*A year ago Nour Abdel Latif, the writer, educator, and young mother of three, was living in a tent on the beach in Nuseirat Camp. She said she wanted to write something for our newspaper, but was not sure what, if anything, would come out of her. To her own surprise, several days later she filed a sprawling testimony, which she called a “genocide diary.”
“We wept as we dreamed of liberating all of Palestine and reclaiming the lands we had been denied from for so long,” Nour wrote in her recollection of October 7, 2023. “A few hours later, the bombing of my city began, and I realized the true cost of the freedom we had briefly enjoyed.”
Nour described the endless longing she felt for her sister, martyred in the early days of the genocide; their days in a crowded shelter where the food supply slowly dwindled; and the informal school where she taught hundreds of Gaza’s children. Later, on the beach in Nuseirat Camp, “it became normal for sand to blow into our food, and we would chew and swallow it just as we swallowed our daily oppression.” Her details were lucid and heartrending.
In January, during the brief, doomed ceasefire, Nour filed a second testimony, this time recounting her family’s return to Gaza City. She described the congestion on the roads as thousands of Palestinians headed north, anxious to be reunited with their neighborhoods and families after the long months of terror. What they found when they finally arrived, Nour wrote, was a world reduced to ash, the streets she once knew disfigured beyond recognition. The occupation again escalated its genocidal campaign, engineering a brutal famine in the Strip. Nour published a poem on her social media called “If I Must Starve,” after her martyred teacher, Refaat Alareer.
When we spoke, Nour told us that she would stay in the North as long as possible, but last month, as occupation forces pressed closer and closer to her family’s home, she made the excruciating decision to head south again. Back in a tent on the beach, she sent us another poem. It reads as a series of questions from the edge of the world.
Please follow this link to donate to Nour, who is fundraising to keep her children’s school open: tiny.cc/nourabdellatif*
Between Here and Gone
How can I press a city to my chest?
Embrace its streets, its homes, its windows?
How can my heart stretch wide,
To hold a longing this deep?
And how can I kiss its wounded ground,
Without my soul collapsing?
How do I hold a scream so deep,
In the alley where I used to play?
How do I wipe a silent tear,
On the stone where Dad once sat?
How do I bring our laughs once more,
To streets we knew?
And how do I say, I missed you so,
Without letting the heartbreak show?
How do I mend my shadow on her timeworn stone,
Where every crack once knew me as its own?
How do I walk the same streets of my young feet,
Without the weight of all that’s lost, replayed?
How do I hear the rising call to prayer,
And not let tears betray my hidden cries?
How do I say, I had to go away,
When my soul never left?
Gaza...
How can one hug hold all your scattered cries?
How can my heart survive the loss each time your name goes by?
I walk your streets, yet I’m not there,
I search your face—it’s lost.
You break inside me,
Without a reason I know why.
Gaza still stands—but not the same,
A shadow walks where once burned flame.
And the ache left within my chest
Is deeper, harsher—
A grief beyond a single death.
If I Must Starve
If I must starve,
let it be with dignity in my children’s eyes,
not with my hands tied by silence.
Let the world witness
that I did not bow to the hunger
but stood, even as the sky emptied
and the earth closed her mouth.
If I must starve,
let it be while I still cradle my child’s hope,
not as a number lost in footnotes.
Let the sea carry my name
to shores that forgot my people,
and let the wind whisper:
she fed love when bread was gone.
Nour Abdel Latif is a mother and writer from North Gaza. This piece appears in the twentieth issue of The New York War Crimes. Read her previous pieces for the NYWC — a diary of displacement and sorrow, published on October 7th, 2024 — here, and — a diary of return to the north, published on March 30th, 2024 — here