Freedom That Hurt

Yesterday should have been a happy day. Gaza was finally welcoming its prisoners home after almost two years. I went online hoping to see smiles, hear laughter, maybe even tears of joy. But what I saw… it was nothing like that. Their faces were pale and tired. Their eyes looked empty. Their steps were slow. You could see that they had been through so much.

One of them looked at the camera, his voice shaking, almost disappearing. He said quietly, “In prison, all I wanted was to be treated like an animal… not like a human.”

I couldn’t believe it. How much pain do you have to feel to say that?

They talked about days without food, without water, nights that felt endless. Some could barely walk. Some had forgotten how to smile. They survived, but part of them didn’t.

Then came the moment that broke me completely. A man fell to his knees — not from relief, but from grief. His name was Haitham Mu’in Salem. He worked at Beit Lahia Municipality and wasn’t part of any political group. The occupation took him a year ago. Yesterday, when he was finally released, he learned that his wife and children had been killed in an airstrike just weeks earlier.

He was holding a small toy he had saved for his daughter’s birthday. He had imagined giving it to her, hearing her laugh.

But when he came home, the house was silent. There was no one left.

He stood in the middle of the street, looking at the sky. His body was weak, and he fell to the ground. I couldn’t keep watching. I closed the screen and cried.

Every prisoner carried a story heavier than their body. They came back from one prison to another — from the cells to the open streets of Gaza. They came back to ruins, to destroyed homes, to missing faces. Even freedom here comes with chains.

This should have been a day of celebration, but Gaza welcomed them with tears, not songs. The streets were silent and sad. And in that silence, my heart broke even more.

Haitham… and everyone who returned, they are proof of pain and proof of survival. Their bodies may be weak, their hearts broken, but just being alive is resistance. They came back — even when there was nothing left to return to.

I haven’t stopped crying since yesterday. Their faces, their voices, their pain keep coming back in my mind. The tears fall without me asking. My heart won’t stay quiet. I feel their pain like it’s mine. And I don’t know how to stop.