The Only One in the Dark: Abu Al-Noor, Who Lost His Family and Remained Among the Rubble

He doesn’t answer immediately. He stares into the distance, as if searching his memory for an image still burning. His name is Abu Al-Noor, a man in his sixties from the Al-Shuja’iyya neighborhood in Gaza. He survived an airstrike that destroyed his entire home—but not the feeling of being completely alone.

I was praying Asr… and suddenly, I felt the earth rise and fall, he says softly. When I opened my eyes, I was under the ceiling. No voices. No screams. Only rubble… and my heartbeat.

He remained trapped under the rubble for more than 14 hours. He didn’t scream. What’s the use? Who would hear? he says bitterly. When rescue workers found him, he was barely conscious. When he asked about his wife and children, he was told none had survived.

Weeks later, Abu Al-Noor returned to the ruins of his home. Today, he sleeps in a shattered room, without electricity or windows. I won’t go to a shelter. This is my home, even if only one wall remains, he says.

What haunts him most is the night. Nights in Gaza are long. Even longer when you’re alone, with only the groaning of memory to keep you company, he says, patting the floor beside him as if to quiet something inside.

When I visited him, he wasn’t complaining—he was telling. Calmly, like someone quietly breaking. I had a daughter named Aya… she loved reading stories. When I flip through my memories, she’s always the first to appear, then he falls silent.

I was reminded of Mahmoud Darwish’s words:

Memories are shattered mirrors… the closer we come to them, the more we bleed.

Today, Abu Al-Noor lives off simple help from neighbors. He refuses to leave. I don’t want a new house. I want my family, he repeats, three times.

In Gaza, stories don’t begin or end. They stretch in silence. Every destroyed home shelters a man like Abu Al-Noor—living in darkness not because the power is out, but because the souls who once lit the home are gone.

Before I left, I asked if he needed anything. He said: I need to speak… to be heard. I don’t want to die twice: once in the bombing, and once in being forgotten.