Witnessing Gaza – Journal 5
Innocence Interrupted

In the beginning, the children appeared quietly - leaning into the frame, tugging on sleeves, showing toys. Sweet, gentle children who just wanted to live. They showed me the corners of rooms that still felt like theirs. Some climbed into laps just out of view.

Over those first days and weeks, as the children got used to me, they began showing up on livestreams more freely - smiling, waving, climbing into view. Their joy lifted everything. They played, laughed, even bickered with siblings - just being kids again. These moments reminded us what we were fighting to protect. These moments, too often, vanished as quickly as they came.

The fear would always arrive. It moved across their faces like a shadow. Not confusion - recognition. A three-year-old once asked, “Why aren’t you stopping this?” And all I could say was, “I’m so sorry.” Because I knew my tax dollars were doing this. I knew the world was lying. But I couldn’t put that weight on a child. So I gave them what I could.

As the bombs became closer, they would run under beds, behind dressers, sometimes toward nothing. Sometimes they just looked at the sky, trying to understand why it hated them.

A girl once tucked her drawing under her leg when the bombing started, like even in panic, she didn’t want to lose what she’d made. What hadn’t been taken yet.

One night, we watched a mother hold her four children while the walls shook. They looked lost. That kind of fear changes a child forever. No one should have to become fluent in grief before they’ve even learned how to read. No one should look that small, holding that much terror, in a room with no exit.

Yet even in the darkest moments, they reached for joy - a natural kind of resistance. They had patience and wisdom decades beyond their years.

These children drew flowers while their sky collapsed.

I no longer see children in peacetime without thinking of the ones who never got one.

This journal begins here. I will add at least one entry from my time with Gaza each week.

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AmyraCull أميرة

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Witnessing Gaza – Journal 6
Teenagers Too Soon

I started noticing the elementary school-aged children in the way they carried themselves. The uncomfortable quiet where questions should be. They didn’t move through the room like kids who expected protection - they moved like people who had already learned it wasn’t coming.

These are the years where a child is supposed to stretch outward into themselves. They’re meant to be learning what they like, what they believe, who their friends are, and how to make then fix mistakes.
They’re meant to be in school - not only to learn, but to have routine, friends, and proof that a future still exists - and in Gaza, even that normality was taken.

They moved with awareness almost like the adults around them. They watched how the parents spoke, how the younger kids reacted, and how the adults read a room. They stayed close to doorways, kept siblings within reach, tracked every sound outside, and carried a steadiness that shouldn’t exist in someone still growing.

Early on, they still had traces of being kids. A sudden laugh. A flash of sarcasm. The awkwardness of becoming someone under a lense. But over time, the brutal routine of terror did what routine always does: it trained them. Broke away their small and growing pieces and sharpened them into tools of survival.

A boy became the one counting what was left. A girl became the one calming her siblings when the sky fell. They learned how to keep fear out of their own faces, because fear spreads fast in crowded rooms. They learned what every sound might mean, what every pause might signal, and how to stay composed while their insides were in chaos.

That kind of responsibility leaves a private wound. They learn to swallow panic, hide grief, and keep their faces steady because everyone else is already cracking. Only later, in quiet, private counsel, would they admit what it costs to help hold a family together while they’re still growing themselves. Even then, they spoke with restraint - composed, controlled, and unbearably strong.

People call it resilience like it’s a compliment. But it’s a survival reflex that happens when childhood gets stripped down to one function: endure.

What was stolen from them wasn’t only safety. It was the right to be unfinished. To grow slowly and privately, without consequences that last forever. Their adolescence was taken from them, replaced by a constant pressure to be responsible, useful, calm, and strong.

Watching that fracture happen, live, changes the way you see teenagers everywhere else. These children become adults inside a genocide, without consent, and we can never give those years back.

During the genocide, they didn’t invent new strength; they leaned harder into what they were already taught. They were raised to thank Allah for everything - not because life was fair, but because gratitude keeps you grounded. Their faith meant believing they were still seen, heard, and held, even when the world looked away.

In this way, their culture armored them for the world’s cruelty.

They shouldn’t have to be this brave, wise, or strong before they were even fully teenagers.
The world owes them more than admiration - we owe them protection, dignity, and a future.

This journal begins here. I will add at least one entry from my time with Gaza each week.

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AmyraCull أميرة

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Witnessing Gaza - Journal 7
Refined Anger

When I spent real time talking to high school and college-age Palestinians, the conversations didn’t stay on the surface for long. We moved quickly past polite explanations - into what they actually thought about what was being done to them.

These were the first times their anger showed itself clearly, and it came through as focused, specific, sharpened by suffering, and most of all, justified. They were angry for a simple reason: the same patterns kept repeating. Homes erased, family lines broken, futures shut down, excuses made, and cameras coming and going. Governments kept sending weapons, and the news kept smoothing everything into “complicated tensions” so the world could keep looking away.

They had been forced to study their own oppression just to survive it, and they understood exactly how the story gets managed. Palestinian death becomes numbers, “context” becomes a stalling tactic, and language gets twisted until obvious violence becomes something the world can tolerate.

What stood out most was the history they carried in their voices. Their timeline wasn’t “since October,” it was generational, shaped by restraint, humiliation, surveillance, and siege long before this genocide began. They were grieving something they were never allowed to have in the first place. Their parents couldn’t hand down stories of freedom, and their grandparents never got to live to see liberation.

The question they kept circling back to was painful: “what are you doing to stop this?” They weren’t asking for people to simply share their words. They wanted action, interruption, and real pressure applied where it matters most, not more spectatorship dressed up as concern.

Many people tried - boycotts, protests, digital resistance, breaking through propaganda, refusing the script, refusing silence - and many were punished for it, because the machine is built to absorb outrage until outrage turns into exhaustion. The Gazans could see the effort, but they could still see the failure, not as something random, but as the outcome of a system designed to protect itself.

Even with all of that, these same young people still spoke about hope, faith, and resistance. Not as a form of denial, but as something practiced with discipline, because giving it up is exactly what the occupation wants. Their faith reinforced their steadfastness to their land, to their families, and to justice.

They held anger and hope at the same time, grief and clarity at the same time, with an anger grounded in evidence and a hope rooted in refusal.

If Gaza has made anything undeniable, it’s that oppression depends on distance - distance from truth, distance from consequences, distance from the people it destroys - and once that distance collapses, silence stops being neutral and turns into a choice.

This journal begins here. I will add at least one entry from my time with Gaza each week.

🙏

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☝

AmyraCull أميرة

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