As-salamu alaykum - A grandmother keeps family and hope alive in Gaza
As-salamu alaykum. Hiam Muqdad, 62, wakes each morning in the rubble of her Gaza City neighborhood to care for her grandchildren, who walk barefoot through dust and ruined streets to fetch water. Holding large black buckets and their grandmother’s hand, the little ones seem to move through the destruction without fully understanding the scale of what’s been lost: piles of rubble, twisted metal and collapsed buildings everywhere.
Muqdad says she goes out every day with the children to look for water - sometimes they find enough for a few days, sometimes none. “Children no longer say ‘I want to go to nursery or school’ but rather ‘I want to go get water or food or a food parcel,’” she told me. “The child’s dream is gone.” Where they once played in parks, now they play on the rubble.
The children’s parents live in Khan Yunis in the south, and at a mound of broken breeze blocks the kids scrambled for bits they could use to make a fire: torn cardboard, an empty milk carton, a plastic bottle and a few thin twigs. With that small fuel, they walked back to their makeshift home.
Muqdad lost her house and relatives during the war. When a US-brokered truce began in October, the family returned to Al Nasr neighborhood and set up a tent in what remained of their home. “When they said there was a truce, oh my God, a tear of joy and a tear of sadness fell from my eye,” she said, thinking of those she lost.
Her house was completely destroyed. Now sheets of battered corrugated metal mark a small patch of sand where the family lives under a Palestinian flag. The street outside is flattened; only building skeletons remain.
Each morning, while the sun is still low, Muqdad comes out of the igloo-shaped tent and tries to bring some order to their displaced life. She shows the grandchildren the pasta they’ll cook on an open fire and smiles that it will fill their bellies, though she cannot buy vegetables or anything else because there is no money and no income.
Gaza’s services are crippled after two years of war, and the territory is buried under huge amounts of debris. Muqdad says clearing the rubble is important, not just to rebuild but because the destruction is hurting the children’s spirits. The kids sit on mats in the sunlight, or on overturned buckets, playing quietly between chores. After their trip to collect water and fire material, Muqdad washes clothes by hand in a large metal basin. At night they bring thin foam mattresses into the tent and light a candle because there is no electricity.
Despite everything, Muqdad still hopes. “We want to bring life back even a little, and feel that there is hope,” she says. May Allah ease their hardship and reunite families, and may the children find safety, schooling and a peaceful future.
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