Each year on December 27, people around the world prepare to welcome the new year. However, life in Gaza is entirely different. Gaza Strip is a small place I was born in and spent my whole life in; that has been sieged by Israel over the past 15 years. A place that has been deprived of any sense of celebrations or what normal life should be.
As a six-year-old child going to a private school, I had the privilege of having one week at the end of the year to spend with family unlike the majority of children who mainly study at UNRWA schools; an agency founded to help the Palestinian refugees after the 1948 Nakba (Make reference from Wikipedia or something). We were having a family gathering at my grandfather's house. The grown-ups were watching what felt “usual” and “boring” news on TV about some kind of a truce. I didn’t know what that meant back then, But my father wasn’t watching the news he immediately went out shopping for groceries.
I was playing with my brother and sister and our cousins in one corner of the house until all of a sudden, an odd humming sound was coming from outside. As kids, we didn’t care as much as our moms and dads did, because they knew what was coming as if they lived it before. With each passing second, all their facial expressions changed as the sound became closer and louder. The TV was muted preparing for what could happen then "BOOOOM!” In a blink of an eye, the glass window shattered all over the place and the moms and dads were panicking and running toward us. But my dad didn’t because he wasn’t home yet. It was complete chaos and everyone was shouting and screaming things that I didn’t understand. Tons Many of the shock waves hit and struck my soul that day before shaking our house, but I couldn’t raise a finger. I was like a statue made of fear. I started thinking of the worst and feared that my dad would never come home.
In such intense situations, normal physics and time no longer apply. If you're lucky, it will pass faster than normal. However, we were not that lucky and each passing second felt like an eternity. The electricity went out and we didn’t have internet back then and the only way to know what was happening was by listening to my grandfather's radio. My grandfather telling me to get his radio is what broke my silence and forced me out of the paralysis I was in. I went to the other room to get it, afraid of dropping and breaking the radio that was older than me. Thank God it didn’t happen. After I delivered the radio, I burst into tears because I was terrified to be bombed alone. I wanted to be bombed with the rest of the family. My tears soon vanished when I saw my dad enter the house. We all flipped from sadness and gray faces into smiles, love, and hope. I can't stop thanking God that he got Dad out safe.
Later that day there was a ceasefire that could be broken at any moment which Israel did several times, it's when I witnessed a great yet weird thing. When someone dies, his family and friends will mourn him, but what I saw that day was different. I heard people shout out "cheers." Standing on our house balcony, I saw the largest group of people I had ever seen before at that age. At first sight, it seemed like a wedding, but when I saw them carrying two bodies of martyrs, I knew it was definitely not. That was (Zafet El Shahed) it's a March for the Martyr its sole purpose is to bid a farewell to a hero. I still imagine them every now and then, especially when I stand on the balcony. I can still see their lifeless faces mixed with blood as they were carried on the shoulders of men followed by women throwing roses at them. For some reason, I perceived their lifeless faces to have slight smiles. Perhaps that’s because they had met their Creator and all of their sufferings had come to an end. A woman caught my attention who I believed was one of the martyrs’ mothers. She hysterically cried and shouted, "May God have mercy on you, my son!" This was followed by a loud "zagrouta," a sound usually heard in happy times like weddings that was strange to hear during a funeral.
The Israeli bombing lasted for twenty-one traumatizing days during my childhood. In them, we as Gazans saw what no one is supposed to see, not even one's worst enemy. People were shredded into pieces. Children and infants were killed in the worst ways possible. In our religion, when someone dies, he will be showered by a specialist, cleaned up, and perfumed with the nicest "musk and amber" scent. They will be dressed in a peaceful white cotton coffin, but this didn’t happen at this time. There were no bodies to be put in coffins, there were only black plastic bags that we saw on TV. People were not just dead. They have been deformed to the point that no one knew who they were anymore, not even their own mother. The doctors and the medics came up with the idea of putting two hands, two legs, one head, and one chest together. They tried to make bodies out of many different people that day.
