What does it mean to see the city where you were born and raised, then return to it and realize that it is no longer the city you knew?

There may be no complete answer to that question.

A city is not only stones, streets, and buildings. It becomes part of our souls. We know the smell of its mornings, the voices of its people, the road we walked to school, and the corners where we met our friends. When a city is destroyed, it is not only homes that disappear. Something inside the people who belonged to them is torn away too. 🏚️💔

I missed my friends today… with a longing that aches deep inside my heart. 💔

I kept wondering: What could I possibly give to the girls who had been beside me since childhood? What could I place in their hands, when their hands are gone forever? 😢

Then I remembered where they were waiting for me…

I walked beneath the scorching sun ☀️, passing through streets and homes reduced to rubble. Every step carried a memory. Here, we used to laugh. There, we walked together to school. Along another road, we went to summer camp, dreaming of brighter days. 🏫🌸

but cannot eat

There are simple things in life that have taken on a completely different meaning for us. Fruit is one of them. 🍎🍊🍓

Sometimes we see pictures of fruit on our phones — apples, oranges, strawberries, bananas. Bright colors, ordinary things that most people rarely think twice about. We look at them for a long time, almost as if our eyes are trying to taste what our mouths cannot.

There are places in the world where beginnings and endings remain distinct—where birth is separated from funerals, joy from grief, life from death.

But Gaza has long since transcended these boundaries.

In Gaza, the living emerge from death, and the dead vanish from among the living. 🌫️

Dear reader,

I want to tell you about a road I walked one day with my little brother on our way to the hospital.

It was not a long road, but it carried a weight that felt impossible to bear. The sun above us was burning, its heat falling heavily on our tired faces. Yet I barely felt it. The heat of the grief inside my heart was stronger than the heat of the blazing sun. My sorrow had become a fire of its own, a fire that made the world around me feel distant. 💔☀️

As we walked, my eyes met Al-Aqsa University.