by Sanaa Kamal
GAZA, Oct. 7 (Xinhua) -- The day before the war began, I sat by the window in my office, sipping coffee and feeling secure in the future I had worked so hard to build.
After years in journalism, I had bought a car and, just weeks earlier, an apartment in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of western Gaza City.
I thought I had finally built a decent life for myself. I did not know I was looking at its final day.
The next morning was Oct. 7, 2023.
Within a week, my family and I had fled our home. In the turmoil that followed, I learned how quickly a future can disappear -- and how deeply the life you leave behind can remain within you.
I stayed in Gaza for another seven months. During that time, even getting food and water became a daily struggle.
After my brothers lost their jobs, I became the main provider for our extended family of about 25 people, most of them children.
I had no time to dwell on the home or car I had lost in the strikes, or the life I had planned. Each day, we had to find food and water and keep the children safe.
I began to realize that the place I had always called home could no longer sustain the life I had known. In April 2024, I left Gaza by bus for Cairo. The journey took 18 hours.
I left Gaza, but only physically.
From Cairo, I continued working as a journalist, following what was happening in Gaza every day. I wrote about bombings, displacement, and death, and then stepped away from my computer to call my brothers and make sure they were still alive.
Working from outside Gaza felt surreal. In Gaza, I had reported on the war while living through it. In Cairo, I watched it unfold on a screen while my family was still there.
Once, a strike hit near my brothers' shelter. I called them again and again for hours, but no one answered. I was no longer thinking like a journalist. I was simply a sister, terrified that something had happened to them.
Moments like this repeated themselves. The fear became so overwhelming that I went to therapy for about six months simply to keep functioning.
I was not the only one carrying that burden.
I spoke with my colleagues in Gaza every day. We discussed not only work but also strikes nearby, homes destroyed in neighboring areas, and people we knew who had been killed.
Across Gaza, the suffering was measured in numbers. The Gaza-based health authorities said in late September that over 1,400 people had been killed in Israeli strikes since a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas was announced in October 2025, bringing the total toll since Oct. 7, 2023, to more than 74,000.
Some 90 percent of Gaza's infrastructure had been damaged or destroyed, leaving homes, schools, hospitals, roads, water networks, and other essential facilities in ruins, said the Hamas-run government media office in late 2025.
For me, these are not just numbers. I see my own family in them.
My brother Radi, 42, lives with his wife and their six children -- five daughters and one son -- in a camp in Al-Zawaida in the central Gaza Strip.
For them, getting through each day is a challenge. "We don't live the way people did before the war," Radi told me. "Every day has its own challenges. We think about water first, then food, then where we'll sleep, and after that, we ask ourselves what we'll do tomorrow."
What worries him most is his children.
"The hardest thing for me is watching my children grow up in the camp," he said. "The girls have grown, and the boy has grown, yet they haven't lived a normal childhood. I try to laugh with them, but deep down, I'm always wondering: For how long?"
When I left Gaza, the children were very young, some barely able to speak. Now, some of them go to makeshift schools in tents.
They have learned to recognize the sounds of war. Some can distinguish missiles from shelling. Some can even judge from the force of an explosion whether it may have caused heavy casualties.
Over the past three years, they have grown older, but they have not had the chance to grow up like children elsewhere in the world.
What they have endured has made me reflect on what the war has changed in my own life.
Before the war, life seemed fairly simple. I would work, build a career, buy a home, and then plan for the future. I believed one stage of life would naturally lead to the next.
Three years have passed, and life no longer feels that simple.
The war has changed my role in the family. I am no longer just the breadwinner. I have become the person everyone turns to for decisions, advice, and help.
I lost my home and car, but I lost more than possessions. I lost the belief that what I worked for would still be there tomorrow.
Now I do not know what comes next.
I do not know when Radi and his children will leave the camp.
I do not know when my colleagues in Gaza will be able to work without fearing for themselves and their families.
I do not know when I will be able to picture a future without wondering whether I will lose it again.
All I know is that going back to the life we once had is becoming harder to imagine.
On Oct. 6, 2023, I thought the future was mine to build.
Today, I am still learning how to believe in one. ■
