Where My Street Remains

During my last month in Gaza (August 2025), while continuing my work as a journalist for international organizations, I began collecting photos from friends and friends of friends: Each photo came with a voice note that told the story and memory behind the image.

On August 27, 2025, I left Gaza for the first time in my life. As the bus was taking me and my fellow evacuees, including other journalists, to the border, I was overwhelmed with the damage and destruction we drove through, the places I had always taken for granted in my homeland. I then understood just how important the photos and memories I was collecting were. They tell the personal side of memory, not the geopolitical or archaeological. They are not marred by the passage of time and displacement and the long distance of the 5,000 years of Gaza’s history now being erased. These unedited voice notes have been recorded at the moment of a calculated massacre of us Palestinians, our land, and our identity.

The voices telling these stories do not indulge in blame or anger, but rather these are friends talking to friends about memories, some long ago, some yesterday, amid grief, the unknown future, and the great awareness that they themselves might not survive tomorrow. Some of the stories speak to the last memories with family and friends, but many of the stories are about life before-- birthdays, graduations, favourite pizza places, and adventures at heritage sites and gardens, and farms that no longer exist. They are not political or accusatory-- and never self-pitying. They are personal, yet speak to the resilience of the Palestinian spirit in the midst of this genocide, rooted in current memory and inherited memory.

I continue to collect photos and record voice notes in Gaza with my friends and family still there. This is how I can make the people of Gaza individuals, rather than a collective mass engulfed in tragedy.

In July 2025, I also built a file for all the geographical points in Gaza—streets, neighborhoods, and certain landmark buildings, with a description of each location. My goal is to include stories for each place, with the understanding of what it is to be a human being in this place, a place two million people call home.