Read writings by Jehad

They Rise
They rise, and we search for
offerings to reunite us with those who’ve left.

They rise, and weeping we draw near,
searching among the dead for who we are.

The mists have cleared, and yet no light
arrives; we cannot see.

Ya3qoub (Jacob) still yearns; Yusuf has not
come home and the dreams of the absent are cut.

They were the reflections of existence, with them
we felt for life in the midst of disaster.

Their eyes were the mirrors, we saw
souls and roads by the torch of the soulmate,

Much time has passed since parting and we
long with the longing of yesterday

O smile which bears the wishes of the weary,
who will save dreams from sad ruin?

Who will breathe life into the spirit from an echo
of tales of wishes and longing?

O blue of the sea, depart! Our eyes
have seen the lies of the sky.

O wind, draw what’s in my mind: the siege
whose chains have crushed hope over the years.

I want to ride the waves of the wind,
to free the dreams from the prisoner’s fate,

to wipe out borders that my imagination might
run to eternity without pause.

I will never wear the clothes of falsehood.
(Time brings forgetfulness) How can the weary forget?

The Final Scene – Notes from a Genocide
October 11, 2023
I am now at Al-Shifa hospital after a lot of warnings of evacuation for my neighborhood.

It was the soul exiting from the body, drowning in the waves of the past, stuck in every single memory in my home. Do you know the home? Do you know the value of a room? You may not know until you imagine yourself without anything later. The idea of nothing is so solidifying. The knowledge of unvalued life, unequal opportunities, and the feeling of screaming from the top of your lungs.

I am writing to you now in the van groans under the weight of our lives—reduced to sacks, to whispers, to the arithmetic of survival. Four dollars yesterday, a hundred today. “Safe,” they call the south, as if safety were a place, and not just the pause between explosions. How many hands must we join to stitch a net for our falling sky?

December 15, 2023
The dust tastes like blood. And the truth is a blade: We are just a family. We are innocent. We have been bombed.

Then— movement. Instinct. Terror.

I run, though the ground writhes beneath me.

Mama. Mama. Mama.

The only prayer left in my ruined lungs. Let me find her. Let her be whole. Let me fall at her feet, a slave to her love, and bury my face in her lap, and weep until time collapses.

May 15, 2024
We realized it would not be war— not the kind we knew. This was the unmaking of a people. This was Genocide, spelled in fire and blood.

I write to you from Al-Mawasi: God’s hell on earth, a cage of sand and tents, where the sun is a blade, and the night, a suffocating shroud. One cup of water a day, sipped like a sacrament. Lines longer than hope, just to clutch a scrap of bread.
Why? For whom?

January 1st, 2025

You might assume I scribble these words in a displacement tent, having lost my home, my kin, my dream of becoming the doctor who’d stitch wounds under bombs. But wait— you haven’t met my neighbor: the legless man who, after twenty years of struggle, buried his only son, his wife, his entire universe, yet still tunes his radio each dawn, scanning static for the word “truce”.

And I wonder: When “returning to zero” means returning to rubble, what could zero possibly offer him now?

He always reads the question in my silence. He answers: “We’ve lost life, must we also be robbed of grieving it?”

January 20, 2025
They have stripped us of all life’s essentials— even the falafel stand has been replaced by a tent. And here I am, returning to study medicine in the last remaining wing of Al-Shifa Hospital. And here is our neighbor, who lost his entire family, transporting their bodies from south to north, carrying their civil registry documents as their will.
The question remains: Is this rubble life’s final scene? Or what awaits us after all this?

Read more of Jehad’s work:

Arab Lit — “When I Die”