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Another year has passed, and life in Gaza is still trapped between Israel’s killing machine and the growing indifference of the world. It is another year added to our unique calendar of loss, destruction and death.
In March, I wrote about my fears that Israel might go even further in its genocidal drive than what it had already done. And it did. Israel went beyond even my darkest expectations, reaching an unimaginable level of evil. That evil marked the whole year for us in Gaza.
As I see many people posting recaps of their favourite 2025 moments, I thought I’d share my own version. Here’s what this year looked like for me.
It started with a 45-day ceasefire; the short respite from the bombs was not even enough for us to mentally process the 15 months of nonstop killing and destruction that preceded it.
In February, I met many of the Palestinian captives who were set free as part of the truce and listened to the horror stories they recounted about their time being forcibly disappeared by the Israeli army. Among then was my high school teacher, Antar al-Agha. When I first saw him, I could not believe it was him. He was so pale and gaunt that he couldn’t stretch his arm to shake my hand.
He told me about the long time he spent in what they called the “scabies room” in the Israeli detention centre – a room designated to be an incubator for scabies. “At one dawn, I was finally allowed to wash my hands, but it didn’t turn out to be a relief for me. Once the water touched my hand, the skin started to peel as if it were a hot boiled potato. The blood burst from all over my hands. I can still feel the pain,” he recounted.
In March, Israel resumed the genocide, killing more than 400 people in a single blow in the middle of that month. It blocked all crossings into the Strip.
In April, the first signs of mass starvation started appearing.
In May, the Israeli army forcibly displaced me and my family from our house in eastern Khan Younis.
By the end of that month, Israel orchestrated a new creative form of mass murder and humiliation, cynically calling it the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”. Launched with the help of the United States, this entity started distributing food to starved Palestinians in the form of “hunger games”.
In June, because of extreme hunger, I, too, went to a GHF point. There, I saw my people crawling on the blazing hot sand to get food. I saw a young man protect himself from bullets by taking cover behind another person. I saw young men stabbing each other to death over a kilo of flour.
In July, the Israeli army flattened my house, along with my entire neighbourhood.
In August, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) officially confirmed that Gaza was experiencing famine. By then, there was nothing left for us to eat, not even flour. We were making thin-layered bread by grinding red lentils or rice bird feed. A piece of that was my only meal for the day.
In September, the Israeli army ordered another mass displacement from northern Gaza to the south, throwing hundreds of thousands into the misery of having to relocate yet again.
In October, another ceasefire agreement was announced. By then, I had no energy to feel anything. I had already been consumed by grief over losing many of my relatives and close friends, my home and my entire city. I lost both of my freelance content writing contracts as I couldn’t keep up with work due to the inhumane conditions of displacement.
Deep down, I knew that Israel would not abide by its side of the truce deal, and this wouldn’t be the final thread of loss.
In November, my suspicions were confirmed. Israel continued to bomb us. The genocide was just transformed from a high, loud and intense campaign of killing into a quieter version. The Israeli land-grabbing continued, with the so-called “yellow line” constantly expanding and swallowing more and more land, including what remained of my neighbourhood. That month, the world’s indifference was made even more apparent with governments refusing to condemn Israel’s ceasefire violations and instead showering it with rewards, like a $35bn gas deal.
In December, the cruel winter hit, flooding tents and collapsing buildings. Babies started dying of hypothermia.
If I were able to remove from my memory one event of this year of misery, it would be my trip to the GHF site. The scenes I saw there were what I believe is the peak level of evil. I still cannot shake off the feeling of fear when I walk by places that I passed on my way to the GHF site and on the way back.
Today, as I wander the rain-flooded narrow alleys of my tent camp, I ask myself: What makes all these people keep clinging onto life after losing their homes, jobs, and loved ones?
For all I know, it’s not hope; it’s a mixture of helplessness and surrender to fate.
Perhaps it is because in Gaza, time has frozen. Here, the past, the present, and the future happen simultaneously.
Time here is not an arrow – it does not fly. It is a circle that merges beginnings and ends, and between them lie infinite episodes of horrifying agony.
Similar to the fundamental laws of physics, which make no distinction between the past and the present, tragedy in Gaza makes no distinction either.
A movement of a pendulum from right to left is the same movement in the opposite direction, with the same energy and momentum. Unless we initiate the process, the past and future would not be identifiable.
Recently, I started entertaining the idea of retrocausality in Gaza, where the future affects the past, or where the effect occurs before the cause. Watching buildings collapse on their own, I imagine how Israeli planes bomb them sometime in the future, but we see them disintegrate now.
Of course, one would argue that buildings are still collapsing in Gaza because they were already damaged by Israeli bombardment. But it is also true that Israel keeps bombing what Palestinians rebuild. The same building would be bombed and restored over and over again, so it is not too much of a stretch of the imagination to see how Palestinian rubble at present is destroyed in the future by an Israeli bomb.
As the world looks to a new year and a better future, we in Gaza dread what is to come. We are caught between a past we don’t dare to remember and a future we don’t dare to imagine.
We can’t even make New Year’s resolutions because we have no control over our lives.
I want to eat less sugar, but Israel might do this for me by blocking all food from entering Gaza again.
I want to learn how to swim, but Israel might shoot me if I set foot in the sea.
I want to replant my back yard, but I can’t even get near it.
I want to take my mother to Umrah, to visit Masjid al-Haram, the Great Mosque of Mecca, but Israel is not allowing us to travel.
Probably the only New Year’s resolution I can make is to get used to chilly showers; the lack of gas and firewood may make that wish that much easier to fulfil.
In Gaza, there is nothing to plan for, and there is everything to wish for.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
