Everything Has Been Said

10 May 2021 · Shati camp

After weeks of tension in Jerusalem, in Sheikh Jarrah and on the Temple Mount, Hamas fired rockets at Jerusalem. Israel launched Operation "Guardian of the Walls", and the streets of Gaza shook as if the whole city had begun breathing to a different rhythm – a heavy, frightened breath.

Mehran sat on the floor of his small room, eyes fixed on his phone. Out of the small screen poured rumours, warnings, reports of fire, calls to stay indoors and emergency instructions. Every sound was a drop of fear flooding the heart. There was nowhere to run. The doors locked, the walls thin, and the 365 square kilometres of the Strip had become a prison inside a prison.

The streets emptied almost completely. Only the shadows of families hurrying to hide, old men looking for shelter, children running between buildings. Every explosion shook the windows, and the stomach. Mehran tried to calculate odds, to predict the next strike. Every attempt to think rationally broke against reality.

In the evening his uncle Khaled arrived with his wife and their two daughters, Sama and Hiba. Their building had received a warning, and they had left with whatever they could carry in their hands. The al-Ghazi family's small flat was now filled with two families, blankets on the floor, and a taut silence.

Those same days · Jaffa

In Israel, Alex was packing up what was left in the flat in Jaffa, in the heart of the old neighbourhood, between the noise of the street and the sirens. His phone buzzed. An official message: reserve duty standby. He stopped, his hands frozen above the suitcase.

He didn't want to fight. Not now, and not at all. But the sense of duty surged through him like a wave that could not be stopped. The suitcases ready, the ticket almost in his hand – and the voice of the state cut right through him.

He didn't clear the flat completely. Ofir, his friend from the stand, had been looking for a place for months; he would move in at the start of June and take the lease in his own name. The boxes that wouldn't fit into the suitcases stayed in the bedroom wardrobe. "So you've got somewhere to come back to, bro," Ofir said, a bottle of beer in his hand as usual. Alex laughed. He had no plans to come back.

For the last few weeks he moved back in with his parents, to make room for Ofir and to be close by if they called him up. Every night he stood at the window and looked out at the dark street. The wish to fly to Athens, to live his freedom, against the need to protect. Every decision felt dangerous.

That night · Shati camp

Night wrapped itself around the camp, heavy as lead. Mehran curled up in the corner, knees drawn to his chest as if they could shield his heart. The only light came from his phone. Every few seconds a fierce noise split the air, followed by a deep tremor that ran through the floor and the walls, as if the earth itself were groaning.

Sama, his little cousin, sat in her mother's lap hugging an old teddy bear she had been given for her birthday. Her eyes were wet, and she searched Mehran's eyes for comfort. Hiba concentrated on a book; reading calmed her. Jana and Reem clung to Fatma.

"It'll be over soon," said Uncle Khaled in a trembling voice. "We just stay together."

Mehran wanted to believe him, but the sky gave no rest. Cold flashes of light cut through the darkness and painted the street a metallic blue. And then came the sound nobody wants to hear – a sharp whistle, too close.

Khaled leapt and covered Sama with his body. Fatma pulled Mehran to the floor. A second later came the explosion, so powerful that the door was half torn from its hinges and the windows shattered. The room filled with dust, and screams rose from outside.

After a long moment of tense silence, Ahmed carefully opened the door. Outside, the street had become a maze of broken concrete. People were running and shouting names. A fire was burning in one of the houses.

Mehran joined the neighbours clearing stones from the ruins of a house nearby. His hands were shaking, but he kept going. Every stone uncovered another layer: a broken piece of furniture, a crushed toy, and finally, under a heavy slab of concrete, an old neighbour who was still breathing. Someone tied his leg with a strip torn from a shirt; someone else called an ambulance, though everyone knew the crews were collapsing.

The boy stood there, his hands caked in dust, staring at the flames. A hot anger rose in him, and a deep fear. When they got home the ground was still shaking now and then. Sama fell asleep in her mother's arms, Hiba with the book beside her. Mehran stayed awake, staring at the dark ceiling.

He swore to himself: if he survived this night, he would do everything he could to build a life in which a child doesn't need to know how to tell when the whistle is too close.

A few nights later, the bombing hit the building where Uncle Yusuf lived, Ahmed's brother – the man who had always told him stories of better days, of the Gaza of old, of a sea you could once sail far out on. Mehran ran there with his father. They dug with their hands until the civil defence teams arrived. Yusuf did not survive.

"He didn't do anything!" Mehran screamed, and his voice tore in his throat.

That night he wrote an anonymous post. His fingers shook on the screen. He tried to cling to football, to anything, like an anchor – but the cracks were widening.

The same week · Holon

Rina, Alex's cousin, lived in Holon, on the third floor of an old building. Alex went to see her one evening to reconnect, to remember the childhood before the army, before what the service had left behind like a shadow behind his eyes – the border patrols, the smell of dust and gun oil.

"We have to protect our home," he told her, and his voice was steady, but his eyes trembled. "But the fear… it's eating me from the inside."

The siren rose in the middle of the sentence. They ran to the stairwell. The whistle cut through the air, and after it the explosion – close, too close. The windows of the flat shattered like hard rain, a car in the street folded like a wounded body, and chunks of wall fell into the courtyard.

No one was hurt. But Alex, on the stairwell floor, felt his body go back to the field on its own: the breathing, the pulse, the smell of dust in his throat. The military trauma woke all at once.

Natalie came running half an hour later, her eyes full of tears. They sat among the broken glass in Rina's flat, hands clasped, feeling the cracks.

21 May 2021

After eleven nights that seemed like an eternity, a ceasefire came into force, and the morning rose in an almost unthinkable quiet. No more whistling, no more blast waves shaking the lungs. Only a faint smell of smoke, like a memory that refuses to fade.

Mehran came carefully out of the room where they had been hiding. The iron door creaked, as if it too were tired. People were already appearing in the street. Some surveyed the destruction in silence, others hugged, trying to convince themselves it was really over. Children searched the heaps for balls and bicycles, as if bringing the street back to life.

At the end of the alley the whole picture opened up before him: buildings that had once stood upright had become grey heaps. Missing roofs, gaping windows. He heard the names of neighbours spoken in whispers – who had survived and who had not. Every name was another stone on his heart.

By the mosque a group had gathered around an aid organisation's lorry. Sacks of flour, water and blankets passed from hand to hand. People gave thanks in quiet voices, but their eyes stayed heavy. Peace had not come. Only a pause.

In the evening, as the sun sank into the sea and the light turned an ashen orange, the family sat outside the house. Reem rested her head on Mehran's shoulder and asked in a whisper whether she could play with her friends tomorrow. He didn't answer straight away. He looked at the horizon, where the sky and the water had taken on the same shades of cautious comfort. Then, quietly, just for her, he hummed a tune without words. She didn't know where it came from. He did: "You won't break us".

Within the relief there was a new fear: the knowledge that the quiet was fragile, that everything could flare up again. But there was something else in it too – a thin, stubborn determination to live inside this pause, not to let fear win.

That same evening, in Tel Aviv, a short message arrived: Alex's standby had been cancelled. Three days later he stood at Ben Gurion Airport with two suitcases and a backpack. The "Ussishkin" sign travelled wrapped in a Hapoel shirt at the bottom of a suitcase. The red scarf was in the backpack.

Two young men who did not know each other lived through the same feelings in those days: fear, pain, despair, loss of control. Neither knew the other existed. But through this experience they were already part of the same humanity that crosses borders, distances and lines on a map.