Summary
Palestinian writer and mother in Rafah, Gaza, author of “Let Me Dream” in Light in Gaza (2022), a memoir of a childhood under occupation, family separation by the border regime, and her dreams for her five children (Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, PDF p.242-257).
Details
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She is a refugee from Breer village; her grandparents were forced out in the 1948 Nakba and fled to a camp near Rafah, as did her husband’s grandparents from Hatta (PDF p.242-243).
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As a child she was befriended by an Arabic-speaking soldier, Ramee, who gave her candy to extract the names of demonstrators; soldiers ordered her father and the neighbourhood men to clean the streets, and killed all the men who remained inside the neighbourhood mosque after a raid (PDF p.244-245).
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At eighteen, in 2004, studying for the tawjihi exams under attack, she wished to die and scored 87 percent; she first told these childhood details in 2020 to a Yale student in a Reporting and Writing on War course and found she could not bear to tell them all (PDF p.247-248).
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Most of her family left Gaza for Egypt — her brothers Iyad and Abdullah, her father, then her mother after extreme border difficulty, and her sisters Doaa and Alaa and brother Fakher — and her closest brother Hasan later left for Germany after his visa expired while the Gaza-Egypt border was closed (PDF p.249-251).
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Her daughter Rawa’s first birthday, January 6, 2009, was spent fleeing bombardment to a relative’s house; the family celebrated survival and the birthday after the war (PDF p.251-252).
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She dreams of erasing the word “refugee” from her children’s vocabulary, of praying at Al-Aqsa, and of her own NGO for women’s empowerment; Rawa dreams of studying medicine in Turkey and Rahaf engineering in Germany (PDF p.255-257).
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The Contributors list (which names her Israa Jamal) records that she is an English literature graduate and a mother of five children who writes about life in Gaza and contributes to We Are Not Numbers (Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, PDF p.315).
Related pages
Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, Nakba, Gaza, Rafah Crossing