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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Witnessing Gaza -Journal 8
Suspended Time

Time did not move normally in Gaza. By several months into the genocide, time itself had become unreliable. Conversations began, broke off, and resumed days later. Continuity felt optional. People remembered the moment a building fell, the sound just before the silence, the way the air folded inward. Dates blurred. Weeks collapsed. Time no longer passed. It pressed.

I was there because I owned a livestream. Not a newsroom. Not an institution. A feed. One of the few remaining ways Gaza could still speak outward. It ran constantly, until it could not. Electricity failed. Signal thinned. Bodies took precedence over bandwidth. The camera did not explain. It stayed.

Inside that distortion, discipline emerged.

Voices lowered around children. Tone was shaped before words. Medics spoke in plain sentences designed to function. Young people delayed their grief, placing it somewhere internal where it would not interfere with survival. Feeling remained, set aside carefully, like something fragile that would be needed later.

The discipline was tested in quieter ways.

Some days, what appeared was unbearable simply because it was ordinary. Loss moved through daily life without announcement. The dead were handled quickly. The living learned where not to look. What mattered most often passed just outside view, carried through without pause or comment.

At times, information stopped short. Names were withheld. Locations were protected. Details were softened or delayed. Not from uncertainty, but from judgement. Protecting people became a priority. Withholding became part of the work.

Language changed under the same pressure.

Messages shortened. Corrections arrived hours later, sometimes days. Numbers were revised quietly. Accuracy still mattered. A mother explained a shortage the way someone explains weather. Her voice carried no appeal. Information was offered because it was needed.

Ethical clarity held, under strain.

Anger existed. It surfaced in pauses, in breathing that took too long to steady. It did not overtake judgement. Claims stayed measured. Words were weighed against consequence. Boundaries held in conditions meant to erode them.

Absence ran through everything.

Images were never sent. Stories stopped mid-sentence. Long pauses marked what had been deliberately protected. These were not failures of documentation. They were acts of guardianship. Some moments were kept for those who survived them. Some grief was not offered as evidence.

From the outside, this restraint was misread.

Quiet was taken for resignation. Control was mistaken for numbness. The refusal to perform grief was read as acceptance. These interpretations relied on distance. They assumed survival should be visible and loud.

What became clear over time was regulation. Of time, of emotion, of language, of judgement. All of it held together inside a reality designed to unravel them. This was how continuity was preserved when continuity itself was under threat.

As activists and aid workers we learned these tools to protect their safety and instilled them as unspoken law in our communities. Surveillance technology, governments, and individuals with ill intent surrounded us on all sides.

Much of what sustained them was never visible. It moved through small decisions, careful silences, names not spoken aloud. What endured was not the record, but the refusal to be undone.

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 9
Cohesion Among Collapse

I expected and feared that famine would be the thing that made them fall apart, but instead it brought them closer.

In tents & homes already holding too many people, more kept arriving - cousins, neighbors, someone’s aunt, children who simply followed a familiar face. Without a question being asked, a space would be cleared, blankets would be shifted, portions would be quietly divided smaller. It was never described as sacrifice because their hearts were in tune despite the collapse around them.

Care did not depend on relationship, closeness, or even familiarity. An older boy watched over younger children who were not his brothers, a young woman corrected children who were not hers, and they listened without hesitation. Elders were respected by default and treated with dignity as much as possible. Protection moved through their society as if everyone deserved it and everyone knew their place.

Faith lived in the behavior of the smallest child, their actions much louder than the words. People shared because keeping something only for yourself wasn’t natural to them, even when they had very little. Patience was not passive. It was a decision repeated throughout their lives. Grief did not isolate a person - it gathered others closely, as if sorrow itself created a social responsibility.

Even when they had very little, they still fed animals that had nothing - not only their own, but stray cats and birds that wandered near the homes. I watched food divided with the same quiet fairness, a small portion set aside without discussion. Hunger did not cancel their humanity. It only reduced the size of what could be given in generosity.

One day, after a small donation had reached a family, they rejoined our livestream to celebrate. On camera, they held up a small piece of manakeesh that they had managed to make from what they could find. The boy carrying it didn’t sit down to eat. He moved in and out of frame, tearing pieces with his hands and placing them into the palms of the other children beside him, then the adults just off-camera. He didn’t share with a sad look on his face. Instead, he had visible excitement, as if the real reward was being able to share at all.

More than once, women told me that when the genocide ended they would cook for me properly - maqluba, musakhan, qidra. They spoke about ingredients and the right order of preparation while living through hunger themselves. During livestreams they would ask what I had eaten that day and whether I was taking care of my health. Little did they know, I would mute my microphone before drinking water so they wouldn’t hear it.

What I first thought was just emergency cooperation revealed itself as something older than the genocide. They were not becoming close under a camera lense. They were continuing a closeness that had already been formed across years of siege, displacement, and even having their calories counted by the occupation.

The order I kept noticing did not come from rules or hierarchy. It came from a shared understanding that no one stands alone here, even if they survived alone.

From far away, suffering is often imagined as something that strips people down to instinct - survival replacing morality. But what I kept witnessing was the opposite. Their families and friends were always the first thing on their mind, and their prayers went to others before themselves.

I began to understand this type of resilience - a culture where community survives catastrophe without needing to be reinvented each time. The war did not teach them how to hold onto each other. It only proved how long they already had.

Buildings were damaged.
Routines were broken.
Their bonds were not.

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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