Navigating Through Grief and Hope for Gaza
After a recent visit to the coastal enclave while pregnant, the author reflects on an unfolding tragedy for children
It is Dec. 1, exactly a week before I am due to give birth, and the temporary pause in fighting in Gaza, which some called a cease-fire, is over. I feel a slow, tight, cramping sensation crawl across my belly, and although I had promised myself that today I would finish sketching an outline of my birth wishes, I put it aside and reach for my phone. It is flashing, indicating distress signals from Palestinian colleagues and friends — and in reading them, I weigh the insignificance of the twinges in my body and the triviality of my hospital logistics. Leaflets are falling like confetti from Israeli war planes in southern Gaza, telling people in the area to go even further south. I know the layout of the strip from many journeys there, and quickly grasp the impossibility of another such evacuation.
My last visit to Gaza was in August, when I was in my sixth month of this pregnancy with my second child. Gaining access to the small coastal enclave under Israeli siege proved to be as precarious as the early stages of carrying my son. I worked from my home in Mallorca on bed rest, the threat of placental abruption from a bleeding hematoma looming. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Mediterranean, authorities negotiated our team’s entry into the Gaza Strip. When we finally obtained the elusive permits to cross into Gaza, I decided I was already feeling better and ready for the journey. Upon my arrival there, Palestinian colleagues greeted me with joyful tears and enveloping hugs. I felt a rush of gratitude — and a healthy kick from deep inside.
Throughout the chain of events that led to the military blockade on Gaza in 2007, I was living in the occupied West Bank as a young international development professional. Then as now, bloodshed was inextricably tied to history and regional struggles for territory and sovereignty. I observed as segments of the separation wall were fast-tracked through rural villages, and learned the difference between cluster bombs and thermobarics when the Israeli military fired missiles into the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon.
This past summer too, before going to Gaza, I had crisscrossed the West Bank for weeks with my nearly 2-year-old daughter in tow. She played with Palestinian children in herding and farming communities, while their parents recounted the effects of increasing settler violence and theft of land and water resources. My toddler ate from shared plates of fragrant rice in refugee camps, and danced to traditional oud music far past her bedtime. The night before my partner took her home and I made my way to Gaza, I lay awake next to her — contemplating the layers of privilege under which she had unknowingly been born. All the while, I was unaware that in just a few months, Palestine as I knew it would irrevocably change.
Our first stop in Gaza City was the offices of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, a group that my organization, Grassroots International, has partnered with for years in order to make trauma support and services more widely available. Over a hot lunch, we carefully filled in the remaining gaps in our calendar for the coming week — we would travel from north to south along Salah al-Din street, Gaza’s main artery, visiting the organization’s network of crisis intervention clinics that prioritize the rights and well-being of women and children. “Since we are trapped in Gaza by the siege, it means so much to us that you traveled all this way,” said Dr. Yasser Abu-Jamei, the director general. He paused, then added, “Soon there will be another slope in our history, and we don’t know if it will take us up or down. But we have to lead with hope.”
That hope now feels lost, as if engulfed in the silent depths of the sapphire abyss that divides two very different sides of the Mediterranean. About a week into the offensive, we heard from the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme as their staff tried to make their way down Salah al-Din street with tens of thousands of urban Palestinians — a panicked 21st-century Trail of Tears, bombs raining from above, despite Israel’s promise of protection along the so-called “evacuation” route. Islam, a young woman who was a colleague from an organization that works with farmers and fishers, was killed by a missile while making the journey. Other colleagues left voice messages and sent photographs, documenting in vivid detail the scenes of scorched earth around them. A dear friend, Ayman, lost 18 members of his extended family when their home in southern Gaza was targeted, while Feda’a, a staff member from th