The thought that my child, Malik, will never experience his father’s love is a source of constant, festering pain.
In Gaza, the war will not end when the bombs stop falling. It will continue to hurt us from within, having left behind wounds that cut deep – wounds that are not reported in casualty figures or news broadcasts.
For my family, one of the cruellest reminders of this truth is my youngest son, Malik. At one year and four months, he has never seen his father. Anas, his father and my husband, was killed by an Israeli air strike while he was reporting as a freelance journalist in Gaza City. I was four months pregnant at that time.
When I discovered I was expecting just before the genocide started, Anas was overjoyed. We spent evenings dreaming together of building a future for ourselves and our children, of having a new home, of continuing our studies – him pursuing a PhD and I: a master’s degree. We discussed baby names and agreed that if the baby were a boy, he would be called Malik. We never settled on a girl’s name.
Israel did not only take my husband from me and the dream of growing old together, but also silenced a voice dedicated to exposing its crimes in Gaza. After his death, many urged me to name the baby after him, but I could not. I wanted to honour Anas’s own choice, so I named him Malik.
Before the war shattered our lives, Anas had poured himself into fatherhood. With our first son, Ibrahim, now three years old, he was not just a father but a constant companion. I have countless photos and videos of the two together: Anas feeding him, taking him along to prayers, carrying him to work. When I attended university classes, Anas proudly stayed home with Ibrahim, tending to him with patience and devotion.
Those memories are now priceless treasures. Ibrahim has a living memory of his father’s love that he can turn to whenever absence becomes too difficult to bear. He can watch his father’s smile, hear his laughter, and feel his presence through the moments captured before war took him away.
Malik, however, was born into his father’s absence. He has no photo, no video, no moment where his father’s face meets his eyes. He came into this world carrying a void that only stories can attempt to fill. Each time I look at Ibrahim’s images with his father, my heart breaks a little more. Not only because Anas is gone, but because Malik’s inheritance is emptiness.
How will he find strength in a father he never knew? How will he build resilience without even a single memory to cling to? I will tell him, of course, how Anas longed for him even before he was born, how he imagined holding him and planned a bright future for him. But words alone cannot replace the tangible comfort of a father’s embrace, the warmth of his voice, or the touch of his hand.
Our story is not an exception. It is part of a broader reality lived by thousands of children in Gaza. Children born orphans, or losing their mothers or fathers in their early years, deprived of the most basic right: to have a memory of the people who brought them into this world. These are not merely personal tales, but a collective wound that deepens every day. The Israeli occupation does not stop at killing the living – it robs future generations of memory, of connection, of even a single image or fleeting moment.
A photo, a video, a shared smile – such simple things, taken for granted elsewhere, are impossible for so many children here. These are children who grow up with fragments, stories passed down to fill the voids left behind by their parents.
I carry the weight of being a mother and a father, a caretaker and a memory-keeper. I work multiple jobs to feed them and try to secure a childhood for them, despite the genocide and the death of their father.
I try to build Malik’s connection to his father through words, weaving a story strong enough to overcome the absence. Yet I know that despite my stories, he will never know what it is like to hear Anas’s laugh or feel the warmth of his embrace.
This is the hidden cruelty of this genocidal war: It not only kills, it robs us of memories. It forces us to fight for remembrance as fiercely as we fight for survival. For children like Malik, memory must be invented, patched together from stories, to resist the erasure of their parents’ lives.
I write this story not to drown in grief, but to preserve what fragments I can for my sons. I write because, in a time when we are being silenced and erased, writing itself becomes resistance.
Perhaps these words will give Malik something that ties him to his father. Perhaps, they will get the world to pay attention, to take action, to stop the massacres that leave children like my son struggling in the absence of a parent.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect media’s editorial stance.
