A letter from a mother in Gaza

We stayed there for two days, and I slept on an empty stomach every night so my children wouldn’t go hungry. Then, one night, the house we stayed in got hit by an airstrike. One of our relatives died, others were injured. We were lucky that we survived.

The second airstrike

We fled to Khan Younis and stayed at my husband’s sister’s place, cramped in a small house with two bedrooms with around 50 other people.

I felt anxious and uneasy. We stayed there for 45 days until an airstrike hit the house next to us. I was playing with my children, trying my best to make them forget the war and everything that was happening.

I carried my youngest daughter, and the other two children went running with me. I couldn’t see anything, and my children were scared and screaming.

Ever since I first saw their little faces, I wanted nothing else but to keep them safe and healthy.

Now, in the blink of an eye, there was just nothing that I could do but tell them to run faster.

We found refuge in yet another house; it was packed with over 100 people. I will never forget the sounds of this house. Everyone was crying and screaming, mourning friends and family.

Everyone who had lived in the house next to us was killed.

A little safety

Since the beginning of the truce on Nov. 24, we have lived in our fourth shelter since the war started.

We live with my mother and around 30 other people in a house in Rafah. For the seven days of the truce, my children and I finally felt a little safety. For the first time in over seven weeks, they were courageous enough to stand outside the house, to look at people and cars passing by.

As a mother, I am trying my best to be positive, divert their attention, and tell them silly jokes. It breaks my heart to see the damage this war has done to them, and to see how my children, who were always full of life and joy, now need all their strength to even dare to leave the house.

But that is now over as hell has returned for us, and the bombings are worse than they have ever been.

My children are petrified. Every minute they ask me: “Mama, when will we go back home?”

The first thing my son Taim asks me every morning he wakes up “Mama, did the war end? Can I go back to school?”

My daughter Tala covers her ears with her little hands whenever there is a loud sound, tells me that she doesn’t want to die, and seems to disassociate from what is happening until things are calm again.

Sally, the one-year-old, cries a lot more than she did before. She wants to be close and hug me all the time.

I’ve heard from other mothers that their children have stopped speaking, constantly wake up because of nightmares, and have wet their beds for the first time in years.

How much longer until they can be children again?

Gendered conflict and unequal burdens

We women are also facing many challenges now, not just as mothers.

No one is eating enough, and in times of war it is usually the mothers who eat last.

How do you deal with your period, when there are no sanitary napkins and no clean water? Where to breastfeed in privacy? What do you do if the milk flow stops because you can’t get enough to eat?

There is no electricity to make bread; there’s no cooking gas. We have lived on canned food for 60 days. There are no vegetables or fruits; no diversity of food. Girls cannot leave the house because it is too dangerous. With all of us sleeping with dozens of people on mattresses on cold floors, family disputes and arguments are increasing. I have also heard cases of gender-based violence.

All the shelters are overcrowded, and there is hardly any clean water. No one knows what comes next; no one knows where to go. The bombardments are worse than ever.

For a lasting peace. I wish that I could look at my children again without fearing whether this might be the last time I can hold them close. I wish that the constant crying and screaming, the terrifying soundtrack of this war, would stop so that we can hear our children laugh again and just let them be children.

Alaa, 30, mother of three children, writes about what it is like to be a mother in Gaza. She is currently in Rafah in South Gaza, living under constant bombardment.