Hassan Ayman Herzallah

For months, I had watched our pile of firewood shrink. We didn’t burn it to keep warm but reserved it for cooking. Smoke got into everything: our faces, our hair, our clothes, the blankets we tried to sleep under at night. Then, at the end of January, my father received a message on his phone: ‘Bring your gas cylinders to the distribution point to receive your share of cooking gas.’

My friend Mahmoud called to check on me at the beginning of January. We hadn’t been in touch for a while. I told him, as always, that I missed our days at university. Then, joking, I asked if he was free to invite me over sometime. Mahmoud was making a fire, with his mother sitting beside him. ‘Do you remember the days of hunger, Hassan?’ she asked. 

I enrolled at the Islamic University of Gaza in 2022. As I started my second year, I hoped I would do well enough to get a scholarship to spend the second semester as an exchange student at a university abroad. A few weeks later war broke out. Everything in Gaza came to a halt; education was suspended at all institutions. We began to live from one day to the next, never knowing what the next day would bring. With the borders closed, the only way to leave Gaza was by paying a fixer $5000 or more per person, an impossible amount for my family. Our home was destroyed. We moved into a tent in a camp where I knew no one.

In the first week of November I was sitting with my mother in the tent in al-Mawasi in southern Gaza. ‘We can’t stay here through the winter,’ she said. ‘Our tents are worn out.’