Gaza – Maysara Fseifes
In Gaza, tragedy does not always begin with a bombing or an explosion. Often, war ignites from the extinguishing of options before those too powerless to keep up with its relentless blows.
Abeer Fujo, displaced from Rafah to Khan Younis, carries the weight of seven children on her shoulders. Alone, abandoned by her husband years ago, she faces life’s upheavals head-on — battling a war that gives her no time to grieve, and no space for survival.
In her attempts to cope with the harsh realities of displacement, and amid the absence of income, the suspension of aid, and the bombing of community kitchens that once provided her family with the bare minimum, she resorted to collecting scraps of stale bread from neighbors’ leftovers. She would boil them into lentil soup over fires fueled by medical waste gathered from a dump near a nearby field hospital.
Speaking of her disregard for the dangers of handling medical waste, Fujo says: “I have no other choice. My children are hungry, and I must feed them. The soup kitchen stopped operating months ago because of food shortages and soaring prices. The Israeli occupation prevents the passage of aid and cooking gas, and I cannot afford to buy firewood.”
But war does not only starve mothers — it tears at their very hearts with even harsher blows: the loss of their children.
Death awaited her eldest son, Haitham, as he passed by a home at the very moment an Israeli warplane rained its fire upon it. In an instant, he was gone, along with another young man who had ventured out to secure flour for his mother and siblings.
Before Fujo could catch her breath or gather her strength from this loss, death came knocking again. This time, a drone attack struck the camp where she had sought refuge in the Qizan Abu Rashwan area south of Khan Younis. Her second son, Saad, was shot in the liver and confined to a hospital bed.
Between tending to her wounded son and struggling to feed her starving children, Fujo clung to fragments of resilience, watching over Saad’s treatment amid the collapse of Gaza’s health system. On her shoulders lay the doubled burden of securing food for her injured son and his siblings, all while living under fear, poverty, and the memory of everything she had lost while fleeing.
When Saad began to recover, devastating news reached him: two of his cousins had been killed on the outskirts of the destroyed city of Rafah, their bodies left behind, unreachable. Moved by his humanity and tormented by the thought of their remains being left to stray animals, Saad left without telling his mother. Pretending he was going to sit by the sea, he promised to return shortly — but he never came back.
Soon, another chapter of anguish began for Fujo. News came of Saad’s death while attempting to retrieve his cousins’ bodies. Even then, she could not reach his remains, nor find any trace confirming his recovery. Only after desperate inquiries did a worker at Nasser Hospital direct her to the archives, where she learned that a medic had reached the site, recovered bodies, and buried them in a mass grave. To help families identify the dead, scraps of clothing were kept.
There, she found a familiar piece of her son’s clothing. Yet the most painful blow was the inability to know his exact burial place. The mass graves were many, the burials rushed, and the chaos left no room for documentation.
Fujo says: “I only wanted to hold his bones, to know where he was buried, to tell him what I couldn’t say when he left.”
In Gaza’s war, the exceptional has become the ordinary — a shared reality for all, in a crime of genocide where women endure ever-changing chapters of suffering, swallowing endless forms of grief, loss, and helplessness. Stripped of their homes, their protectors, and even the dignity of a grave, mothers like Abeer Fugo carry burdens no heart should ever bear.
