The Electronic Intifada 21 October 2025
The author on her way south. “We tried to laugh the whole way.”
When the Israeli military ordered us to evacuate the north, I cut my hair.
When I told my mother, Hadiya, that I wanted to cut my hair, she didn’t look at me, didn’t even pause from folding the clothes into the suitcase.
“Go ahead, cut it,” she snapped.
Her voice was sharp, clipped, like the scissors were about to be.
My sister Basma, 36, stood behind me, gathering the long river of my hair in her fingers. It reached below my waist, a curtain I had carried for years. She combed slowly, carefully, tugging at knots with a patience that felt like grief.
For months since the collapse of the last ceasefire in March, I had promised myself: if there was even the smallest chance the negotiations would succeed, I would keep my hair. Every night I opened Telegram, scrolling for news that might save it. Every morning, nothing.
The teeth of the comb whispered through my hair. For a moment, I imagined we were still at home on just another day, my sister braiding my hair. But the smell of gunpowder and smoke and the half-filled bags in the corner of a room of my brother-in-law’s uncle’s house in al-Rimal – where many relatives had sought shelter – reminded me this was not a comforting routine, but a farewell.
She braided tightly, her fingers moving as if she were binding memories into the strands. When she tied the end and laid the braid against my back, her hands lingered. She hesitated.
“What a loss,” she murmured.
The scissors gleamed.
“Cut it,” I said. “I will not regret it.”
Snip.
60 centimeters of memory
Sixty centimeters fell. The braid slipped from my head into my sister’s palm, and loose clippings curled on the floor like tiny black question marks.
Days later, as we were preparing to leave, my other sister, Asmaa, 34, leaned close:
“They say hair holds memory. This braid is full of them. Your new hair will grow, but it won’t remember.”
I lowered the braid into a thin plastic bag. In the mirror, I saw a stranger. The bare nape, the hollow expression.
We kept packing in silence. Shirts folded. Papers tucked away. Shoes shuffled into corners of the suitcase.
When I finally zipped the bag, the braid lay buried inside: quiet, sealed, a piece of me smuggled into exile.
On 23 September, our company walked more than twenty-five thousand steps – my sister has an app – or more than five hours to reach Deir al-Balah.
We set out as two young men (my cousin and brother-in-law), five children and eight women.
On my back I carried a pink backpack with my laptop and chargers. In my hand, I held a basil plant. I refused to put it in the truck with the other belongings that we had packed separately, afraid it would die. It was heavy, but every time I looked at it, it gave me motivation to keep walking.
Someone passing by muttered, “runaways,” a disparaging term that has become increasingly common in Gaza during the genocide to describe those who have sought safety in the south.
A driver appeared, offering to take five people – just under $9 each – for a ride of about fifteen minutes.
We stood in the road, forced to choose. Then we saw that the truck we had rented had sustained a puncture and had been forced to turn around. My brother-in-law had also turned back to find another truck to take our belongings.
So we pushed the children forward with their mother, insisting they take the seats. The rest of us stayed behind, our feet on the hot road, watching the truck rattle away with part of our family. We became five: four women and my cousin Ahmad, 21.
Laughter as defiance
As we walked, a young man sitting on a truck looked down at me, his eyes heavy with pity.
“Wallah, it’s a shame,” he muttered.
It was a shame – he wasn’t wrong. But I don’t tolerate pity. We had been walking for hours under the sun, yes, but we were laughing.
We tried to laugh the whole way, the five of us. We laughed so much that people passing by began laughing at our laughter.
We mocked politics, slogans, the hollow word “victory.” We joked about chicken and food, about how the date sellers would cheat us. We mocked and poked fun at anything on our way!
“Why me,” my cousin Rama, 14, joked. “Why, I am prettier than Angelina Jolie, yet here I am walking under the sun, humiliated on these appalling streets?”
We laughed at the makeshift oil and diesel burners we passed, the ones where they burn plastic to make fuel, choking us in the process. We laughed at every voice that once said, “Don’t worry, Gaza is still fine. Don’t leave.”
We laughed until we couldn’t breathe.
The sea
The sea of Gaza will always be our healer.
We knew walking along the shore to reach Deir al-Balah would be less strain on us. We took off our shoes and socks and went to the water’s edge.
The first touch made me scream with release. It was as if the water drank the pain from my feet. For months my body had carried the weight of walking, fleeing, waiting. But the sea knew. The sea pulled it out of me.
The water rose to my knees. The sound of the waves drowned everything else: no bombs, no drones, no shouting. Just us and the sea.
For a moment, it felt like a commercial break from genocide. A pause. A reprieve.
We bent down and collected seashells as if they were treasures. Ahmad lifted a jellyfish carefully, its body soft and translucent in his hands, then placed it back in the water. He even caught a small crab, then flicked it gently back into the water: a reminder that life still insisted on existing here.
The sea opened its arms. It carried us. We sat down after a while, the salt clinging to our skin. We ate dry bread, passing it between us, and shared water: less than half a bottle for all five.
Still, it was enough. Because at that moment, the sea fed us more than food ever could.
For a little while, we forgot we were evacuating.
We were just alive.
Waiting for an ending
When we reached Deir al-Balah, we couldn’t settle. The air felt restless, as if everything around us was holding its breath. There was news on Telegram channels and Facebook about new negotiations to end the war: constant updates, messages and rumors passed between people who didn’t quite believe them but couldn’t stop checking.
I had lived through the first displacement here in Deir al-Balah for almost eight months. I knew every street, every small shop. Yet this time it felt different. Whenever I walked to find a bit of internet, something inside me tightened. I felt suffocated, like the city itself was pushing me to leave. I kept whispering to myself, “I want to go home.”
And somewhere deep inside, a fragile hope began to take shape. Maybe this time the shelling would stop, maybe this time the sky would stay quiet.
Whatever we tried to do – fixing the ground around the tents, or deciding whether to change the piece of land we had rented for $120 a week because the soil was wet and slippery – we kept hoping that this time we would go back soon and the genocide would end.
The ceasefire was announced on 9 October. The day after, my family and I went back north to al-Rimal and the apartment we had rented there. Days later, I looked at myself in the mirror. My hair hadn’t started to grow yet, and I felt regret. I had said I wouldn’t, but I did. That braid had carried years of ordinary days, of laughter and sunlight, of the smell of home. I had cut it to survive, but survival had its own cost.
My hair will grow again. Gaza will too. But neither of us will forget the sound of the scissors or the bombs.
Israa Alsigaly is a writer and translator in Gaza.
