Diary from Gaza: “I Dream of an Ordinary Death”

The Key is a new magazine committed to covering Palestine as the core issue at the heart of the modern world. Support our work by becoming a subscriber today.

Editor’s Note: This text was originally written while the author was fleeing along with her family from one shelter to another during Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The young writer and poet has been in France since August 2026. Her family remains in Gaza.

Translated for The Key by Hadeel Jamal.

After years of bombardment, my mother's fear left its mark on her skin. I've learned to carry mine – and to hope for a quiet and swift death.

I am familiar with fear in all its shapes and colors, and how it creeps up on us. I see its marks colors in my mother’s hands and I remember how, after the 2014 offensive, that fear appeared to turn her skin a different shade. I was in the seventh grade back then, and together we visited every dermatologist in Gaza. They all gave the same verdict: "It is likely vitiligo, triggered by the fear of loud bombardment. It is impossible to cure, but we can try to halt its spread."

My mother longed to eliminate that fear from her hands and stop its progression. She hid it to avoid the prying eyes of strangers.

She feared losing one or all of us, or perhaps she feared leaving us behind, alone without her. With each passing year, the fear spread on her hands, darkening and taking shape. After October 2023, my mother no longer hid her dread: She would roll up her sleeves to cook and knead dough alongside other mothers in a house sheltering more than 50 displaced people, sharing her anxiety, sorrow, and worry with them. At the end of each day she would gently caress my face, as though wiping her anguish off it – protecting my features with the certainty that no harm would befall any of us.

She would raise her hands, praying for the genocide to cease and for death to spare those around her, until that first November in 2023, when she received a call from my uncle.

“The seven have been martyred,” he said. She tried to identify the seven in her mind – Who is gone? Who remains? The grief of those questions wrapped around her hands in coils, shackling them, tightening whenever she tried to wipe her tears. My mother confined herself to the room where we were sheltering and would not move, desperately trying to reach her niece still in northern Gaza. What do funerals and grieving look like during a genocide? Everything around us seemed to dictate that we were to weep in solitude without a true farewell to the bodies, without funeral prayers, and without a gathering to mourn the dead.

That day, my mother told me not to place my hands on my head whenever I was afraid. Her mother once told her that fear travels from the hands to the hair, turning it gray. I understood then why my grandmother always dyed her hair with henna.

Yet my fear lingers around me. I see it in my friends’ faces. In the evening, over a cup of tea during family conversation, I catch it stealing glances at me. I fear that it will see me laughing and snatch away everything around me. It monitors our eyes, so we try to keep them closed at night lest it see our longing. We do not sleep, and instead I try to imagine a peaceful death.

That is when the phantasms of death overtake me. I try to imagine that quiet death, one that is like drifting into a deep sleep, free from the sound of missiles hunting down my body. I want my body to remain whole, wrapped in a pristine white shroud, unmarred by the stain of red. I want to be carried from a bed to a grave in the Earth; I want my body to retain some measure of privacy. I do not want to be missing, left under the rubble for an eternity or gathered in a black plastic bag – a collection of limbs. I do not want to be reduced to a statistic or a news item.

I want to experience an ordinary death, like any human body that had time for a farewell before burial. I want to feel my friends’ hands touching my face, that face which I had always refused to let anyone but my mother touch. I want an end to the absurdity of postponed funerals, and for visits to begin soon after death. I want to live so that it might be said, “Her death was quiet and swift. It caused her no pain, nor did it haunt her like a specter that haunted those who came before her.”

But my mother does not leave us to these thoughts for long. She stays awake, rearranging the map of her fears on her hands. She tries to sketch out a new home for us, one that resembles the one reduced to ash. She clings to the hope that she might find all her belongings beneath the debris exactly as she had last arranged them, and that the surviving fig tree will yield fruit for us to eat this year. She rearranges things around us–perhaps having made peace with her fear, or choosing to look past it considering the scale of the genocide. Yet, whenever she waves to me, her hands reveal both her fear and my own.