Alone in the Dark – From Gaza
When a home is bombed, it doesn’t just collapse — an entire life shatters with it.
The night was quiet in Khan Younis, southern Gaza — the kind of quiet that only comes before catastrophe. In a modest, cramped room, young Anwar slept beside his mother and siblings. His father had stepped out briefly to find some bread and water. No one knew that those few minutes would draw the line between life and death.
Anwar, just nine years old, recalls in a trembling voice: “I heard a huge sound… like the sky exploded. Then everything went black. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. My leg hurt… I cried, but no sound came out.”
“I kept screaming: Mama! Baba! But no one answered. I was alone.”
Anwar remained trapped under the rubble for over 72 hours — no food, no water, not even light. His thin body was pinned between iron and concrete. His mind began to fade, until he finally heard a voice in the distance: “There’s someone underneath!”
When they pulled him out, his leg was crushed, his face smeared with blood and dust. He was rushed to a temporary field hospital, where he sat alone on a rusty metal bed, asking only one thing: Where are my mother and siblings? A medic told him gently, “There’s no one left, habibi. We’re here… and God is with you.”
Anwar didn’t cry. He stayed silent. But his eyes spoke everything — pain, loss, isolation, and a fear too deep to name. The doctor caring for him said that Anwar’s silence was louder than any scream he’d ever heard from a child in war.
He was later transferred to a hospital in Cairo by the Red Crescent. That’s where I met him. He was sitting in a wheelchair, staring at the floor. When I tried to speak to him, he whispered without raising his eyes: “Why was I the only one who survived?”
“Sometimes, I wish I had stayed under the rubble with them.”
He told me he still hears the explosion every night. That he imagines his mother covering him with a blanket. That he’s afraid to sleep because he dreams of the rubble falling again and again. I had no words to comfort him… How do you comfort someone who’s lost their whole world?
Anwar isn’t just a child who survived a bombing. He is the face of thousands of children whose pictures don’t appear, whose voices aren’t heard. He is a microcosm of an entire homeland being bombed daily — not just with missiles, but with global silence.
Before I left, I asked him, “What do you want to do when you return to Gaza?” He smiled faintly and said: “I want to build a house underground… where no missile can reach.”
I walked out of that room feeling like a part of me stayed behind — under the rubble, next to Anwar.
