp was quiet except for the sound of coughing and the wind moving through the plastic sheets.
“I looked at the walls,” Nour says, “and I thought—how many times can life take everything from one person?”
Every morning she woke to the same emptiness, the same ache that followed her like a shadow.
What Remains
A few weeks later, she discovered she was pregnant.
“I didn’t know what to feel,” she says. “Should I be happy that something of Taha was still alive inside me? Or should I be afraid—afraid that I would bring another soul into this world only to watch it suffer like the rest? I felt broken—like life was mocking me, giving me something new only after taking everything away. Sometimes I thought I should mourn myself, because I’ve been left alone again and again in this world. I’ve buried my father, my husbands, my daughter… and now this child will come into a world of loss. How do you welcome life when you’re still surrounded by death?”
She touches her stomach as she speaks, her eyes fixed on the ground. “Sometimes I think maybe God keeps giving me these children to remind me I’m still human. But other times I think maybe it’s a test—to see how much I can bear.”
Outside, the sea lies still. She looks toward it, the horizon gray and endless.
“I’ve buried my father. I’ve buried my husbands. I’ve lost my daughter. Every time I start to stand again, the ground moves beneath me. But I’m still here. I’m still breathing. Maybe that’s what survival means—just breathing when everything in you wants to stop.”
She pauses, her voice small but steady. “People say the war is over,” she says. “But what does that mean? There’s no home, no safety, no sound of laughter anymore. The buildings can stop falling, but the pain doesn’t stop. It follows you. It becomes part of your body.”
Then she looks back, her eyes bright with something between grief and defiance. When you look at her, you see an endless sorrow—a silence that lives in her eyes, heavy and unspoken. It’s as if all her losses have settled there, saying what words no longer can.
“The war is over,” she says softly, “but mine is not.”
