7 October, 6:54am

We go to sleep thinking about very ordinary things, a university exam, buying a new piece of clothing, worrying about applying to a job, then suddenly the sound of the alarm changes, exams are cancelled, schools and universities are shut down, gunpowder blasts everywhere, Al-Jazeera turns red, we turn on the radio, Telegram, in our minds we start to reschedule all our plans. In Gaza, everything changes in an instant.

8 October, 11:30am

Our newsfeeds are funeral homes / memorial services / obituary pages. We move from page to page as if walking through a square full of funerals packed side by side. God, the weight of these days.

8 October, 10:02pm

America wants to send an aircraft carrier to support the Zionist entity. Good, inshallah when we are liberated we will turn it into a floating restaurant in the sea.

9 October, 12:34pm

-Where are these fusillades coming from?

-From our hearts, each bursting from the agony of a Gazan.

9 October, 4:52pm

In every previous war, there was some kind of pattern to the entity’s targets, one time it would be families, another time mosques, another time streets, another time border areas or town centers, another time high rises, there was some kind of plan for the explosions that we could grasp, we the ones under the explosions, and based on that we would deduce the goals and the trajectory and how long we could expect the war to last.

This time there is no pattern, everything is being bombed every previous war being squeezed into this war, Gaza from the north to the south being bombed in a chaotic, catastrophic manner, mass butchery, senseless assassination of everything. But it is our endurance and our faith in God that allows us to look at the planes and become calm before we start to cry, or when we start to cry after the silence and say: O God, we have no one but You.

9 October, 6:39pm

Dear friends,

We are entering a chapter in which we will be isolated from the world so that the city can be eradicated in the shortest time possible, a time when we won’t be able to communicate with anyone inside or outside the city. Night hasn’t fallen yet and the shelling is like hell. Until then cover us in a flood of prayer and send a message, or even a word, of steadfastness and freedom on our behalf. We entrust Gaza and everything within her to God, the Guardian, the Almighty.

10 October, 9:29am

At the beginning of the day, after making sure we are still alive, we start to count each other who is still here and who has turned into a funeral, not just people, streets and neighborhoods too. The whole city has been martyred.

10 October, 8:56pm

I seek refuge in You

from injury and agony

the seven oft-repeated verses

I declare

from phosphorus, the taste of orange

and the colors of cloud

from the smoke

I seek refuge in You

they who fell in love and died

the dust will scatter

and they laugh

11 October, 11:09am

Gaza did everything she could to confront this oppression. She surpassed imagination, rose above the limits of the possible and impossible, smashed all the statues and prohibitions, invented a steadfastness that will be taught in history, ascribed to Gaza, and when the lies are shed, the politicians and their hypocrisy fall away, and porcelain humanity collapses in on itself: Gaza will remain, an incomprehensible, impossible legend, a world record that cities, civilizations, armies might only attain in an era of prophets and miracles.

We have done what we must to take reclaim our rights, to fight, to endure, on behalf of the nation and all of the oppressed in this world, there is nothing to regret or grieve. Before God and before ourselves, we are people with a rightful claim, our duty in this covenant was to endure and to strive, everything else is left to God, in Him we have faith, in Him we trust. If we perish, it is a badge of honor and if we survive, let us tell the tale and bring our story before the eyes of the entire world. Between the two, we have our rituals – tears, patience, sadness, remembrance, hope and despair.

And if we die, to speak on our behalf, there were people here who dreamt of travel and love and life and other things.

We are under the planes and God is higher than they are, and higher than they are.

12 October, 2:30pm

Entire family trees have fallen, not people nor branches. The tree collapses with everyone in it and Gaza transforms into a wasteland a wide-open graveyard stretching from the doorstep of the Arab League to the podium of the United Nations, and we stare into our graves in silence, heaviness, submission to God.

13 October, 12:15pm

Today is Friday. It has not been a week, it has been one long day divided into tens of martyrs and wounded and much death and we don’t know what we are waiting for.

13 October, 8:13pm

We survive moment by moment here, the instant we like a post, the instant we turn off the alarm, the instant you call to your son, you might call and there might be no response, death is far faster!

15 October, 5:19pm

That sound we hear is the sound of death that has passed over us to choose another. We are still alive, we hear the death of others we know, we say: Thank God, the last sound they heard was not the sound of the missile. Those who hear the sound of the missile survive. We are alive until further notice.

15 October, 8:47pm

We are above, building a second city, doctors without patients or blood, professors without overcrowding and yelling at students, new families without pain or sadness, journalists photographing paradise, and poets writing about eternal love, all of them from Gaza, all of them. In heaven, a new Gaza – unbesieged – is coming into being.

17 October, 11:46am

Children have died who had not yet used their names!

18 October, 8:58pm

Our family photos, a bag of limbs, a pile of ash, five wrapped shrouds alongside one another of various sizes.

Family photos in Gaza are different, but they are together, they were together and they departed together.

18 October, 9:17pm

If we die, know that we are willing and steadfast, and tell of us that we are people with a rightful claim.

19 October, 1:10pm

My friend list is shrinking, turning into little coffins scattered here and there. I cannot catch my friends after the missiles, as they fly off, I cannot bring them back again nor can I pay my condolences nor can I cry, I don’t know what to do. Every day it shrinks further, these are not just names, these are us only with different faces, different names.

O God, what do we do, O God, in the face of this vast feast of death.

There is no icon here to bring them back, even if they renounce.

19 October, 1:47pm

Mariam has been relieved of her exhaustion, relieved forever. I am sorry, Mariam, for every time we disagreed you and I, so sorry...

19 October, 9:20pm

The entire Zahra neighborhood in Gaza is under threat all twenty-four towers being bombarded now, an entire city martyred, tower by tower, O God, O God!

20 October, 4:52pm

Before God, we in Gaza are either martyrs or witnesses to liberation and we all wait to learn where we will fall. We are all waiting, O God, Your vow is true.

On the evening of October 20, Hiba Abu Nada was martyred with her family under bombardment in their home in the Manara neighborhood of Khan Yunis.