In Gaza, where two years of unrelenting bombardment have carved silence into the landscape, the words of Aya Abu Nasr have become a refuge for memory. She has endured more than most can fathom, surviving repeated brushes with death yet losing more than 150 relatives in a single instant. Her writing now rises from the rubble as a refusal to let the faces she loved be reduced to entries in the chronicle of a genocidal war.

Aya describes herself simply as a human being before anything else: a mother, a sister, a daughter, a woman trying to steady herself amid the collapse of everything familiar. Displaced on the first day of the war, she took shelter in her family’s home, unaware that the decision which saved her life would leave her carrying unbearable grief. Days later, a short phone call shattered what remained of certainty. She recalls the moment she was told of the mass killing of her relatives, a memory so heavy it continues to echo painfully whenever she tries to speak of it.

With nothing left untouched by loss, Aya turned to writing as the only space not destroyed around her. She began setting down the names, dreams and small details that made her loved ones human, determined that the world should know they were not statistics. Her words eventually formed a book, a testimony not only to her own family but to countless others whose stories risk disappearing. She wrote on children’s notebooks, on scraps of paper salvaged from the debris, even during bombardment. Many pages were burnt or lost, yet she continued, convinced that failing to write meant surrendering memory to oblivion.

Her work soon expanded beyond her personal grief. Aya collected the voices of mothers who had buried their children, families uprooted again and again, and children navigating hunger, dust and fear. She gathered these testimonies as though piecing together fragments of a shattered place, hoping to preserve traces of lives the world too easily overlooks. Every account she records is, for her, an act of resistance against erasure, a reminder that the people of Gaza lived full lives, dreamed freely, and deserved a world that recognised their humanity.

What drives Aya forward, even in the bleakest moments, is the belief that despair is a luxury Gaza cannot afford. She insists that every child’s laughter, every small act of survival, is a reason to hold on. Through her writing, she seeks not only to document the past but to safeguard the dignity of a people who refuse to be forgotten.