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It’s Diaa Ostaz, a journalist based in Gaza, and I’ve been walking in the streets of Gaza, and honestly, they don’t look like streets anymore. It’s all rubble now. Homes are gone, replaced by tents. And hunger — you can almost feel it in the air exactly like dust. And yet, even in all this destruction, I keep meeting people who refuse to give up.
I’ve been seeing staff from the Near East Council of Churches, which is known here on the ground as NECC, still running clinics — and even after they lost two of their clinics during this conflict. I’ve watched volunteers from the Spark Foundation set up little learning corners for kids in tents, just so they can draw, play and feel like children again.
Their work is fragile. Their resources are almost nothing but, they are still here, holding together a community that’s being pushed to the very edge of famine. Hundreds of the families — mothers, children and women — are flowing to the Near East Council of Churches’ clinics to get treatment. So, mothers carrying weak, smaller children, families desperate for medicine.
The staff work under shelling, while being displaced themselves, and the choices they face are impossible: who gets the last nutritional biscuits and who walks away with nothing.
Meanwhile, Spark Foundation tries to heal the wants you can’t see. With the schools destroyed, they create small space of hope: art workshops, group therapy, unstructured lessons. I met one of teenager, who told me that, “This is the only place” — she means the Spark Foundation — “that took us out of the atmosphere of war. It gives us relief, laughter and hope.”
So, the threads tying all these stories together are decisions no human should ever have to make: who eats and who goes without, which mother gets medicine for her children, and which one must wait. How many days can staff survive without pay, without rest, without safety? And yet, despite the exhaustion and grief, the answer is always yes, they continue.
But the question is for how long? Now, no one knows how long supplies will last, how long staff can keep pushing, how long children can survive hunger without permanent harm. Still the determination is clear: It’s in every clinic, in every classroom, in every church compound.
As long as a mother is searching for milk for her baby, as long as a child hungers for a classroom, as long as a community cries out for dignity, these people will keep going.
And so, in the middle of famine, they remain small lights of the vast darkness of Gaza — and fragile — but reminding the world that, even in war, humanity is never completely lost.