Welcome to The Truth Museum, the diary archive for our Humans But From Gaza initiative. Explore un-filtered narratives shared directly by individuals navigating life during the war in Gaza, revealing daily survival, loss, resilience, and hope under siege. Engage respectfully with these authentic testimonies to connect with the human experience often overlooked and deepen your understanding of Gaza.
I was listening to Ghayath Almadhoun on a podcast when he said: “I cast an envious glance at writers and poets who were born into different surroundings.” Then the poet’s voice cut off; either the internet or the electricity went out, as usual. Although the silence came suddenly, but it wasn’t sudden for my jumbled thoughts. It slipped into a question that lingered in my mind, as if it tied scattered thoughts and blurred observations into a single thought. The matter turned from simply listening to deeply reflecting on a specific thought. I wanted to complete it with what I had observed and scrutinized. Thus, it became: "I cast an envious glance at writers and poets who were born in settled surroundings. Their words are neither about an occupied homeland nor about ruins and rubble. Their words are about a wish in the sky, about a flower in an orchard, or even about the colors of the rainbow in their land.” Since childhood, I have surrounded myself with Palestinian literature. I feel as if the Palestinian writers and poets have taken it as a vast repository of their tragedies and disappointments. If they try to fly to the sky, they are struck by a spiteful bullet, that reminding them of the black fences that confine them. The ink of their pens is the blood of the martyrs. The pens begin and refuse to place a dot that would suggest satisfaction with the end of the words. Their pens narrate real nightmares, about a family waiting for a tattered piece of paper that would allow them to reunite after years of separation. They tell miserable yet determined attempts, like a little girl trying to write with her left hand after losing her right to an airstrike or a blind bullet. The pen writes easily, without the need for the writer to brainstorm to create detective novels to keep the reader engaged deeply to finish reading the novel. They narrate literally and with actual words; there is no need for metaphors. The literature is stained in red, a spectacle to behold, yet dangerous for any reader who dares to come too close. This is the literature that dropped in my hand and the kind my eyes have read for most of my life. I find myself reading a Nakba novel while living through a present one. I read in the book about the sound of an explosion, and then I heard it exploding in my neighborhood, so I don’t get bored with the reality. I go to read war diaries, and I discuss with other readers about our written reality between the lines at dedicated gatherings, and I find them like me, deeply immersed. I don’t have the time to read Western literature, because sometimes I feel it’s a betrayal. As if there is no trace of reassurance; fear has become the companion, the maze is the compass, the homelessness is the shelter, and the inhalation here has become without exhalation! Maybe this is a reason why I am helpless to write another poem far from the red color, the green color erased from the color wheel here. Maybe we will create another similar and special color for us, recognizing it with us, and we won’t share it with those who don’t understand us. Or maybe if my entire surrounding changed, I would be able to write trivial things and wouldn’t care to share them. Because we are nothing but a mirror of this city, a mixture of it, like a dough that takes shape, and its ingredients are the events and the sorrows of the city. Every event that happened to it is reflected back to us; it rages against us to declare that it is the tyrant. So we turn to paper, hoping we might be able to empty out this chaos; we empty it in random words, in a drawing in black, and recite it in a poem that doesn’t have a title or end; all of it is nightmares, whether in waking or in dreams, and if you ever manage to escape them, tell me how you did it!
Born in Gaza - as though that were a terrorist crime demanding my horrific execution. A small reminder, in case my ashes still whisper: I am human, still feel, and once had dreams .. Even after nearly two years of doors slamming shut again and again in my face, I still cradle those dreams within me - quiet , breathless , starving with me , bleeding beside me - far from missile shards, the thunder of explosions, the stench of death, and those bewildering evacuation orders. They say dreams are stubborn, but I've watched mine flinch at every detonation . And now I wonder .. will my dreams perish when I am martyred? Or can they emerge, surviving, from beneath the ruins of my soul ? Would they choose to remain in a world that watched our torment unfold for decades - eyes wide open, yet mouths sealed? and stood silent, arms folded - a world bloated with slogans of human rights and noble causes, yet powerless to offer a crumb to a starving soul .. just because we are from Gaza! Stay indifferent, as always. I'm just a martyr, whispering final words before I'm reduced to fragments - and by morning, my name will fade, as if I never existed. When I was little - before my bones learned to grow, they learned how to shrink under rubble. Before I knew my own name, I memorized the names of missiles. In one of my favorite cartoons, Ben 10, I used to watch Ben and his cousin Gwen save the world, shield the weak, and defy evil with courage. I always wished to stand beside them. As a child, I truly believed a hero's shield could stop missiles - So I dreamed of building one like Gwen’s. But real life taught me: in Gaza, you don't get to be the hero... You just pray not to be the target! Years later, I grew older . And instead of surrendering, I chose AI - not to fight, but to save. And maybe, just maybe, to become the hero I never saw arrive. Three weeks into university, the apocalypse struck. My campus - one of the few places I felt I truly belonged - was obliterated. Because in Gaza, we are cursed to wander until death claims us ! Despite it all, I did not surrender.. because "Resistance is a continuous purpose", so I decided to pursue my path through self-learning, I was forced to fight draining battles, alongside the savage war that consumed my life - battles born of scarce connection, faltering internet, and relentless power outages, as though knowledge itself were a forbidden incantation meant to destroy this planet. Still, I carried on with what little I had, clutching my fragile dream - flaming with hardship - in trembling hands, to one day craft a machine, a robot. For humanity, not nationality. I would name it "Noor" - "The light", so it might become the light for those whose lives were darkened by evil, whose dreams were buried without mercy, until silent, starving resistance could bloom in a form that transcends all the hell this world has drowned in. But how long could a childhood dream like mine endure beneath the weight of such ruthless, merciless weaponry? The missiles outpaced my thoughts, and the thunder of explosions drowned out even my most desperate cries. Bit by bit, the strength that held me together began to fracture - until the verdict was cast: We are surrounded now. Encircled by rigged machines, robotic instruments of annihilation, built not to protect but to erase us - to scour our existence off the face of this earth. And so “Noor” collapsed before it could ever shine. Perhaps the final question I ask is this: What kind of darkness must reside in a heart to craft such a grotesque weapon - as though pain were a mathematical equation that could be engineered? And what of those who bore witness to every form of inventive slaughter - who watched tens of thousands of us perish while they yawned and scrolled past with casual indifference? No reaction. No outrage. Just a single tap: “Skip.” So dear humans in this "fair" world.. You abandoned us. I suggest you don’t gaze too long into the mirror, lest you catch a glimpse of our blood - tattooed as a stain of shame on the forehead of your counterfeit humanity. I hope you’re granted a natural death, with a whole body - not hungry, not afraid, nor dizzy from the tremors caused by the detonation of residential blocks around you. Because we are the ones who truly know the grotesque weight of death in that form. And I wished I could hope that your conscience rests as ours - but you possess no conscience at all. End of story. Thanks for wasting your precious time on this trivial nonsense. Now, You may return to your day… to live. And I shall remain where I am, waiting for my turn… to die.
After he had stayed in the loneliness of the well, there came one to liberate him to bring out the light from within him; those who threw him to the pit are the ones who were supposed to raise him to the top. It’s 10:44 PM, where I am sitting and emptying the ideas that haunt me before the power goes out and before the ideas fade away from my mind. But it’s strange that my city’s people and I went through what happened to this man— Prophet Yusuf—, peace be upon him, we were dropped to the well too, in its utter darkness, by their injustice, I don’t think they were ten as Yusuf’s siblings, rather, they were much more, the count doesn’t matter now as much as the crime that occurred, as for their silence and lies, God, how alike we are, but we were absolutely certain of their silence, as they were silent several times before, because this wasn't the first time, that they dropped us into the well, they dropped us several times, but this time the darkness is deeper, they are making excuses, claiming helplessness, and we fully realize that they are pretending that. We don’t care to become kings as Yusuf—peace be upon him—became later; all that matters is survival. As for forgiving them, this is a very heavy burden; I don't think any one of us would be so naive as to discard it and simply move on. We see the homeland through the cracks of the well; through two lean years, we see the city lost its identity, as if Allah had just created it, but it left traces that point to the existence of injustice by its rapists, so this time the doom wasn’t for the nations that denied their messengers; rather, it’s for oppressed Muslim people, and the situation remains the same. This final full stop is a doubtful stop because a full stop in linguistics means the end of the actions, but here it didn’t and will never end. I find myself wondering, my mind drifting away, about what is possible for the writer "Gharib Asqalani" to write in his book "The Taste of Sleep" about Gaza, after he wrote about what we were living, and for me, I consider what we were living to be a heaven, but there was a fire that was blazing up and subsiding, but now it is a fire that hasn’t subsided yet. I think he will not be capable of writing about what happened in these two years because he once said this before: "There is no description, for the description is shorter than the described." I could say he shaped it for us, prepared it for us, left it for us, and walked away. Did you understand from the beginning of the diary that we are still waiting for those who would liberate us from the well? I reconsider what I said; I retract what I said because it’s too late, our hope has been dashed, and the rope of the well that once hung there has burned away. This time we will save ourselves. I know the path's features have yet to take shape, but maybe we will dig the tunnel of freedom with our empty hands, using the cunning and wisdom of our ancestors, the prayers of bereaved mothers, and the strength of our men, which resembles the burning power of the sun that is beyond the reach of anyone to extinguish the power of its flame.
We are in the second half of 2025! But yesterday I was imagining achieving one of my dreams in the second half of 2023! Why 2023?! Because the time in my hometown has been frozen Since the 7th of October, 2023, and until now, I have been incapable of seeing the horizon line of the end! But isn’t that enough? Haven’t the criminals had enough from permitting bloodshed? Weren’t the hearts of the humans wrung with pain about what has been going on? Didn’t the bodies resting on plush leather chairs decide to denounce even a little, or are they still afraid of removal from their positions? The answers for these questions are still empty; the only things that I have are my pen, question marks, and exclamation marks. And I think the ink of the pen will run out, and the question marks and exclamation marks will be stealing glances from some of the people! Maybe, but I hope not. I don’t want to use exclamation marks for only critique. I wanna use them when I take a picture of myself in the courtyard of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, when the mother of the prisoner is heralded with the glad tidings about her son’s release from captivity. When I am touching the Kaaba’s covering without being drained after crossing the limits between it and between the cities between my town. When I understand a new Quranic miracle while reading the Quran. I wanna use them when I describe the beauty of my mom’s smile and when I am listening meticulously to my dad’s guffaw to create a musical theme of it and play it when life betrays me. I wanna use them when I checkmate the king of my opponent when I am playing chess. when I fix a programmer error immediately when it appears in the code. I am using it now because I am writing my diary in the same diaries notebook that I was using when I was a kid in the fifth grade in elementary school, but now I am writing in it as a writer! I wanna use exclamation marks just with joy, delight, and tidings only. Basmala.
What can we possibly say when mourning a homeland? A homeland with its entirety, its sky and earth, its youth and children, its olives and palm trees, and its flowers and colors. This home we love has become a mirror of our pain and a breeding ground of our confusion, where its details have turned into wounds we daily live with. Everything our eyes gaze upon has turned to ashes. Everything our souls desire is but a mirage. Tranquility has become a trap as if fear itself is the comforter, and stability has become turmoil as if displacement there is a rest. And when these concepts confused us, we were displaced this time while hoping it would be salvation. I no longer count the displacement numbers, nor do I write memoirs or document the endless suffering. Why must we write diaries filled with pain, oppression, and loss? For whom do we write while we are the forgotten stories in this world? But there's no harm in writing, if only to unburden the soul and avoid choking on words. Though there are many reasons leading me to dump my fatigue on papers, I know exactly at the moment what drains me most is the frequent exposure to scenes of destruction and rubble that I keep looking into. Yesterday, I walked among roads full of rubble, feeling as though beneath every step lay a buried martyr, a limb of one's body, or even a pile of shreds that doesn't suit to put in one's grave. I stood, then I contemplated the depth of rage and hatred that drove such an Israeli occupation to cause this amount of destruction, and the tremendous anguish that must strike the owner of that home if they were in my shoes. Behind every shattered wall, I began to hear the whispers of the stuck memories. The alleyways that once echoed with laughter now hid in a strange silence. At the end of it all, I lifted my eyes to the vastness of the sky, and I was sure that if they could have deprived us of it, they would have. There, in the sky, I saw a large kite soaring above the rubble, decorating the colors of our Palestinian flag. At that moment, I muttered: "Gaza might be destroyed, but not defeated". The night comes; I have felt the darkness of this world as I do these nights. Before the war, it was a haven, a time to call a day of striving. I would read, write, or watch a film; something far from action, if only I had watched action movies as a preparation or a rehearsal for what we're living through now! But night has turned into a monster, waiting for me to doze off so it can pounce on my heart. Ever since the sun disappears from the sky, the bombings madness begins. Cowards, they commit their crimes under the cover of darkness. The night is a shared suffering we all endure as Gazans, beyond the personal torment that uniquely marks each of us living under the fire of war. We all fear the night, tremble at its horrors, and wait for the morning sun, hoping it brings not just light, but news of survival. Survival isn't just for the one who survives from a missile, but who wakes to see the sun, finds a bite to eat, has a wall left standing, or manages to find a tent as many sleep on the ground and cover themselves with the sky. In the shadow of the harshest moments, the darkest nights, the hungriest stomachs, and the aggressive bombings, I wish I could carry my whole city away far from the unjust world to feed their thin bodies, plant hope in every heart, and sow seeds in every land. They have stripped us of our humanity, closed their eyes, and blocked their ears, thinking that the arrows of pain will never reach them.
It feels… surreal every single day. I wake up here, in my room in Cape Town. The mountain is visible sometimes, shrouded in mist, and there is the usual student buzz outside—people talking about classes, assignments, and weekend plans. And I go to UWC. I sit in lectures, open textbooks, and try to focus on theories and concepts that suddenly feel utterly detached from reality—my reality. Because my reality is also... Gaza. Simultaneously. All the time. Six months. I lived through six months of the genocide. Saw things. Felt things. Heard things. The kind of things that carve themselves into your soul and rearrange your understanding of the world forever. Then, a path opened, a chance to come here, work, study, and be safe. And I took it. Part of me knows it is important, necessary even, for the future, rebuilding, having a voice that perhaps the world might listen to a little more readily from here than from there. But another, louder part of me screams with guilt. How can I sit here, in a quiet library, surrounded by books and the mundane comfort of stable electricity and readily available food, when my family… my mother, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, my friends… are living minute by minute? How can I read about history, economics, or computer science when their history is being destroyed before my eyes, their economy is non existent while the only computing they care about is whether a signal might briefly appear to send a single, life-affirming text message? The hunger pangs they must feel, the gnawing, constant hunger. It is not just a physical sensation; it is a terror. Knowing your children are starving, and you have nothing. Nothing. This thought haunts me during lectures. I stare at the professor and hear the words. Still, my mind is conjuring images of empty shelves, distended bellies, and the sheer panic of not being able to feed the people you brought into this world. And the danger. Oh, God. Every single second. Will today be the day the building falls? Will the drone strike hit their shelter? Will the sniper take a shot? The fear is a physical ache in my own chest, a mirror of the constant, bone-deep terror they must be living with. A phone call, when it rarely comes through, is a tightrope walk between desperate relief that they are still alive and the agony of hearing the weariness, the fear, the lack in their voices. They try to be strong for me, I know. And I try to sound strong and hopeful for them. But we both know the truth. Being here feels like a betrayal. A profound, agonizing separation. Yes, I can work on PalestinianCauses from here. I can help amplify voices, build the platform, and connect with people outside. This work is fueled by everything I lived and everything my family is living now. It's the only way I can make sense of being here, that this distance isn't just comfort for me but a tool for them, us, and our future. But the internal storm is relentless. The guilt is a heavy cloak. The worry is a constant knot in my stomach. I see students complaining about Wi-Fi speed or exam stress, and a part of me wants to scream. Don't they know? Can't they see? Is it really possible to exist in such parallel universes? Studying here is not a privilege I can basically enjoy. It is a responsibility that is crushing me. It is a race against time. A race to acquire skills, build networks, and strengthen PalestinianCauses so that if my family survives, if our people can return and rebuild, there will be something or anything tangible to contribute. Every theory I learn, every line of code I write, feels stained with the dust and blood of Gaza. It is an education paid for with suffering. I carry Gaza with me into every classroom, every meeting, every quiet moment of study. It is the ghost in the machine, the unwritten chapter in every textbook, the silent scream behind every academic discussion. This is the weight of witnessing from a distance. This is what it feels like to study at UWC while my home, family, and people are being destroyed. It is a complex, unbearable burden, lifted only slightly by the desperate hope that it can, somehow, be turned into a tool for justice, for rebuilding, for a future where such a diary entry would be an artifact of a terrible past, not a reflection of a brutal present. The ink feels heavy tonight. The thoughts are a tangled mess. But this is the truth, unfiltered. This is my diary from the eye of the storm, far away yet inextricably bound.
The screen is finally showing the right thing. The crucial update is live. My eyes ache, raw and tired after a night glued to this monitor. It is 05:08 in the morning. Another night vanished into pixels and problem-solving here in Cape Town. I have been battling a stubborn issue that made it difficult, sometimes impossible, for new diaries to be perfectly saved and displayed on The Truth Museum pages. It is not a simple fix; it is one of those deep-seated snags that required taking everything apart and carefully putting it back together, testing every angle—hour after hour. And all those hours, I kept thinking of them. I think of L and M, whose incredible work involves preparing these vital testimonies and are eagerly awaiting the chance to see people's diary submissions flood into our new Museum. I think of N, whose outstanding art needs a solid platform for the world to see and who shares that excitement for this new space where we will collect the truth. Gym Rat, who is trying to gauge how our message is landing, needs the site to be consistently functional to understand our reach. They could not help me hunt down a digital problem; their fight is a different kind of urgent, physical, and immediate. They only need the tools to work whenever they get a window of possibility. Now, you understand how the pressure came from tonight. It is not the code itself – the logic, the structure. I trust the effort that I put in and the tests I write to catch the easy stuff. The real fight lies in forging a lifeline strong enough to bear the weight of the realities it connects. It is the awareness that my inability to fix this tonight means another delay for L and M trying to get a new diary online during a brief power window tomorrow. It describes another moment where someone outside, searching for truth, might hit a broken link. I feel intensely personal, this fight against a digital wall, knowing the actual walls and blockades they face constantly. So I pushed through the exhaustion, the frustration. Coffee cooled, and the sky outside began to lighten. It is not about proving I can fix the bug. It is about removing an obstacle between a voice in Gaza and the world that needs to hear it. Seeing that final confirmation – that the update is live and the system is accepting new entries correctly – felt like opening a small, vital channel just a little wider. It is 05:08 in the morning. My small victory here ensures the path is ready for their monumental courage in my homeland. The fight continues on screens and the ground, connected by threads of determination and the unwavering power of truth.
I don’t know what I should name this. Is this a diary, or is it a summary of stories that can’t be summarized? Who said that words can describe what we have been living through? There are horrible stories you’re not ready to hear; stories we thought only happened in the movies we watched—but this time, we were the victims in the film! Everyone in this goddamn world was watching us, but no one took a real action! We were living in one of the highest population densities in the world, under gunfire, bombs, rockets, and flare bombs, yet to the world, it was as if nothing was happening. I saw homelessness, loss, confusion, and hesitation in the eyes around me. Our eyes were talking on our behalf. But if I start writing about what was happening, where should I begin? When I found out my best friend had died along with her entire husband’s family while I kept calling her daily, not knowing she was already gone? Or should I start when half of my family was forced to flee to the unknown—to southern Gaza—where all we knew was that they had to leave? No, maybe I should start when we learned that my sister’s apartment had been bombed and she still hadn’t paid off the financial costs of the apartment. Or when we were under bombardment, certain we wouldn’t survive? No, I should start when my pregnant sister had to walk kilometers without rest, without even daring to look back, or…........ Do you think this is all that was happening?! We weren’t searching for food or water, as some claim—we were searching for peace, which no longer existed. The peace, in my opinion, was sitting among my family—I mean half of my family, because half of my family was in the south and the other half in the north of Gaza! We didn’t care about what the news said about us; it was all nonsense. We were asking ourselves, will this genocide end? We did not have any hope in. But if it actually ended, it would end just in the ground. Do you think it would end with who had lost his family, to who had lost his home, to who had lost everything? Once, I tried to escape my reality by losing myself in Radwa Ashour’s novel Al-Tantouriya, but I failed—the same horrors were happening in the book! Since 1948, we’ve been living the same nightmare, the same crimes, the same victims! Wait—who am I writing to? And what am I waiting for? No one cares. Basmala