From childhood to adulthood, Refaat Ibrahim recounts a life marked by repeated war, displacement and loss — a personal testimony of a generation growing up under siege in Gaza.

Refaat Ibrahim

The war in Gaza is not merely the one that began in 2023, but an unending policy of suffering that Palestinians have endured for 77 years under Israeli occupation and its crimes. I have lived this suffering since I was born on March 21, 2001. Today, I turn 25, having witnessed five wars and dozens of military escalations.

These wars were not passing events. They shaped the course of my life and carved the contours of my inner world, not only for me but for entire generations of Palestinians.

In 2008, at the age of seven, I lived through my first of these bitter experiences during a war that lasted 21 days. It was my first experience of displacement. Yet the moment that remains most vivid in the memory of that child I once was is the sight of a helicopter raining bullets over our land planted with roses. In that moment, my young mind could not comprehend the crime.

What had our flowers done to deserve being killed by gunfire? I took shelter behind the root of a massive olive tree, following my uncle’s advice as he tended the roses, as though that tree were my only refuge in a world beginning to lose its sanity.

That was only the beginning of a life in which death became a constant shadow. In the second war in 2012, I once again tasted the bitterness of displacement and watched part of my family home be destroyed. I was given no time to process the shock. Just two years later, in 2014, a more brutal war stormed our lives, bringing with it longer displacement. My home was completely targeted. Warplanes crushed it first, then military machinery came to distort what remained of the rubble of our memories.

But the deepest pain was the loss of loved ones. As a thirteen year old, my ambitions were simple: to excel in school, to play football with the neighbourhood children, and to sit and learn from my uncles and their friends who filled our home with noise and life.

In that war, Israel killed one of them, the one closest to our hearts, the one who used to play with us and teach us the basics of life. Not content with that, they uprooted olive and citrus trees and burned the roses once again.

My grandfather cared for those trees as though they were an extension of his roots, as if they were his children who never left the land. He grieved for them like a father losing his own child, and his heart faded under the weight of sorrow. In less than two weeks, he was gone.

I completed high school and entered university, trying to gather the scattered pieces of myself and leap over the scars of the past, only to find the machinery of war racing ahead of my dreams again in 2021. This time, I was no longer the frightened child. I had come to believe that this occupation was absolute evil, denying us our most basic right to exist.

When my family was displaced for the third time, I chose to remain alone in our home to experience, for the first time, the terror of what is known as the fire belt: an aerial campaign carried out by swarms of Israeli aircraft, sometimes numbering between fifty and two hundred planes, all bombing a single area no larger than one square kilometre at the same time, unleashing an intense and continuous barrage, as though pouring hell from the sky.

In those moments, my uncle, the same one who had taught me to seek shelter by the olive tree in 2008, was the one comforting me, while questions tore through my mind. How long will this occupation keep our lives suspended? When will we live a single day without the dust of gunpowder?

It did not take long before what I can only call the great genocide began in 2023, and it continues to this moment. Despite my experience with war and displacement, the brutality of this one exceeded all expectations. I was displaced across 34 different locations, came face to face with death hundreds of times, and hunger gnawed at my body until I could no longer move.

But what truly shattered me was the killing of my friends. Those who ran with me as children in the streets, those who sat beside me in school and university, more than 50 souls were killed by Israel.

Nearly everyone I loved now lies beneath the earth.

The final blow came when my uncle, the one who planted roses in 2008, who protected me from shelling and guided me again in 2021, was killed in 2025. In that moment, I felt as though all my sorrow and tears had been exhausted, as if something had been ripped from within my soul. Another uncle was also killed, the one who used to sit in the fields overseeing the planting of roses, along with my cousin who stood beside me at the time.

Today, as I turn 25, I look back and find no life in the familiar sense. I see a train moving from one station of war to another of annihilation. We are a generation not born to live, but born to be suspended. Our dreams have been denied flight, our choices confiscated, and we have been stripped of the most basic right of any young person to build a future.

These wars have shaped our identity, turning us into bodies burdened with pain and minds weighed down by loss. Despite my academic achievements and my work in journalism, I do not write with ink. I press my pen against my bleeding wounds just to continue, for in Gaza there is no luxury of stopping.

This testimony is not a plea for sympathy. It is a cry to recognise that behind every number we bleed, there is a life that deserved to be lived, and an entire generation whose years are being stolen by force. We are not enthusiasts of endurance. We are human beings who love life, yet we live in a closed circle of struggle, holding on to the hope that one day we will step out of this vast prison of war into the open horizon of freedom, to plant roses one last time without the smell of gunpowder suffocating them.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/03/i-am-25-wars-shaped-my-consciousness-and-memory/

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