Mediapart is publishing a series of reports regularly sent to it from inside the Gaza Strip by two young Palestinians. Nour Elassy, a 22-year-old journalist, who is also a poet and writer, and Ibrahim Badra, a 23-year-old journalist and human rights activist, chronicle the grim reality of life and death in Gaza as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to wage a genocidal war against the population of about 2.1 million.
Nour Elassy, whose higher education studies were on English and French literature, was born and raised in the Gaza Strip, in the north-east neighbourhood of Tuffah. After Israel’s invasion of Gaza, following the Hamas attacks of October 7th 2023 that left more than 1,200 Israelis dead, she and her family were displaced and lived for almost 15 months in Deir al-Balah, a town in the centre of Gaza.
She returned to the north in February this year, but in April she and her family were again forced to move. She currently lives in Gaza City.
She says writing is essential for her. She began composing poetry shortly after the October 2023 Hamas attacks against Israel, and has published them online, notably on Instagram.
Below are Elassy's first two contributions to Mediapart - to be followed soon in a second feature by those of Badra. Both were written in May. First published by Mediapart in French translations, the two texts below are her original reports written in English.
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We, the people of Gaza, are being written out of history in real time
(First published in French on May 31st)
I never thought I would say this, and it breaks me to admit it – but I am seriously thinking of leaving Gaza. Just writing those words fills me with a kind of shame I can’t even explain. I was raised to believe that Gaza is not just a place – it is my soul, my history, my identity.
I’ve seen nothing here but hardship wrapped in holiness, war wrapped in warmth, destruction surrounded by an unshakable sense of home. And yet, after all we’ve endured – after the endless nights of bombardment, the hunger, the displacement, the bodies buried under rubble – I am now allowing the thought to grow in my mind: what if I left? And it’s not just me.
So many of us, young and brilliant, once rooted so deeply in this land, are now thinking the unthinkable. We are dreaming of building something outside, because everything we build here is destroyed—physically and spiritually.
A man I know spent ten years saving to build an apartment so he and his wife could finally move out of a single crowded room. The day they moved in, they were displaced. Days later, the apartment was bombed. What does that do to a person’s spirit? How can you still believe in staying when even permanence is an illusion? Now that man speaks of never investing in Gaza again.
And I have given so much to this country. I have studied, I have worked, I have fought to be a voice for my people. I want to work with the United Nations to carry the testimonies of every soul crushed by injustice. But how do I continue to carry the weight of a homeland that is being emptied in front of my eyes?
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Israel has succeeded – yes, I’ll say it, painfully and truthfully – in its diabolical strategy of forced expulsion. Not through trucks and borders, but through trauma. By making Gaza unliveable.
They have turned homes into targets, hospitals into graveyards, schools into ruins. They have starved us, displaced us, shelled us again and again until all that remains is survival. This isn’t a war – it’s demographic cleansing, systematic and cruel. They didn’t just want to kill us; they wanted to kill our will to stay. And, God help me, it’s working.
It hurts more than any missile, any wound, to say this: they are pushing us out, and we are beginning to let go – not of our love for Gaza, never that – but of our belief that we can live here, grow here, raise our children here. And that, right there, is their ultimate weapon: not bombs, but hopelessness.
Not fought, not displaced, not collateralized – but deliberately erased. Piece by piece, body by body, city by city. The world is watching, the cameras are rolling, the humanitarian trucks roll in with crumbs of aid and bright-coloured logos – and still, the silence is deafening. What Israel is doing to Gaza is not a war. It is ethnic cleansing. It is genocide. And the international community, cloaked in the language of diplomacy and democracy, is not just complicit – it is responsible.
On May 2025, Benjamin Netanyahu declared a new operation: Gideon’s Chariots—a biblical name for a modern massacre. What it means in practice is the total military invasion of Gaza’s remaining cities. Rafah, once a thriving, beautiful city, has been erased and taken entirely. Khan Yunis is now being invaded, street by street. Deir el-Balah is suffocating under the weight of the displaced. They are not targeting militants—they are targeting places. Entire neighbourhoods. Families. Futures.
Israel’s goal is no longer hidden. It wants Gaza emptied of Palestinians. From the north to Gaza City, to the last camp in Rafah, civilians are being forced south under the pretext of “safe zones” – zones which are then bombed. The intent is not safety. It is exile. Forced exile. Our people are being squeezed into a tighter and tighter box with no air left to breathe, until all we want – until all we think of – is leaving.
That is what they want. To make us give up. To make the next generation of Palestinians, my generation,believe that there is nothing left worth staying for. Our homes are dust. Our schools are rubble. Our diplomas, our notebooks, our dreams lie under the debris. Education has been suspended indefinitely. Children haven’t stepped foot in a classroom in eight months. Universities have been flattened. This is ‘scholasticide’ – the deliberate murder of our right to learn, to grow, to exist as thinking people.
And when the world dares to send aid? That aid is a mirage. Hundreds of trucks are needed daily to feed our people. Israel lets in a handful – enough for headlines, not for survival. The rest? Looted, often in areas heavily monitored or even surrounded by Israeli forces. Aid is dangled in front of our starving children like bait, then stolen. Then filmed. Then weaponized. What do you call a system that uses hunger as a military tool? It’s not security. It’s siege warfare. And it’s a crime.
We are witnessing something beyond cruelty. Children are being burned alive. Forgive my description. Limbs torn from their tiny bodies. Not as an accident of war—but as an accepted outcome. A fact. A cost. This is not conflict. This is genocide.
We, the people of Gaza, are being pushed out of history in real time. And yet no red line has been crossed. No action taken. Because the world has traded its soul for politics, optics, and normalization. They have left us with a choice between exile or extinction.
I am not writing this just as a journalist. I am writing as a daughter who can no longer promise safety to her parents. As a sister who hears explosions and wonders if the next name called will be ours. As a student whose education has been bombed into ashes. As a young woman who is told she deserves freedom, but whose life is penned inside a prison. And above all, as a human being screaming into the void, begging for someone – anyone – to look this truth in the eye and not look away.
This isn’t about political complexity. It’s not about both sides. It’s about a people being slaughtered, starved, displaced, and erased while the world debates terminology.
If there is any meaning left in human rights, in law, in morality—then Gaza is the place where those values must stand or die. Because if the world can watch us disappear, and still do nothing, then nothing it claims to stand for is real.
We are not dying silently. We are documenting our own destruction. Remember this: if Gaza falls, it will not fall in darkness—it will fall under floodlights, as the world scrolls past, knowing, and choosing to forget.
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How long will the world watch Gaza die?
(First published in French on May 19th)
For more than 15 months, I have lived the life of a displaced person in my own homeland. I am a journalist. I am a humanitarian worker. I am also a young woman trying to finish her university degree. And yet, like so many others here in Gaza, my life has been frozen by endless cycles of loss, hunger, and forced exile.
When I was finally able to return to my neighbourhood, a place that no longer looked like home, we barely had time to begin healing. We tried to piece together what little remained of our lives. But before we could even catch our breath, new orders came. We were staying up late at night taking with my sister they came to visit us with their lovely kids. And suddenly my brother heard from our neighbours that they forced new evacuation orders!
Today, I am homeless once more like nearly 70% of Gaza’s population who have been forcibly displaced, most of these families were displaced dozens of times. Once again, I carry my life in a bag, unsure where the next night will find me.
Since March 2nd, Israel has blocked humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. What little hope we had for survival has been steadily suffocated. Gaza today is not only under siege by bombs and bullets, it is under siege by hunger.
The World Food Programme has confirmed that its food stocks have completely run out across the Gaza Strip. Bakeries, once a lifeline for desperate families, have shuttered, starved of fuel. Markets are barren. People now live among piles of garbage and waste because there is no space left to set up even the flimsiest of tents, if you are lucky enough to find one.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Those living in makeshift shelters often sleep surrounded by trash, without clean water, without proper sewage systems, without basic hygiene. Diseases are exploding. Children, already weak from hunger, are now dying from diarrhoea, hepatitis A, and skin infections.
Since the last ceasefire collapsed, I have been working harder than ever, dedicating myself to reporting — even when I was having my final and as conditions worsened around me. Often, I stand for hours in the streets, under the burning sun or amid cold winds, gathering testimonies from families whose worlds have crumbled.
Recently, after days of standing for endless hours while covering the devastation, I visited a doctor for the severe pain in my legs.
They diagnosed me with high ESR [editor’s note: test of red blood cells for signs of inflammation in the body], made worse by standing, malnutrition, and the lack of any available treatment. They told me: like they tell so many others — there is no medicine, no vitamins, no healing here anymore.
I have developed digestive issues from surviving on canned foods, the only thing available. and even those are often expired. I am just one among thousands now suffering.
The injured are even worse off. People with severe burns, amputations, or open wounds urgently need high-protein, high-calorie diets to heal. In Gaza, they barely receive 500 to 800 calories per day — less than half the minimum daily requirement for survival, let alone recovery.
One father I met Yahiya, showed me his leg, infected and untreated. “They tell us to be patient,” he said bitterly. “But how do you ask a starving man to be patient?”
A mother, Umm Ahmad, sobbed as she told me, “look, look, at my son’s skin, photograph him let the world see what their neglecting did to us”; she was pointing at his face and arms infected by living amid waste.
This is not a natural famine.
It is a man-made one.
It is weaponized.
Israel is using starvation to try to break Gaza — to break our spirit, to break our will to live on this land.
And it is working.
Every day that we endure this nightmare, Israel makes it easier for us to imagine leaving — for good.
They want us to abandon Gaza.
They are trying to force us to forget our roots, our dreams, our sacrifices.
When we think of Palestine now, so many of us first think of our endless suffering here: the hunger, the funerals, the humiliation.
And I will not lie: I am one of them.
I would lie if I said I do not dream of leaving.
Many of the young men I know, even the elderly who spent their whole lives believing in this land, now say things they once thought they would never say. They want to escape.
Israel is putting unbearable pressure on us — even reportedly requiring patients traveling abroad for medical treatment to sign documents promising not to return.
The plan is clear: make Gaza unliveable so that Palestinians will leave, and never come back.
This war is approaching its second year. Two years of unimaginable devastation. Two years of families erased, homes flattened, futures stolen. And yet, there is still no real movement toward a solution. No ceasefire. No justice. Only more suffering — and more silence.
Civilians, not soldiers, are the ones paying the price. It is always civilians who bleed. It is always civilians who bury their dead. Where is the international community? Where are the promises of “never again”?
What we are living through now in Gaza is not just a humanitarian crisis. It is a humanitarian catastrophe — a man-made famine in the 21st century. Massacres are carried out in the open, with the world watching and doing almost nothing.
How much longer will the world watch Gaza starve?
How much more must we lose before our lives are treated as if they matter?
I am writing this not only as a journalist but as a survivor — as someone whose only crime was being born in Gaza. I write because my people’s voices are being drowned out by the roar of injustice. And because even in the face of hunger, displacement, and death, we still cling to our humanity. We still believe our stories deserve to be heard.
Please, hear us now.
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Editing by Graham Tearse