Wounds in my body, scars in my heart
Days after we published her essay about reporting from Gaza amid Israeli attacks on journalists, a Palestinian reporter was injured by an explosive dropped from an Israeli drone
Ansam Al-Kitaa in Gaza
Days after we published her essay about reporting from Gaza amid Israeli attacks on journalists, a Palestinian reporter was injured by an explosive dropped from an Israeli drone as she walked with her family. Seven weeks into the Gaza ‘ceasefire’, she writes for us again.
For two years of blood, death, and fear, we waited for news of a ceasefire. But when the announcement came on 9 October, my feelings froze. I couldn’t believe it was real. I didn’t believe the war had truly ended.
For the first weeks of the truce, fear that the bombing would return inhabited us. The Israeli occupation stole even our hope – for life, for joy, for a real end of the casualty counts and grim news bulletins.
True to our fears, the strikes never completely ceased.
We’ve lived through a compounded tragedy that cannot be described or imagined. Bombing, starvation, and forced evacuation.
We try, as journalists still living in Gaza, to document part of the truth and suffering, but our pens, cameras, and even our voices stand helpless before the enormity of this catastrophe.
My mind returns often to the days before 7 October 2023 when we had lives, routines, families, and photographs.
Between then and now are the days I wish I didn’t remember. Like the afternoon of 13 September 2025. At about 1pm, I was walking with my family near Tamraz station on Al-Nafaq Street when a drone dropped an explosive. The blast was deafening. With my mother, my brother Sameh, and my brother Mohammed’s wife Hala, we ran toward a nearby mechanic’s shop.
I felt a sharp pain and blood quickly began pouring from my side and both of my feet. I wasn’t the only one injured. Sameh was bleeding and dizzy; our mother, who was desperately checking us for injuries, seemed to be bleeding from her entire body too. She came to me, then towards Sameh, then towards Hala. She didn’t seem to feel her own pain. Her fear for us was stronger than her wounds.
For half an hour we stayed inside the mechanic’s shop waiting for an ambulance that never arrived. A few young men tightly bandaged our wounds to stop the bleeding.
We found a private car that took us to the hospital, where medical teams faced a flood of injured people, each waiting their seemingly interminable turn.
The scene inside the hospital was gruesome: corridors packed with injured, bleeding, and screaming people. Beside us, an injured man was screaming in agony as he called for his fiancée who had just lost her life. Next to him, a crying mother pleaded for anyone to save her bleeding son.
I couldn’t stop my tears.
I cried like I’d never done before.
Everything that had accumulated inside me during the two years of reporting the genocide came out all at once. A terrible fear that I would be hit by shrapnel had accompanied me since the start of this war. It had now come to pass. I feared that my foot would need amputation and thought: I would prefer death.
When the doctor arrived, she sent me for X-rays. I could barely walk to the room and when I got there, the machine needed charging so I waited another half hour.
After the X-ray, my wound was dressed and, exhausted, I left for the arduous journey “home”, to where we were staying after being displaced.
I was among the lucky ones who left a hospital in Gaza with an intact body in those months.
My left foot injury began bleeding heavily again and I went to another hospital, Al-Shifa Medical Complex, because it was closer. There it was cleaned, disinfected, and I got several stitches. During that procedure, I lost consciousness from exhaustion.
About a month later, on 9 October, the truce was signed.
What truce?
Despite the “official” ceasefire, the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains catastrophic, with prices still elevated beyond people’s capacity to bear them.
Not enough aid arrived to satisfy the hunger of thousands of families exhausted by siege and starvation.
Even in supposed peacetime, the war inhabits the details of our daily lives – in bread lines, in the eyes of mothers searching for medicine, in children’s fear of any loud sound.
We still live by force, with no luxury in our choices and no space for rest as we breathe amid the rubble and convince ourselves that survival is a form of life.
I couldn’t stop my tears. I cried like I’d never done before. Everything that had accumulated inside me during the two years of reporting the genocide came out all at once.
Yet, even survival was not guaranteed, as Israel broke the ceasefire to kill hundreds more people in the first three weeks. By 20 October, it had killed nearly 100 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 230 more, Al Jazeera reported. In a 24hour period between 28 and 29 October, it killed another 100 people, including 46 children.
Pain and anxiety from the injuries in my feet has weighed me down and forcibly distanced me from my own reporting work, which was always my only livelihood and means of resistance.
I have barely been able to change my wound dressing, which causes painful inflammation and makes walking difficult. Medicine is nearly non-existent and sterilisation tools, gauze, and antibiotics are rare. Most hospitals in Gaza have been forcibly put out of service.
Around Gaza, sporadic killings continue. On Monday, an Israeli drone killed two Palestinians east of Khan Yunis and a shelling killed another person in Gaza City.
And still we live
I try to remember my dreams before the war: a master’s degree in gender and development studies felt so close to my grasp. I’ve begun searching again for an opportunity to continue my studies – a small attempt to reclaim myself and what was stolen. With death, injury, fear, loss, and pain, the war changed our futures and stole our dreams. Perhaps I won’t recover quickly and perhaps the scars in my body and memory will accompany me for a long time. But I’ll keep trying: staying alive with hope in Gaza is the truest form of resistance.