Najwa Sheikh Ahmed

A year has passed since the Israeli war on the besieged Gaza, a war that left more than one thousand innocent children, women and elderly people killed, a tremendous destruction of houses, universities, hospitals, schools, and infrastructure.

This malicious act of killing and destruction reached every thing and every where in Gaza, where complete families have been killed without any mercy of the screams of their children or women, without any regret. Complete districts have been flattened to the ground; agricultural lands have been bulldozed not for any reason but to keep more pain and bitterness inside the people of Gaza.

For the world both the international and Arab, the war had ended since the Israeli pulled their tanks and stopped targeting the people of Gaza. However, for us, the Gazan people who witnessed it, the war is still continues in our heads, minds, and ears.

We no more hear the frequent bombings, shootings, and the roaring of the apaches and F16s on top of our heads on reality, we no more pray when we hear the F16 that Allah may save us all, but inside us, inside our minds, ears, and hearts the war and all the kind of fears we face are still strongly living.

The sound of the heavy bombings and the F16 is still roaring in our ears, and images of the dead bodies lying on the ground, amputated, is still in our minds and eyes, and the destruction that hit every house, school, clinic , university in still freaking us all.

For me, for my children, as well as for all of the Palestinians in Gaza the war is still not over, and will not be over, because this time the pain and the size of damages are greater than our capacity as humans to forget or even to forgive.

The war is not over at least for my 3 years old Salma as she freaks out and hide behind my back when we were watching a helicopter in one of the action movies.
The war is not over for those who lost their houses, and live in a tent, or in what is left from their houses, since a complete year unable to protect their children form the cold, from the winds that might tear out their tents or from the risks that the walls of the left house might fall on their heads.

The war is not over for those survived children, girls, boys; and women who watched the rest of their family killed in front of their eyes, leaving them ruminate their pain, and live the event over and over again.

The war is not over for those who have to flee their houses in the middle of the night with their children screaming, barefooted, seeking refuge to an UNRWA school where they think that they will be safe, but discover later amid their fears that no place is safe when the missiles of the Israeli planes broke into the ceiling of the killing the children in the arms of their mother, burning their flesh and bones.

I can not say that the war is over, and that we lived the year after gathering ourselves to survive, because with each time I see one of the Israeli Generals on the TV threatening of another war on Gaza, I can not stop myself from trembling and fearing to live the same experience again, and hearing the sound of the bombing again.

Therefore, the war is still living in Gaza, in each house, with each individual as far as Gaza is still sealed, and as long as we still living under the mercy of our occupier, and as long as we can not live in a respected way as the rest of the world.

We will live in a continuous war if not on reality, on our minds, souls, and ears, a war that we as human beings will not be able to conquer.

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Najwa Sheikh Ahmed, Nusierat Camp, Gaza Strip. Najwa Sheikh's blog: http://www.najwa.tk/