Read writing from Omar

Everything here in Gaza has a heart. This elderly man sitting in front of me in the tent is something magnificent, made of flesh, blood, and a soul that has endured an endless amount of suffering. The tent that shelters him is invaluable, having withstood a full year of scorching heat, rain, wind, and storms.

The mother is the steadfast heart of Gaza and a symbol of the unshakable freedom rooted in our hearts and minds. She carried her son in her womb for nine months, nursed and raised him with the best care, only for the Zionists to kill him in the blink of an eye. The wall that this mother leans on as she gazes at the sky and prays to the Creator of this universe for an end to this bloodshed is still standing despite thousands of tons of explosives, a proud example of strength learned from the one who built it.

The food, most of which I've forgotten, yet I still remember some of it. Days are now reduced to canned beans and peas, but even those cans are a profound example of how they haven't given up on us. The beautiful memories that continue to consume our brain cells every night before we sleep, squeezing the eyes to shed the greatest number of tears, are a form of spiritual resistance that we live by after every bombardment.

I walk barefoot on the embers of war, carrying my worn-out shoe in my right hand and my pen in my left, to write the journey of this shoe, which can no longer continue the road with me, as if life itself is loading me with burdens I can no longer carry.
Now I move on with nothing, moving on in a book that knows nothing but sorrow — its pages filled with lines of oppression and injustice while silence takes hold of us. Its pages are full of mothers’ cries, children’s tears, and fathers’ anguish. I carefully search for the meaning of hope and cannot find it, for the meaning of love and cannot find it.

This longing kills me — the longing for my library, for The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak, and The Rubaiyat by Jalal al-Din Rumi. The longing for my pen and its inkwell, where I would dip the pen into the ink so it would drip letters full of spiritual romance and love.
And between every book and the next, you’d find the shelves filled with daisies and anemones. My library was like paradise; I would travel and sail among its books to seize wisdom and the self I had forgotten since the first day I was forced to abandon reading and became bound to writing blood, tears, and forgotten remains.

There is a sentence that says: he survived the drowning, but the sea always remained in his eyes.

And it is indeed a true sentence — ask me and I will tell you that the stains of blood and the remains are still in my eyes to the point that my eyes grow red whenever I remember the sacks filled with the bodies of my friends.

Ask me and I will tell you that memory has emptied of everything except the blackness of night, the darkness of longing for the time before the catastrophe, and the knives of death stuck into every section of the skull.

Ask me and I will tell you that a sea of blood swims inside me, and it is not I who swim in it; this body has expanded to contain a whole sea of blood, killing, death, oppression, hunger, thirst, loss, longing, and breaking — and I did not cry out even once. I remained motionless and silent, and this hand writes my pain while my letters cannot hold anything.

Ask me and I will tell you that I do not know a single shape of death that I have not witnessed — I have seen it, embraced it, it embraced me and kissed me — yet it could not take me, for reasons of its own.

In every corner and every place, there was life, there were echoes of laughter, there were children practicing their right to live. There were leaves falling in autumn and blossoming in spring. In every corner, there was a mother weaving tenderness with her gentle hands, and there was a father who left in the morning and returned with bags filled with sweets, fruits, and love. In every corner, there was a life incomparable to any other.
Until this Zionist occupation came and turned every corner into a heap of ashes that carried away countless souls. Damn this vile occupation.