‘Gaza, the Game the Elephant Swallows Every Time’
Writer Husam Maarouf returns to Deir al-Balah in what feels like the same displacement and return he experienced only months ago.
Gaza, the Game the Elephant Swallows Every Time
By Husam Maarouf
Every time I try to understand Gaza, I find myself more confused.
I tell myself: this isn’t a city—it’s an ancient mystery, an unsolved puzzle scattered across the earth.
Gaza feels like an idea born to test the limits of human endurance, or perhaps to teach the cruelest kind of love, the one that offers no escape.
At night, I wake as if tending to a feverish lover.
I press cool cloths to her brow, feeling her pulse with every nerve in my body.
The fever in you never breaks, Gaza. And I never heal.
You lie within me like a secret fire, not burning me to ashes, but slowly melting me.
Every time I return from exile, I come with an open heart, and it bursts the moment I step on your soil.
I carry Gaza like a terrible mistake—afraid its stones will fall on me—and yet I cannot let it go.
As a child, I used to play with a giant imaginary elephant.
I thought life was a game of sound, movement, and rhythm, and that everything could be created by the movement of my hands and another’s.
I built dreams out of threads so thin that even the air could barely sense them.
But in a single moment, the elephant would swallow the whole play.
I would return disappointed, then start again, with a new game, a new elephant.
Now I understand: the elephant was life itself.
Life gives you the toy, only to take it away. It leaves you face-to-face with its emptiness, forcing you to admit that everything you once believed in was an illusion—bubbles of belief you must now abandon as you watch the world around you mercilessly crumble.
Everything you worked for becomes dry clay.
And in Gaza, life is that elephant.
It devours our dreams, breaks us, throws us off the mountain, and yet we return, exhausted, barefoot pilgrims, treading its paths, losing our way, longing for another dream. What fools we are.
Gaza without mirrors
As a child, I played “house” with my best friend. We would build a house out of sand and water. Then, when we got bored, we would destroy it and quietly go back to our real homes.
I didn’t know then that I was reading Gaza’s future in that game.
Gaza builds its homes only to have them destroyed—the cursed hand of the occupation never stops destroying life in a place that has yet to truly live.
We watch it happen, and yet we still call Gaza a city.
Gaza is an ever-changing shape, like changing hotel rooms in a collapsing building.
We see windows opening onto life, even though every window overlooks a cemetery.
I return to Gaza unable to do anything but cry, broken in a way that mirrors its streets.
A man on the street tells me, “There is no need for mirrors here anymore—all the faces look the same: sad, bruised, and as yellow as autumn leaves.
I walk back and forth, collapsing as I move. A wanderer with no ground to support my weight.
Gaza has become the city that can no longer support its own people.
I walk its streets, inspecting the ruins as if they were remnants of a cosmic game; as if a childish hand had smashed Gaza’s beauty for sport.
They’ve placed one memory next to another, each devouring the next.
Gaza has become like the puzzle game I loved as a child—the one I never finished, afraid that completing it would kill my passion.
So I’d leave it unfinished, just to have a reason to come back.
In Gaza, life also remains unfinished. No one gets the chance to live fully.
People die before they can tell their stories.
The collective memory collapses, and in an instant the city becomes hollow, deprived of its voice.
A repeated scene
As I walked through Deir al-Balah, I looked at the shops, the narrow streets. I heard the sameness of the cries of the merchants, felt the same suffocating crowds.
My head pounded—why is this scene repeating itself?
It’s the same displacement I experienced only months ago!
Didn’t I return to Gaza in January 2025, in that great scene we called the holy return to northern Gaza?
Now the same return is happening again—identical in every detail—only colder, joyless, like a new kind of pain.
Why are the same sorrows repeating themselves in my life?
What force makes me a pawn in someone else’s story?
Why is my own story always ignored?
I can’t believe that tragedy visits me twice in the same form.
That I must swallow sorrow whole, like a bitter spoonful of castor oil.
Why does Gaza contain so much drama?
Why has it replaced all my old games?
Even writing—once my favorite game—has joined it in shaping me.
Now every word I try to write looks like Gaza: broken, numb, and meaningless.
I am unhappy because I love her.
Miserable because I hold on to a thread that keeps breaking—and I keep tying it, knowing it will break again.
Gaza ebbs and flows like the tide—changing nothing but the shape of the ruin.
Every return hurts. Each farewell kills.
I hate this endless wheel that keeps dragging me back to the same place.
Gaza has stolen my peace.
I live between staying and leaving, like a string about to break.
If I leave, I lose my memory; if I stay, I lose myself.
So I stand on the edge, watching the whole game, afraid of the elephant—and its endless roar.
The disfigurement of the disfigured
Gaza has never been beautiful in the visual sense: its streets unpaved, its houses weary, its face covered in dust.
Yet I see her beauty.
In my imagination, her wound becomes art.
I marvel at myself: how can a place struck on the head become such a luminous idea in the mind of a dreamer?
Gaza—cruel and kind, tender and harsh, built and destroyed, myth and truth, proud and tearful, fragile and wise—all at once.
It sits in the middle of my head now, in the middle of the world, exhausting me with its stories, filling the universe with its noise. A rope pulled so tight it’s about to snap.
If the world had known Gaza before cinema, there would have been no need for Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, or Daniel Day-Lewis.
Gaza alone would’ve been enough—the only movie ever worth repeating.
A tragedy complete in itself, performed by real flesh, real blood, real tears.
Gaza plays itself—no script, no director, no camera.
Everything about her is too real to be believable.
A joy like Gaza’s
Give me sorrow like Gaza’s—when she’s bombed, when her people flee to nowhere, when the lights go out and only sound echoes through the void.
And give me joy like theirs—when their people return, once, twice, touching the earth with trembling fingers, growing taller with gratitude for simply surviving.
Give me a moon like Gaza—one whose ground is inhabited not by light but by survivors and memories.
Give me a land where stone and man are equal in destruction and creation.
This city has killed me more than once—but it’s also taught me that life dies and returns.
It collapses before me and within me—and yet I love it.
Gaza is the beautiful disease that I never want to cure.
The obsession that redefines life and gives it new birds every time.
I am afflicted with Gaza—and there is no cure for it.
I am the madman who survived an annihilation that spared no stone, no bird, no thought.
And yet—I write about it.
I write like a patient writing his own medical report.
I am writing from a miserable prison where everyone is working towards my execution.
Gaza is my only sorrow—and my only comfort in this vast ruin.
Everyone who has passed through it has left it incomplete, as if they had read a novel they could not understand.
Those who never knew it lived an easier life. But they never felt the full depth of what it means to be human.
Gaza is the border between life and death, between remembering and forgetting, between sense and madness.
It is the elephant—and the child still waiting to play with it.
It is the riddle of the earth that can never be solved.
And every time I look for an answer, it swallows me whole, just like my old toy.
My city has imprisoned me, surrounded me with pain, and yet I do not want to escape.
Because I simply love this beautiful disease called Gaza.
-Husam Maarouf
Editor’s note: There is currently a campaign to get Husam and his family residency in France, through the PAUSE program; however, we need to raise additional funds. You can contribute to getting Husam out here.
Read more by Husam Maarouf:
I Want a Room, God. Do You Hear Me?
How Do I Leave the Prison of Gaza?
Husam Maarouf on Launching New ‘Gaza Publications’
How War Transformed My Literary Taste
What Do Gazans Read During War?
Laughter Without Joy: Between Gaza’s Reality and Beckett’s Stage