A New Year for Gaza: Will life return?

Gaza City – Over the past two years, we stopped counting seasons, days, and the passage of time.

Days are no longer days; the life we knew before the outbreak of Israel’s genocidal war is gone.

Instead, days merge as we taste every shade of suffering and drink from every bitter cup except the one that will give us our lives back.

We watch the world writing about the end of 2025, celebrating achievements and opening a blank page to welcome the coming year.

But a new year in Gaza means we are entering the third year of the war and its aftermath.

It’s as if Gaza has its own calendar since the genocide began.

Carrying tears and disbelief

Whoever emerged from this year alive survived with their body, but their soul has been eroded – you can see it on the face of any woman or man who has been displaced for two years.

We were hopeful at the beginning of 2025 as we returned, carrying our tears and disbelief, to northern Gaza, to our destroyed homes where we had lived our entire lives.

In that ceasefire in January 2025, we thought the war had ended and that we could start anew.

But we were wrong. Only six weeks later, as people were still trying to absorb life in post-war northern Gaza, the war returned, even more brutal.

In mid-March, we were woken to the sound of bombs – a sound that had never really left us. This time, Israel added the weapon of starvation, blocking the entry of everything, even aid.

And so it went: War, bombardment, blood, hunger, and the constant race to secure a single meal.

Seasons of abundance passed us by, Eid and feast days, while tables were bare. No holiday cookies, no coffee, no chocolate. Nothing.

People made do by offering water, and some stopped receiving visitors, hiding their poverty.

This year’s Eid, supermarket shelves had been bare for months.

A vendor set out a table with thin fingers of sweets his wife had made at home from sugar, sesame, and flour. One little piece sold for 10 shekels (about $3).

I wasn’t surprised. Sugar and flour were priceless, sold by the gramme, like gold.

That day, I went from place to place with my children, trying to find any sign of celebration.

I was surprised at myself for hoping, even subconsciously, that it being Eid might change things, that perhaps food would enter.

But I told myself: What would it being Eid matter in Gaza? Nothing changes. It’s just another day, the same reality. A day in Gaza means bombs in the sky, and hunger and deprivation of joy on the ground.

I decided not to go see my family in the north for Eid and turned back home.

Not only because I stood at a street corner for more than an hour and a half looking for a car or even an animal-drawn cart to take us north, but also because I felt joy was dead, no matter how hard I tried. So I returned, broken, my children trailing behind me.

I had enough money to buy them new clothes, but all my money couldn’t buy them a cookie.

I collapsed onto a couch at home, wondering at the wrath that seemed to have been unleashed on us in Gaza while the rest of the planet carried on, celebrating Eid as famine consumed us.

The passing of days

As the days passed, they drained us.

Day after day, I began to lose my desire to work, to write, to keep listening to people’s stories.

What’s the point of listening to the stories of the hungry when the world has grown accustomed to our protruding bones? What’s the point of covering a massacre that isn’t ending?

I had no energy left. I would think of a story, but my mind would tell me to conserve what energy remained.

My days narrowed to counting how much flour, rice, and sugar we had left. I cooked lentils over an open, smoking fire for my children. I worried about the last of the yeast, worried about how to find more firewood, craved a cup of coffee as if it were a dream, and scrolled through photos of once-abundant tables.

We were seeing people die for a bag of flour or a food parcel, and crowds gathering at night to go to aid distribution points.

I had never stopped thinking about leaving Gaza throughout the war, but my motivation changed as the thoughts got sharper.

I was dreaming of taking my children somewhere they could eat whatever they wanted.

I want to title all this humiliation and suffering in my memory as: “So we do not forget.”

How could I forget, when even now, whenever I pass a stall full of fruits and vegetables, I gasp and stare, my heart pounding with prayers that this blessing will not disappear again?

How could I forget, when I still remember my shock and emotion in late September when I entered a supermarket and saw shelves of food? I went into a buying frenzy.

I took a bit of everything: Canned goods, chocolate, chips, cream cheese, flour, legumes. I felt like I was carrying treasures, even at double the price.

Since then, whenever I enter a grocery shop, anxiety, fear, and exhaustion overwhelm me. I buy what I need and what I don’t need.

Food is more available, yet my mind tells me that this abundance will not last. We are conditioned to deprivation, empty shelves and severed supply lines.

It is a deep trauma, a constant feeling that food will disappear. I can’t say I hate food, but I hate the terror and fear around it.

The same feeling returns with every door slam, every rug shaken out, every sound of a passing truck, or gunfire. All of it throws us into a state of emergency, waiting for the sound of a missile.

‘Achievements’

The other night, just before the end of the year, I was joking with my father and my siblings, who have been sheltering with us since September, when Israel forced people out of the north.

We wanted to imitate the social media “achievements” trend, where friends and families gather around a cake, and each person lights a candle and details an achievement for the year.

We began – without a cake – under dim LED lights, because electricity had been cut for months.

When my turn came, I said my greatest achievement this year was retaining my mental and psychological faculties.

I hadn’t even finished my sentence before everyone burst into laughter.

“Who told you that you still have your mental and psychological faculties?” my sister choked out around her laughter.

I fell silent, stunned by their reaction, then laughed along with them when I realised the weight of what I had said.

What is this, you fool? What psyche, what sanity? God forgive you, Maram.

After what you mentioned above, and what you didn’t mention, and everything you will never mention, is there still room to speak of mental and emotional stability?

It was the most honest ending to this year.

An ending where I fully understood the limits of my strength and that I had reached the end of it, yet somehow I managed to keep going.

This is not defiance, nor strength. Prolonged survival in this state eats away at souls and minds.

Day after day, our humanity erodes further until we are no longer fit for life, no matter how many years pass.