In Gaza, even saying goodbye has become a privilege too rare to hold. Where once farewells were marked with final embraces, silent prayers, and tearful shrouds, today they are reduced to dropped calls, trembling voices, and blurry videos watched hours too late. The cruelty of war in Gaza isn’t just measured in lives lost—but in the sacred moments stolen.
Funerals are now streamed, not attended. Mothers press play instead of their children’s hands. Fiancées cry into voicemails, desperate for one more whisper, one more sign. The living mourn without closure; the dead are buried without touch. In Gaza, a final kiss is no longer a right—it’s a memory denied.
Malak Ziyad, the wife of martyred journalist Ismail Al-Ghoul, recalls how her final conversation with him was heartbreakingly ordinary. “He told me not to worry. That everything was okay,” she said. Then the line went dead. Hours passed. The news came. “I searched for any footage of his funeral. It took days. That was how I said goodbye—to a video on a cracked screen.”
For journalist Samah Hijazi, grief came as a scream. Her family was fleeing near Kamal Adwan Hospital when an Israeli missile hit. “My sister called—she was panicking: ‘Dad and Mu’ath… they’re gone.’” She lost her father, her two brothers, her cousin, her grandmother, and her aunts. “Not a single goodbye,” she said. “No last words. No bodies for some. Just silence where their voices used to be.”
Even across borders, the heartbreak finds no distance. Intisar Al-Saafin, a mother in Qatar, recognised her son Ahmad’s face in the wreckage of a café bombing in Gaza. She saw the photo before anyone told her. She never held him again. “My goodbye,” she whispered, “was through a trembling call. I prayed into the screen: ‘May your soul rest in peace, my love.’”
This is Gaza today: a place where the dead often leave without farewells, and the living carry wounds that no time can mend. In the absence of embraces, grief clings to signals and pixels—too fragile to hold, too painful to forget.
Source : Safa News
