BY Gawhara Madkour
I arrived in Beirut on the very day Israel began bombing.
I chose to go to Lebanon, knowing war was coming. Something inside me refused to go any further from home. I chose what felt familiar, no matter the cost.
It was surreal — hearing drones circling above, knowing they could end my life in an instant. I was raised on the Palestinian cause, on understanding Israel as a settler-colonial project. But I never imagined I’d one day be this close to its violence.
It felt like a dream, or more accurately, a nightmare, especially after over a year of genocide in Gaza.
One of my closest friends, Sami, lives in Gaza. I’ve lived this war with him, every moment. I remember the sound of tanks in the background while on the phone with him. I remember going back to SMS when the internet failed— a forgotten method, suddenly revived.
Through him, I learned how survival becomes a daily task.
When I told him I was now in Beirut and that war had begun, his response broke me. He mourned for me. He didn’t want me to go through what he’d lived. He gave me survival tips:
A bag with power banks, cash, ID papers, and chargers. Keep it under your bed, just in case.
That was the moment it hit me:
None of us is safe.
And when I say “us,” I mean all of us in the Global South, especially in SWANA.
As long as the settler colonial project exists, we are all in danger.
During the same week, Sami was displaced for the 14th time. The Israeli Occupation Forces were advancing on Jabalia Camp, where he lived with his mother. I couldn’t reach him. I was losing my mind. The world felt unbearably small: just Gaza and Lebanon, no in-between, no safe exit.
I couldn’t understand how the world kept turning, how people elsewhere could go on with their lives as if nothing was happening. If life didn’t stop at this exact moment and if all humans didn’t rise up in revolt, then something inside me whispered: nothing makes sense anymore.
To ease the weight of the days, I created a shared Google Doc for Sami and me. I called it: “Smsm + gogo = love forever.” We poured our thoughts and grief into it quietly when words were too heavy to say aloud. It was a way to carry our pain together, and to document what must not be forgotten. There is one text from Sami I will never forget. I know it by heart.
“My heart is still heavy.
The night is full of bad dreams.
I still think of Aya, I don’t know if she’s still under the rubble.
I don’t know if she’s whole or in pieces.
40,000 martyrs… and still, death feels strange.
As if I’m hearing about it for the first time.
How will my loved ones return from the South, and my aunt not return with them?
I’m still hopeful that she will. That if they return, she will too.
But how… if she is dead?
What do I do with all the scenarios I imagined hugging her after the war, talking endlessly.
Where do I put those words now?
The body parts we found on the street the day after the ceasefire, we collected them, wrapped them, and buried them.
I wonder about their families. Do they know?
Maybe it’s easier to know your loved one is dead than to live with not knowing.
I still imagine the ceiling collapsing on us at any moment.
I wish I could keep reading ‘The Story of Civilization’ series, but I can’t.
I have no energy to see anything.
I deleted the news channels from Telegram.
News about displacement hits me like a stone.
Displacement is the most bitter part of war, more than shelling, more than siege, more than hunger.
To sit in a place — even just for a week — and convince yourself it’s home.
To fall into a routine.
To have new neighbors, new friends.
And then, suddenly, be asked to leave.
And to repeat this cycle ten, twelve times.
It’s torture. A kind of pain that can’t be described.”
After a week of war, I needed to do something — anything — to stop myself from falling apart. I started volunteering at a community kitchen, preparing food for displaced families. We worked like a beehive. None of us knew each other, yet simply being together gave us reassurance.
By coincidence, I found myself helping in a Christian convent running a shelter for migrant domestic workers abandoned by their employers when the war began. Within three weeks, we had formed deep bonds. We loved each other fiercely. It reminded me how much we share: our pain, our joy, our stories. We danced, cried, laughed, and fought.
And I was reminded: we in the Global South only have each other. Our enemy is one.
This year has felt like the death of everything I once believed. Survival itself has changed meaning. I did not survive. None of us did.
I feel a deep, almost unbearable sadness about the state of the world and a rage so fierce it threatens to explode and consume everything around me.
Once, after a bomb went off nearby, I rushed to Instagram for updates. The first post I saw was about something completely unrelated, something to do with sexual health, and I laughed at the absurdity.
But then I realized: we are all complicit.
By we, I mean all of us who work in NGOs, including feminist organizations. We operate using human rights frameworks created not to liberate us, but to protect those in power.
And when Gaza put these systems to the test, undeniably, brutally, they failed.
The mask fell.
These systems were never built for us. They control us differently — through diplomacy, sanctions, and frameworks that punish people but protect regimes. Mechanisms that never touch the powerful who can manipulate, sidestep, or ignore them.
Yet we convince ourselves we’re resisting. Millions spent on luxury hotels, salaries inflated above local economies, and enough comfort to keep us from questioning too deeply. And comfort — the fear of losing it — makes many hesitate before taking real risks.
So we stay. We stay in these roles, in these circles.
I still believe in justice, in accountability, in the urgent need for systems that protect human life and dignity. What I no longer believe is that such systems can be built with tools given to us by those funding our killing. They cannot fund our liberation. We in this field must face that truth. Only then can we break free from the donor’s grip and build mechanisms truly ours — not for containment, but for freedom.
I write these words knowing they will never be enough.
There is no language vast enough to hold what we’ve lived.
But still, I write: to resist erasure, to remember, to name what must not be normalized.
I am part of a generation scattered and stubborn, betrayed and burning.
We are not symbols. We are not case studies.
We are witnesses.
We are still alive.
And that, in itself, is already defiance.