Today is my birthday… and I am Sameh from Gaza.
Another year passes — a year in which I count not wishes, but what we have lost and what we have endured. In a place where days are measured by survival, simply continuing to live becomes a form of resistance.
Despite everything, I still believe life has meaning, and that the days ahead may hold something better. If this post reaches you, please keep us in your prayers for safety and peace, and pray for Gaza to find relief soon. 🎂🇵🇸💔
@PalPress24 Happy Birthday. I always pray you and your family . I always pray ceasefire and peace at all Parestine area .I want to see Parestinian rebuild glorious Palestine with peace and hope.Amen.
I used to think the most remarkable thing about Gaza was how people survive death.
Lately, I have begun to think it is how they survive life.
For the past two days, I have found myself walking through the streets, studying the faces of strangers. I was trying to understand a contradiction that exists nowhere more clearly than here:
How do people continue to laugh after burying those they love?
How do weddings still happen?
How do mothers still buy sweets for their children?
How do people keep searching for small fragments of happiness while carrying so much grief?
Yesterday, I saw a crowd gathered around an elderly woman on the side of the road, she looked as though she was about to collapse.
I approached and introduced myself as a doctor, but before I could ask what had happened, a young woman standing beside her spoke.
“It is the sadness,” she said.
Then, after a brief pause: “Whenever there is a happy occasion, she remembers my brother who was killed in the war.”
“She starts crying. Sometimes she loses consciousness.”
I checked on her and continued walking.
But I carried the scene with me.
A while later, I heard a young man shouting for water.
I turned and saw another elderly woman being held upright by two men.
Her body had not failed her. Her grief had.
I walked over and asked only one question:
“Was she remembering someone she lost?”
The young man looked at me and nodded.
“Yes. My brother.”
The same story.
Twice, within less than thirty minutes.
Two women. Two families.
One wound.
And this is the truth,
Gaza exists in two realities at the same time.
The first is visible.
Children playing, markets crowded with people, families attending weddings, mothers preparing meals.
Life insisting on itself.
The second reality is hidden beneath the surface.
A city of empty chairs, unanswered phone calls, bedrooms preserved exactly as they were the day their owners never returned.
A city where every moment of happiness accidentally steps on a memory.
Perhaps that is why joy feels different here.
It never arrives alone, it drags sorrow behind it like a shadow.
Every celebration has an absent guest, every smile carries a name.
Every mother who watches children play sees one child that nobody else can see.
And yet people continue, that is the miracle. Not that they are strong. Not that they have healed.
But that they continue.
They gather, they laugh, they fall in love, they make plans for tomorrow.
All while carrying losses heavy enough to stop a heart.
And this is what Gaza truly is:
A place where people keep planting flowers in the ruins, while beneath their feet, the graves are still fresh.
#WoundedGaza #EidMubark
Israel mató de un tiro en la mandíbula a un bebé de 7 meses que iba en coche con sus padres en la ciudad ocupada de Hebrón.
Las Fuerzas de Ocupación de Israel han tenido que tuitear una especie de disculpa-excusa ante este crimen, cosa poco habitual en su política de comunicación. El texto es cínico e insoportable, pero hay algo más en esa impostura de comunicado: la certeza de que el mundo les detesta y que ni con propaganda millonaria ni con política del silencio pueden ya acallar la voz de tantas personas que denuncian sus crímenes y comparten el deseo de un mundo sin Israel. Su comunicación, que pasa del cinismo al victimismo y de ahí a la crueldad manifiesta, ya no funciona en ninguna de sus modalidades salvo para los suyos.
🇮🇱🇵🇸 ¿Pensabas que la isla de Epstein era lo peor?
Israel construyó la única prisión militar del mundo exclusiva para niños.
Niños palestinos (desde los 12 años) son juzgados en tribunales militares. Tasa de condena: 99.7%.
Son sometidos regularmente a palizas, torturas, aislamiento y violaciones.
Esto solo aplica a niños no judíos.
Los niños israelíes van a tribunales civiles normales.
Un sistema diseñado para quebrar a una generación entera: arrestos nocturnos, confesiones bajo tortura y condenas masivas.
Todo bajo la ocupación militar.
Esto es crueldad institucionalizada contra niños. No hay otra forma de llamarlo.
I thought the problem was simple.
We did not have an ultrasound machine at the clinic, and I wondered whether bringing a gynecologist would still make a difference without one.
But her answer made me realize how small my question really was.
The issue was never only the lack of equipment.
There are changes happening to women’s bodies everywhere around us, and almost no one is speaking about them. No one is truly paying attention to what war, displacement, fear, and humiliation are doing to women physically and psychologically.
She told me something I had never fully understood before.
“In these societies,” she said, “women’s health issues are often considered shameful to discuss openly.”
And suddenly, I felt something heavier than silence.
I felt ashamed, not because of what she said, but because I needed someone to remind me that an entire category of suffering had been pushed so far into silence that even we had stopped truly seeing it.
Then she told me something even more unsettling.
“The war has changed everything,” she said.
Before the war, most gynecological cases were related to pregnancy. Women came carrying life inside them.
Now, the cases are entirely different.
Most of the patients are teenage girls and older women.
Women whose bodies are no longer functioning the way they once did.
She described it slowly and carefully.
Months without menstruation.
Or the opposite: prolonged, exhausting bleeding that lasts for days or weeks.
Even women who had already reached menopause are experiencing abnormal bleeding again.
Hormonal cycles have become severely disrupted.
Bodies no longer seem to recognize themselves.
Many now require medication, not for complex diseases, but simply to help their bodies regain a basic sense of balance and normal function.
And I sat there thinking:
What kind of life does this to a body?
What kind of fear alters something so deeply human?
The answer is everywhere.
It is in the tents.
In the suffocating heat.
In the fear that never leaves.
In the humiliation of exposure, of having no privacy, no control, no personal space in which to simply exist.
A few days ago, in our small clinic, we organized a simple awareness program for pregnant women.
Four days of discussions about maternal health, child care, and basic survival during displacement.
But something unexpected happened.
Many women came to register who were not pregnant.
They simply wanted to be there.
To sit in a place created for women.
To feel seen.
To feel heard.
To feel, even briefly, that they were more than the lives they are now forced to endure.
Because their lives have been reduced to something unbearable.
Living inside tents.
Fighting relentless heat.
Enduring insects, rodents, exhaustion, and constant discomfort.
And something even more difficult to describe:
The loss of privacy, the loss of dignity, the loss of the ability to simply feel human.
One woman said something I cannot forget.
“We used to live in homes where we could cry quietly in the corners,” she said. “Now, in the tent, we cannot even say ‘ah’ because every sound is exposed.”
And in that moment, I realized:
This is not only a medical crisis, this is not only about hormones.
This is what happens when human beings are stripped of safety, privacy, stability, and dignity for so long that even the body itself begins to collapse under the weight of survival.
And somewhere inside all of this are women trying desperately to hold themselves together in a world that has left them no room to breathe.
No room to speak, no room to whisper their pain, and perhaps the most painful truth is this:
They are not asking for miracles, they are asking for something far more basic.
To be seen,to be heard.
To be allowed to feel human again.
#WoundedGaza