I have lived through many wars in Gaza, from when I was a child until I myself became a father of three. Like an overbearing guest, the war came and went as it pleased, leaving behind many scars. Time was only able to mend a few, while the rest painfully persisted on, never fully healed.
Many wars
Long before 2023, Gaza had been subject to blockade (since 2007) and regular military incursions over many years conducted by what Palestinians call ‘The Occupation’, as a means of avoiding the nominative legitimation of using the word ‘Israel’.Throughout all the wars Gaza has endured, I lived in the heavy shadows of fear and trauma, constantly afraid for myself, for my parents, my brothers and sisters, relatives, and close friends.
However, it all felt radically different, more prevalent and tangible during the wars that I witnessed as a father to children who believed I was a saviour, that I would be able to protect them from atrocious calamities they were facing for the very first time.
I was forced, in these moments, to provide answers to a deluge of questions, to children whose consciousnesses were being shaped by complex residuals of war —questions about life and death, danger and safety, remaining and leaving, memory and forgetfulness. Suddenly, they found themselves surrounded by terrifying sounds and scenes that pushed them into a narrow corner of the horizon, blocked and unfamiliar, and they were powerless to end any of it.
Fatherhood between philosophy and war
“This was inflicted upon me by my father, which I have not inflicted upon any other.” Abu al-Alaa al-Ma’arri asked for this famous line to be inscribed on his grave after his death, indicating his absolute rejection of procreation, and adamant refusal to implicate himself in the continuation of the human race after a lifetime spent trapped between two prisons: blindness, as he lost his sight at a young age, and voluntary exile, choosing to seclude himself from people and confining himself to his home in al-Ma’arra city for most of his life.
Abu al-Alaa al-Ma’arri
An Arab Abbasid poet and philosopher from al-Ma'arra, Syria; a famous deist, accepting the existence of a creator while being otherwise sceptical of religion; and an ascetic, consuming neither meat nor animal products. He lost his sight at the age of four after a bout of smallpox.
Al-Ma’arra
Now called Ma’arrat al-Numan, a city northwest of Syria.Al-Ma’arri’s verse encapsulates his view on fatherhood and procreation: rather than partaking in bringing more souls to a world drowning in filth and monstrosity, humans must abstain from reproducing as an act of mercy and moral responsibility. Bleak and morbid as it may seem, and perhaps selfish on the surface, this view reveals his prescience in a world marching towards ever greater ruin.
Al-Ma’arri’s philosophy thwarts all common conceptions about fatherhood, in which fathers are solid shields, protectors, guardians, caretakers, and any other attributes providing children with safety and a sense of belonging. Despite al-Ma’arri’s morbid view, for many years I looked to him in respect and contemplation. I held the view that bringing children into the world presents a profound ethical dilemma, a decision that is not to be made lightly or in surrender to some instinct.
I have always been, and still am, taken with the idea of family. I adore children. While it might be the morally merciful choice to not have kids in a place as monstrous as this, possibly driven by that same instinct, I got swept up. I created a family and had children. I admit I enjoyed it all; but it was costly at the same time.
A few years into marriage, I found myself a father to three children. I tried my best to be a father who embodied all the meanings of fatherhood, exactly like people the world over. This seemed possible and effective, up until the current war arrived, destroying all the beautiful metaphors I had clung to.
The war redefined fatherhood for me and my children, creating a significant rift with traditional roles, leaving us all to confront a new and bitter meaning.
The first night of terror: fatherhood tested by war
A month into the war, we were subjected to the most violent bombardment yet, near our home in Hamad City, Khan Younis. That night marked the first brutal test of my children’s view of their father. The shelling erupted after midnight, dozens of consecutive explosions set the city alight with bright reds and yellows, their blasts shaking the walls of our apartment, planting fear in our hearts. Seized by terror, we took refuge in a narrow corridor inside the house.
Shivering, my eldest son Baraa’ clung onto me, limbs shaking, lips blue, and body growing cold bit by bit. It wasn’t a mere momentary fear, rather a complete breakdown of a small child who knew nothing of life other than the safety of his home and my voice. I couldn’t calm him down or even hide my own fear.
I tried to convince him that we were safe, that the bombs weren’t as close as he thought they were, even if the blast sounded massive, even if he could see the glare of the explosions up close, or smell the gunpowder residue, even if I looked scared and was shaking like him. It was like trying to convince fire that water couldn’t suffocate it. I was scared the boy would die of fear. I told him: “The sun will come up in a few hours. As soon as dawn arrives, we’re heading out. We’ll leave the apartment, go somewhere safer.”
Baraa’ beseeched the sun to come up. As dawn approached, he’d remind me that we had to leave the apartment and that he wanted to go somewhere, anywhere else. While Baraa’ was begging the sun to hurry, I was berating myself: how evil, impulsive, and selfish was I when I decided to raise a child in a land marked for death such as ours? How helpless did I seem to him, unable to even convince him that I was a father able to protect him from death, or explain to him the complex realities of his young life he has had to survive? What an unforgivable sin.
That was the first obvious fracture of my son’s image of me, it was also a fracture of the image I had of myself as a father.
In an attempt to repair the damage as much as possible, not in the way that would make me feel capable of protecting my children at a time such as this, but to atone for the sin of bringing them into this world to experience all of this pain so young, I took it upon myself to flee with them before the bombs got closer, before enduring another night as frightful as that one.
The success of such a decision couldn’t be guaranteed, but it was something I could resort to while trying to escape my guilt complex triggered by the look in my child’s eyes, fear eating them alive as they realised how powerless I was to protect them.
Thereon, I commenced a series of continuous displacements to flee the fear my children might feel to places I thought safer.
Displacements
نزوه (nuzooh): forced internal displacement. In Palestine, there are two types of refugees: nazeh, the internally displaced within Palestinian cities, and laje’ the externally displaced to countries elsewhere. In Gaza, families have been forced to evacuate their homes and shelters multiple times, oftentimes onto the street, becoming refugees in their own city.Another fracture in fatherhood: when bread becomes more valuable than books
In November 2023, the first real wave of hunger reared its head in Gaza. Flour disappeared from the markets, bakeries closed their doors, and UNRWA warehouses containing tonnes of flour bags were ransacked.
UNWRA
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, established in 1949 in the wake of the 1948 Nakba (literally, the catastrophe) that led to the mass displacement of Palestinians from their homes in Palestine.
Towers
أبراج literally means towers. Even before the war destroyed and damaged as much as 90% of its homes, the Gaza Strip as a whole (not just the relatively more urban areas within it) was one of the most densely populated places on earth, with a density of at least 5,800 per kilometre (more, for example, than a city such as London; and with no surrounding less densely populated areas to which Gazans can move). In Gaza City, population density was many times higher. By necessity, multi-apartment residential tower blocks have characterised Gaza’s built environment. Hamad City in Khan Younis, where Mohammad and his family were living in October 2023, is a well-known complex of residential tower blocks, most now severely damaged or destroyed.After it disappeared from the market, I was able to get my hands on a single stolen UNRWA flour bag at a very high price. Yet it felt like I got my hands on a treasure.
Our joy was dark, muddled with guilt and uncertainty; flour alone didn’t make bread, and we did not have anything to bake with ever since cooking gas had vanished. Kneaded loaves of flatbread had to be baked in folk clay ovens traditionally used in the countryside. These ovens spread widely across all areas. Villager women, with much solidarity and generosity of spirit, baked bread for the families who could provide something to ignite the fire, things to throw inside, such as carton boxes, pages from books, and other materials.
At the time, my wife suggested we use two books from my library as fuel for the clay ovens, which began to spread among the towers. She gently explained: “Feeding our children now is more important than reading to them.”
Her words slapped me right in the face. I never imagined that my library, which I had built over the years, would be weighed against the hunger of my children.
The full gravity of the truth hit me right there and then. This collected memory, embodied in stacked books on a shelf, was worth nothing in the face of my children’s hunger in the time of war. I was shocked at the magnitude of the moment I found myself drowning in. How did things get so bad, so quickly?
There weren’t many options, but I somehow refused the predicament I was in and to which I was forced to find a solution. This was one more impossible test. Some might think I shouldn’t have felt that way, that nothing compares to standing helplessly in the face of your children’s hunger. But at the time, my sense of anticipated losses was compounded with disillusionment, and the fear of slipping still further into them. Which is why my response was: “There must be another way.” I had a special connection to my library. This is not a poetic image I had dreamed up. It was a reality I had lived for many years. This is why I strived to find another solution.
Although I was somehow able to provide enough material to bake my children’s bread without resorting to burning my library, that incident formed another early fracture in my definition of fatherhood.
This is how more serious scars began forming in the crux of fatherhood. I was a father who once thought he could save his children from hunger without the war eroding parts of his soul, memory, and essence, which he had imagined would stay whole. But that is what the war did.
A father’s weakness and a child’s weakness
In December 2023, after military vehicles stormed Khan Younis City, I decided to flee with my children, especially after I had promised myself not to subject them to the more atrocious terrors that would certainly arrive as the military vehicles advanced further. I headed to Rafah. On our first night there, while I was trying to close my eyes, whimpering wails and dry coughs filled the room.
Basel, my youngest, was suffering through a severe cold, almost running out of breath. His face had turned red, and his temperature grew alarmingly high. It was past 1am. I sat next to him, trying to calm him down and ease some of the pain gnawing at him.
I carried him in my arms and paced around the room trying to soothe his pain, but to no avail. His breath was growing shallow. I could see fear in his eyes like I had never witnessed before. Helplessness and loneliness grew inside of me like a dark cloud. I told myself: “If I were in Khan Younis, next to my mother, she would’ve known what to do in such a moment. If I were near my siblings, I would at least know where to ask for help.” A storm of regret came over me. I felt like I failed my duty, that in this war, I was no longer a father capable of providing protection. However, despite everything, I could do nothing but persist.
I left the room. On both sides of the long corridor, several men were sleeping: a young man in his thirties, two elderly men, and a few teenagers. Carefully, I approached the thirty-year-old and gently woke him up. He slowly opened his eyes and whispered: “What’s happening?” I responded: “My son is sick, he’s coughing a lot, he has a fever and he’s out of breath. Can you help?” Trying to be fully awake, he responded: “Honestly, I don’t know what to do. Hold on a minute. Let me wake up Abu Bayan, he’s a pharmacist, he might be able to help you.”
And so, we went and woke him up together. He seemed calm and collected, a serene man with a heart-soothing temperament.
He got up and asked: “Khair? What’s wrong with the child?” I explained what was happening. Sympathetically, he nodded, responding: “I don’t have the medicine you need, but use this powder to rub on his feet. And take this pill, split it into two halves and stir one half into a spoonful of water. Make him drink it. Insha’Allah this will make him better.”
Khair
May all be good.
Insha’Allah
God willing.I took the medicine and went back to Basel. I sat next to him and did exactly as Abu Bayan told me. All that was running through my head was whether Basel saw me as I wanted him to see me, as a protective father—or was the war taking this away from me bit by bit? And then again, I thought, even in the moments of my weakness, I tried to support him. Perhaps I could provide neither medicine nor safety—but he had my heart, my arms, my worry, and all the remaining love within me which the war failed to destroy.
In the vastness of war, the pillars of fatherhood crumble and the charming cultural stereotypes held in our imagination unravel. Fathers are no longer solid fortresses shielding against danger. Rather they hang between fear and weakness, between helplessness and endless responsibility. Fatherhood here isn’t a mere act of protection or care, but rather a deep existential experience, a confrontation with the constant collapse of self and identity, where morality meets pain, and dreams clash into reality.
In this cruel test, despite their own personal fragility, fathers encompass a deeper meaning of love and sacrifice, trying to mold a new life for their children out of the ashes of ruin, their hearts carrying the echoes of larger questions about life, death, and meaning in a world where safety crumbles and the future fades. Thus, fatherhood isn’t a mere daily act, but a continuous process of contemplation and suffering—a search for the faintest light amidst complete darkness.
Original article “أن تكون أبًا في زمن الإبادة” published by 7iber on 22 May 2025.
Muhammad al-Zaqzouq is a writer, editor and researcher from Khan Younis, Gaza. His poetry collection Betrayed by the Soothsayers was awarded the 2018 Al Khalili Prize for Poetry. He has published short stories, regular book and film reviews and opinion pieces in magazines and journals. He was responsible for running an extensive network of community libraries at the Tamer Institute for Community Education, a Palestinian organisation that works with children, young people, and caregivers across Palestine. His poetry has been translated into French and his pieces have also appeared in the New York Review of Books, De Standaard in Belgium and Il Manifesto in Italy.
Note from Nour Jaljuli, translator: “When translating, I have encountered my fair share of texts from Palestine, yet rendering these accounts into English never gets easier, especially the ones coming out of Gaza. I have found the best way necessitates some willful dissociation to get through the work without having my emotions stand in the way of honouring these stories. Along with the rest of the globe, over the past two years, I have witnessed the failure of language time and again. No words can capture what Gazans have been subjected to.”
