The Longest Two Seconds Amid Gaza’s Two Years of Conflict | A Personal Reflection
The sound of bullets whizzing just past my feet and sinking into the sand was almost hypnotic. It didn’t feel real until a man with a weapon shouted at me to find cover.
I quickly ducked behind a car, all alone. Just a few meters away, a van was filled with journalists. A bodyguard stood by the door, yelling for me to run over to them. I dashed across the open space, bullets buzzing in my ears. Those felt like the longest two seconds of my life.
Libya in 2011 was the toughest time I’d faced as a journalist. Then came Gaza.
I’ve never been to Gaza myself. Since the war started, I’ve been coordinating coverage from the newsroom. I’m honestly ashamed to admit that compared to what others go through there, every day here felt like another Libya: a rush between facing reality and death, trying to understand how mass killing could become normal, how injustice could be ignored.
No matter how many stories we produced or headlines we made, it never felt enough. It couldn’t capture the full scale of the suffering on the ground. That truth - that our words have limits - has stayed with me for 24 months.
When the ceasefire was announced on Friday, my thoughts immediately went to the journalists who lost their lives covering this war. Fathers, mothers, people who risked everything just to tell the truth and were killed by Israeli fire. I saw videos of journalists walking through Gaza’s dark streets, announcing the war’s end, their voices shaky between disbelief and exhaustion. Others held up pictures of colleagues they lost. It stirred a mix of feelings in me: guilt for not being there, relief that the killing stopped, and anger that no one will be held accountable.
One of the scariest moments in these two years was when my colleague on the ground, sister Nagham, went silent after her area was bombed. We lost contact with her for hours. We called every connection we had in Gaza, desperate to know she was alive. When we finally heard she was safe, the relief was overwhelming.
Nagham, a mother of two, soon decided to leave Gaza. She walked several kilometers with her children and a few belongings, crossing into Egypt and then to a country where she didn’t know the language or anyone. I haven’t met her in person yet. I only knew her from a photo and her calm voice over WhatsApp, guiding her children as they walked under Israeli fire. I kept imagining that scene, thinking of the images I’ve seen of other mothers making that same journey.
Back at the desk, there’s another kind of struggle - asking colleagues to write about Gaza, scrolling through endless photos of loss, destruction, and sorrow, trying to pick the one picture that tells the story best. It reminded me of 2006, when I worked at a newspaper in Beirut during another Gaza conflict. One night, I checked if the editor working on the Gaza story was done. I found him crying, scrolling through photos. He paused on a picture of a mother killed with her three children at their doorstep, their bodies tangled after an Israeli strike. He couldn’t move on. I had to step in and encourage him to keep going. He did - every day, through tears, until that war ended with the same heartbreak. Just like this one.
Israel’s war in Gaza has dragged on for two years, but something changed in me exactly nine months ago when I learned I was going to be a father. My years covering war zones, especially in Iraq, already changed me. They brought me close to people, and somehow made me calmer, more patient, more adaptable. But this time, Gaza felt different. Covering this war while knowing I was about to raise a child in this world created something new inside me, something I still can’t put into words. It reminded me of when grief first hit me four years ago and never really left - like seeing a new color for the first time.
Today, there’s a ceasefire. And in two weeks, I’ll become a father. That thought gives me hope that maybe this ceasefire will last, so one day I can tell my daughter she was born during a time of peace. And maybe, just maybe, I can take her to Gaza, to see the olive trees, meet the warm-hearted Palestinians of that generous land, and swim in the sea that’s now off-limits.
I don’t know if I’ll still be working as a journalist then. But I know I won’t be going there to report. I’ll be going so she can believe that beauty can still grow from a place that has seen so much suffering.
And to meet one of her father’s heroes: sister Nagham and her children.
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