Deferred Dreams

Imagine you sit one night and write a list of your dreams — a trip abroad, a small warm home, a job you enjoy, a marriage where you start a family. Then you wake up every morning to find that list hanging between a sky raining fire and a sea that can’t breathe. This is Gaza. Here, dreams are written again and again, yet the planes erase them before they can take shape.

An engineering graduate once dreamed of building homes. He stepped outside one morning to see his university crushed — lecture halls buried, labs gone, and every part of his future turned to dust. A medical student spent her nights studying, memorizing how to save lives. Then a missile hit the hospital. Her friends and their dreams vanished together. A mother now sits in the rubble, pressing her hand to her chest. She screams without sound — as if each cry carves another wound in her soul. A child who once played football on a calm street now lies silent. Yesterday his laughter filled the air; today, fear lives where joy once was. A young man saved for years to marry and build a simple home. The war came first. His dream was destroyed, and his fiancée sits among the rubble, her white dress covered in dust and sorrow.

A wife lost her husband. Two children lost their father. The house that once echoed with laughter now holds only silence and dust.

Even little hopes wait: a walk outside, time with friends, a single safe hour. Every sound of joy is replaced by explosions. Any sense of safety is gone before it can last.

Time does not move in Gaza. People wait: for power, for water, for borders to open, for peace, for a tomorrow that doesn’t arrive. Life itself becomes waiting. Waiting to live, even once.

Gaza doesn’t kill the dream; it locks it away — postponed until a future no one can promise.

Put yourself in the place of a mother who lost her son under the hospital rubble. In the place of a child who forgot what laughter sounds like. Be in the shoes of a young man who dreamed of a home and a wedding, but was met only with silence. In the place of a wife who lost her world in one moment.

In Gaza, lives are rewritten in blood — every day, every hour, every breath.