Ramadan Kareem, ya Gaza

Ramadan Kareem, ya Gaza

By Alaa Alqaisi

Gaza does not resemble herself in Ramadan. Or rather, she used to become more herself in that month than at any other time of the year. Across decades of siege and abrasion, she would gather her wounded body and clothe it in light. She would insist on beauty with a kind of moral stubbornness, as though beauty itself were a form of resistance. Markets would erupt into color. Fawanees, or lanterns, would swing from shopfronts and balconies. The narrow arteries of Souq al-Zawiya in the Old City would pulse with voices, with trays of qamar al-din, bottles of kharrub, stacks of fresh bread, and Ramadan tablecloths laid out as if to announce that life, no matter how battered, still intended to host guests. Children would carry their small lanterns like fragile suns cupped in their palms. They would sing “Ramadan Gana, wa farahna bih” (Ramadan has come, and we rejoice in it) without irony, without self-consciousness, as though joy were not something that needed justification. Even under blockade, even as the horizon narrowed year after year, Ramadan would pry open a window in the spirit. Gaza would glow.

Forgive me, dear reader. I am not merely sharing these scenes for you. I am carving them into my own soul. I am gathering them the way one gathers embers from a dying fire, desperate to coax warmth from what remains. Genocide has a way of overfeeding the memory with horror until it forgets the texture of ordinary tenderness. I write to keep certain details in place. I write because I do not want Gaza to survive in memory as damage alone. Ramadan in the past two years arrived with another face, one that did not resemble itself, and a Gaza that no longer resembled Gaza. The city slipped beyond geography. It no longer felt like a place on a map but like a suspended fragment of the universe, severed from law, from mercy, from proportion. I remember the first night of Ramadan 2024 in unforgiving detail; nothing in it has blurred, nothing has loosened its hold on me. The loneliness was not metaphorical. It was architectural. It stood in the streets like an additional building. Darkness did not simply fall; it invaded. There were no children in the alleys. No firecrackers cracking against the sky. No strings of light trembling between rooftops. No laughter rising from windows. It was as though the city had deliberately extinguished her own lantern. As Fairuz once sang of Beirut—“my city extinguished her lamp, closed her door, and in the evening she became alone”—Gaza, too, stood alone. Alone under bombardment. Alone under skies that no longer distinguished between night and explosion. Alone with a silence that was not peace but exhaustion. For months, the call to prayer had vanished from Gaza City and the North. The mosques were damaged, the muezzins silenced by fear or death. Then, at dawn on the first day of Ramadan, I heard it. A single hoarse voice, unamplified, fragile yet obstinate, cutting through the gray of early morning. No loudspeaker carried it. It traveled only as far as the courage of the man who uttered it. And then the words: “Sallu fi rihalikum.” Pray where you are. We wept. We wept because we had been starved even of this, of a voice reminding us that we still belonged to something larger than destruction.

Yet before the morning had settled into its fragile mercy, the bombardment began again. At seven o’clock, news struck like lightning: the house of a close friend had been bombed. I was near Al-Shifa Hospital at the time. I remember running toward it, as though proximity to catastrophe might grant me clarity. Another friend walked beside me; she would later be killed. The hospital corridors were thick with dust and confusion. Names were shouted. I searched for my friends among the grief of strangers. I found nothing. Communications were cut; the air itself seemed severed. I learned later that she had survived, but most of her family had not. I stood there, unable to move, unable to perform even the simplest gesture of solidarity. I have replayed that paralysis more times than I can admit. Was it fear? Was it shock? Was it cowardice? Under relentless bombardment, I did not visit her. I did not stand before her ruins. I remained suspended between survival and shame. There is a weight that settles upon those who live when others do not, a density that language cannot adequately carry. It is the knowledge that your continued breathing feels like a betrayal, even when it is involuntary.

In those first days of Ramadan, consolation arrived in improbable form. Or perhaps we clung to it so fiercely that it seemed to arrive. Taghreed—radiant, stubborn Taghreed—refused to let the month collapse entirely. She stole minutes from catastrophe. She gathered children and tried to reconstruct ritual from fragments. She believed, with a conviction that now feels almost prophetic, that joy was not a luxury but a responsibility. But even that fragile rebellion did not endure. We fell under the siege of Al-Shifa when Israeli soldiers stormed the hospital and encircled it. Days blurred into nights punctuated by artillery, by gas canisters, by the metallic percussion of fear. The air burned our lungs. The floors trembled. After several days, we fled into what felt like impossibility. We scattered, each of us tethered only to the urgency of staying alive. I never saw Taghreed again. Less than a month later, she was killed. Israel killed her.

Ramadan 2025 did not lift the curse. Even under the pretense of a ceasefire, bombardment returned after a calculated season of hunger. Starvation was administered with bureaucratic precision; bombs followed with theatrical brutality. The city, having barely inhaled, was forced to gasp again. It wounds me that I left Gaza with my last Ramadan memories soaked in hunger and smoke. My mind longs to leap backward, to the sea that once opened itself to us, to evenings when the breeze carried salt rather than ash, to a Gaza that, despite everything, could still host mercy.

Now, in this blessed month, the city sinks. She sinks into darkness that is no longer merely external. It has entered the bloodstream of her people. The possibilities of life, the small gestures that once defined celebration, have been disfigured. How does one revive Ramadan when both the city and the self have been fractured? How does one name a darkness that is not simply the absence of light but the distortion of meaning? Survivors carry ruins within them. They fast not only from food but from certainty, from ease, from the assumption that tomorrow will resemble today.

I left Gaza nearly six months ago. This is my first Ramadan away from Gaza and family and friends. I write these words at a small table in the corner of an Arab café in Berlin, snow pressed against the windows like a silent witness. The cold here is disciplined, orderly, nothing like the chaotic heat of home. Around me, Arabic flows in familiar cadences. Keffiyehs hang in shop windows. The Palestinian flag appears in corners, stubborn and luminous. Lanterns decorate the street outside. For a fleeting moment, I believed I might find comfort here—in what I half-jokingly call the Arab colony of Berlin. I thought perhaps homeland could be approximated through proximity to language, to food, to symbol. But what illusion persuaded me that we could replicate belonging? That we could reconstruct Gaza from fragments of diaspora? Instead, exile deepened. I found myself searching for Gaza more intensely here than I ever did there. The familiarity of my surroundings sharpened absence rather than softening it. Ramadan outside Gaza feels intact, ceremonious, orderly. Ramadan in Gaza was never merely ceremonial. It was an eruption of mercy in a place accustomed to scarcity. It was a collective widening of the soul. It was the one month in which even the most exhausted among us felt briefly lifted beyond the daily grind of survival.

That passage now feels obstructed.

Fairuz once sang of wounds blossoming, of a city claimed in love. I borrow her cadence and turn toward Gaza: “أزهرت جراح شعبي أزهرت دمعة الأمهات أنت غزّة لي، أنت لي آه عانقيني” (“The wounds of my people have blossomed, the tears of the mothers have blossomed”). I turn the line toward you and say: Anti Ghazza li, anti li… āh ‘āniqīnī (“You are Gaza to me, you are mine… ah, embrace me”).

But I do not know who requires the embrace more. Are you waiting for us to return to you with unbroken hands? Or am I the one standing here, in a cold European city, waiting for your warmth to rescue me from the illusion that survival elsewhere is a form of healing?

Ramadan Kareem, ya Gaza.

Alaa Alqaisi is a Palestinian translator, writer, and researcher from Gaza, deeply passionate about literature, language, and the power of storytelling to bridge cultures and bear witness to lived realities.