The Electronic Intifada 14 March 2025
The author’s cousin Wassim holds his newborn child Yousef. Wassim was killed by an Israeli attack in January 2025.
Shams means “sun” in Arabic, and when I gave birth in May 2024, this is what my partner and I named our son. Back home in Gaza, where I was born and where most of my family lives, we say that the sun of liberation will rise sooner or later.
I gave birth to Shams in a hospital in Brussels, where I have lived for seven years. The room was spacious and well lit, and the staff were supportive, making an effort to communicate with me in both English and Arabic. In the background we played music by Lebanese legend Fairouz, and this helped me feel more at home, though my thoughts kept returning to Gaza.
In the postpartum months that followed, I remembered my mother’s and grandmother’s stories of their years of early motherhood in Gaza.
My mother gave birth to my sister Shahd during the first intifada, in 1992. During this time, the occupation had imposed a curfew on the Jabaliya refugee camp. She walked to the UNRWA clinic, leaning on my grandmother Tamam for support. My grandmother carried a white cloth in one hand and a lantern in the other, hoping for mercy from Israeli soldiers trained to shoot anything that moved.
Tamam herself was born in 1920, decades before the Nakba in 1948, when Israeli settlers forcibly expelled Palestinians from their homes and began to ethnically cleanse her village of Beit Jirja. She escaped with her three children to Gaza, walking the 15 kilometers with her ailing husband and a few belongings, including a key to their home.
When I returned from the hospital to my home, one of the first things Shams reached out to grab hold of was my silver necklace, a map of Palestine, an outline of our land. Shams’s touch seemed a message to me: “We are the owners of the land. We’re here. We will remain here.”
The memories that remain
Months into my postpartum, I was resting in my Brussels bedroom, receiving the surprising presence of the sun. Shams, at 10 months old, was lying next to me in his bedside sleeper, his gentle breaths the only sound in the room.
My mother and father were in the kitchen cooking, and the aroma of Palestinian cuisine was in the air. My mother was successfully evacuated to Spain from Gaza’s genocide in December 2023. My father was among the last individuals to leave Gaza through the Rafah border crossing in February 2024, before Israeli troops seized the crossing in May.
My heart swelled with love and gratitude for all that I have, yet these moments of tranquility are continuously mired in guilt and sadness.
Memories surface in my mind.
I remember my cousin Khalil, whose wife and children were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Jabaliya in November 2023, leaving him the sole survivor of his family.
I remember how, in October 2024, during the Israeli offensive on Jabaliya refugee camp, my cousin Wassim’s wife Mona, nine months pregnant, was forced to abandon her planned induced labor at Al-Awda Hospital and flee the camp.
With no transportation available to Gaza City, Mona and Wassim had to walk approximately 3 kilometers through the bombardment. The following day, Mona gave birth at the Patient’s Friends Benevolent Society Hospital, the only hospital in Gaza City they could find that still had obstetric services.
Wassim sent me a text shortly after, joyfully announcing the birth of their son, whom they named Yousef. They named him after Wassim’s brother, who had been killed by Israeli forces in November 2023.
“They kill one Yousef,” Wassim told me, “we bring thousands.”
Barely four months later, on 2 January 2025, Wassim was killed in an Israeli airstrike along with his parents at a shelter in Gaza City. Yousef and Mona survived, though the child has now been robbed of knowing his father and his grandparents.
I remember how my cousin Asil, in southern Gaza, struggled with her own pregnancy. She was malnourished and her baby’s heartbeat was faltering in her womb. With nearby hospitals lacking essential equipment for prenatal care, and overwhelmed with critical injuries and displaced people, Asil had no choice but to wait for delivery day, uncertain whether her child would be born healthy.
Asil went into early labor at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, giving birth to her son Ahmad.
Now approaching his first birthday, Ahmad has only known a life of hardship and displacement, starvation and extreme weather.
After the ceasefire, they made their way back to Khan Younis to find their home unlivable, destroyed by Israeli bombardments. Like many families, they placed a tent atop the rubble and called it home.
Finding Gandhi in Brussels
Outside, in Brussels, the weather was serene and beautiful. My mother, partner and I walked to a nearby park, pushing Shams in his stroller. We had never visited this park before and I was surprised to see a statue of Mahatma Gandhi.
It was a bronze sculpture, by Belgian artist René Cliquet, made to commemorate Gandhi’s 100th birthday in 1969. Gandhi is in a seated position and a placard features the quote: “The world is my family.”
I understand that some might read this as a message that advocates passive coexistence, but I read it differently, telling myself that Gandhi’s belief in the power of compassion was not meant to overshadow the pursuit of justice and freedom.
Suddenly, Shams began to cry. We paused our walk, and I prepared to breastfeed him. Passersby either smiled at us or averted their eyes to give us some privacy. Still, others looked at us with what I sensed as disapproval of public breastfeeding.
Their looks irritated me, but it was not the true source of my discomfort.
What truly unsettled me was the normalcy surrounding us. The seemingly unaffected world around me. People looking at their smartphones and engaging in small talk. It’s as if the countless loved ones I’ve lost could be so easily forgotten. As if we can all simply move past the knowledge of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
Undermining Palestinian existence
Israel’s targeting of Palestinian women and children isn’t collateral damage: it’s a calculated strategy to undermine Palestinian existence. Israel aims to control not just our territory but also the very possibility of Palestinian life.
I acknowledge the hardship of becoming a mother in such times, especially in the face of the narrative that often confines Palestinian women and girls to a single story of resilience.
Yet motherhood has provided me with a profound clarity. Every moment I spend nurturing my child is a victory against those who seek to erase Palestinian existence.
While Israel seeks to weaken the future generations who will inherit the liberation struggle, Palestinians have long understood that reproduction itself is a form of resistance.
I rise each morning with the sun. I get up to live and to show love to our people and our land, and to fight with whatever energy is left in me. The sun rises, and so too does the dawn of liberation.
Tamam Abusalama is a Palestinian communications professional, living in Belgium. Her work includes campaigning for refugee rights.
