The lights flicker above me, casting strange shadows across my eyelids. Even anesthetized, I can feel the surgeon’s hands roaming in my belly, seeking to yield the quiet occupant. A flood surges through me. A.’s eyes are locked on mine. I try and fail to tell him that this is painful, and he tries to make sense of what I’m failing to release. An unfamiliar voice: “The baby is out.” A.’s hand presses mine. I see a tiny body cloaked in a strange white film. I’m shivering badly. My head is heavy. I need to focus. She’s safe. Real. Alive. She made it out alive. I collapse into stillness.
A. and I learned that I was pregnant just one month before the war broke out. At my first and only doctor’s appointment, I insisted that I wanted to print a picture of the life growing inside me. I asked for this again and again, and the obstetrician told me again and again that nothing was visible yet. Like any new mom-to-be, I wanted to collect memories of this miraculous experience. I couldn’t on that day, and I was denied later as well. A. and I were denied any chance to check on R.’s health and development for the final eight months she nestled in my womb. We were denied the ultrasound photos we were supposed to collect from every stage of the pregnancy. We were denied the opportunity to revel in the precious snapshots, turning each one over and writing how it felt to see her curled up there, ever closer to meeting the world. As a pregnant woman in a time of war, I clung to whatever I could. I downloaded an app called Pregnancy +. Each month, it would send me a celebratory message: “Congratulations, you’ve reached the third month! Your baby is now the size of a lime”; “You’re now four months along, and your baby is the size of an avocado!” It was abstract, way too abstract for me. I wanted something to hold on to; I wanted to experience this. I was desperate.
When the war started, A. and I had to evacuate our apartment in Gaza City. We traveled 30 kilometers to his parents’ home in the south, where my family joined us after a month and a half. “A month and a half” and “30 kilometers” sound like things you can count. But these measurements meant nothing—not when the cell phone network was cut off and the silence consumed us, not when we couldn’t be sure we would ever see our families, the people closest to our hearts, again. In Rafah, my family and my in-laws crammed into one house—15 adults, four kids, and the abstract thought of the baby growing inside me.
As the war dragged into its second month, rumors swirled that all Gazans would be exiled to Sinai. One night, as A. and I were lying on our thin mattresses on the ground, the sound of F-16 jets indiscriminately unloading their bombs punctuating the dark, I whispered, “I’m having a conflict in my head about how the future looks for us. I yearn for the good old days, for the apartment we lived in happily for six months as newlyweds. But all I can see before me is a bare life of tents in the Sinai desert.” A. hugged me and reassured me that we would return to our home in Gaza City. I held onto that—I so wanted to believe it—and faded toward sleep.
It’s funny to think about this now. What started gradually has overtaken the entire Strip: Today, nearly all Gazans are displaced and living in tents. There are hardly any buildings left standing. It’s been a year—a year of turning Gaza into an uninhabitable place, of robbing us of necessities like electricity and water, of separating people from one another, of endless loss and suffering, of yearning for what has been stolen from us. This war has surpassed all that a human mind can endure.
At the beginning of the war, I took solace in the fact that I was just two months pregnant; of course, once my term was finished, the war would be over. I would reminisce about our apartment, imagining where we would put the baby’s crib. Our bedroom was tiny, so I thought we should make space by moving the two nightstands to the living room. When the internet was working, I would steal a few minutes to search Instagram for baby room designs, saving ones I liked so I could draw on them when we could go home. But even as I attempted to distract myself online, the horror we were living encroached. Logging onto Facebook, I would find my page flooded with condolences for newly martyred people. People I knew. People who had once been my colleagues at school or work. People I spent a lifetime with. People I loved. Women killed while pregnant. Fetuses pulled from under the rubble.
As if that weren’t enough, food shortages became the next plague. It was impossible to find flour. We started counting how many loaves of bread each person could have per day. At first it was two, but eventually it dropped to one; I was the exception, because I was pregnant. When gas shortages soon followed, we began collecting wood and paper items to generate heat for cooking. Once, A. bought his niece and nephew paper bags filled with juice as a treat. After drinking her bag, A.’s three-and-a-half-year-old niece told her grandpa, “I’m not throwing this bag away. I’m leaving it here so we can reuse it for cooking.”
By the fourth month of my pregnancy, I was losing hope. My mom reassured me that the war would end soon and then we would go shopping for beautiful baby clothes. But I was not reassured. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to give birth. I didn’t want to deliver this child into a world that would treat her as if she weren’t fully human. I had seen too many women bury their babies with their own hands. I wanted my baby to stay inside me forever, where she was safe. It was the only place I could protect her, the only refuge I had left to offer.
As I entered my seventh month, I knew deep down that the war would not end soon. There were no baby clothes anywhere. Every day, A. roamed the streets, searching for anything—a tiny shirt, a pair of socks—and every day he came back empty-handed. One afternoon, he returned to the house clutching four secondhand rompers, which he had purchased from an elderly man. The fabric was so poor that when I touched the little outfits my skin itched, but it didn’t matter. Everyone was so happy, eager to see the baby clothes. I washed them gently, as though they were the most precious and sacred things I could own.
Halfway through my eighth month, I began experiencing terrible cramps. A. accompanied me to the hospital. I remember overhearing a woman talking about what it was like to give birth during the war. She described it in stark detail—lying on a blood-covered bed without anesthesia, malnourished and too weak to nurse. You die of pain, she said. You regret having ever become pregnant.
I panicked. I wanted to leave Gaza no matter what it took. I wanted to have my baby safely. A dear friend of mine in the United States, M., wanted to help. She filled out applications for graduate programs on my behalf. Miraculously, two universities offered scholarships. A. and I borrowed money and registered for evacuation. Rafah, where over 1.4 million were sheltering, could be invaded at any moment. Every night, we held our breath. Every morning, we scanned the evacuation lists, looking for our names.
Just one week before Israel invaded Rafah, A. and I were able to leave. We left our families behind. We carry this guilt, an inescapable weight. We didn’t deserve safety more than they did. I didn’t deserve to give birth in a hospital with resources to care for patients more than any other pregnant woman in the Strip. It’s just the privilege of knowing someone abroad, of speaking English, of being able to secure money. The world does not see Gazans as human. We are just abstract ideas. The things we are facing don’t matter to them. They don’t need us.
By the time I arrived in Cairo, my body was frail, anemia and infections tightening their grip. The doctors quickly decided a C-section was necessary. R. was born to us, distant from the warmth of her grandparents, the teasing of her aunts and uncles. She was brought into a world I both cherish and fear. I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened had we stayed—whether either of us would have made it. When I held R. for the first time, her tiny warmth resting against me, I kissed her over and over, thanking her for holding on to me, to us. And now, as she nestles against me, each determined latch feels like a surge of life, a quiet exchange of energy filling us both with the power to be.