Heroism of not breaking: Gaza genocide and the unyielding Palestinian spirit

When Israel unleashed its genocidal war on Gaza on October 7, 2023,  Amira*, a teacher and a mother of four, had a grim familiarity with tragedy, yet she couldn't have grasped that this assault would shatter the very geometry of her life.

In the past, every major Israeli offensive — starting with the brutal "Operation Cast Lead" in 2008−2009— had exacted a toll: Her brother, several cousins, two nephews, and countless other relatives had already been consumed by Israel’s repeated onslaughts, which consistently targeted the civilian population of Gaza.

Though she braced for pain, for loss, for the expected grief, she did not brace for the annihilation of her world, the sweeping away of her entire existence.

The devastation began swiftly. In the first weeks, her husband, a man in his prime, was killed. His body simply vanished — never recovered, never mourned over a grave. Two weeks later, her youngest son, Abdulrahman, a 19-year-old aspiring engineer at Al-Azhar University, fell in the fighting.

A deeply spiritual woman, ravaged by war and the early famine, Amira rushed toward the front lines north of Shati camp the moment a fragile ceasefire was announced on November 24, 2023.

There she found her son.

She desperately tried to pull his body to safety. She failed. For hours, she lay beside her dead son, closing his eyes against the smoke-filled sky. She whispered verses from the Quran while holding his hand, before leaving to search for her surviving children.

I spoke with her several times then. Her focus narrowed to a tiny, fragile point of light: her newborn, Alia, named after a sister-in-law killed earlier in the genocide, alongside her husband and young son. Alia was born with a heart defect. Amira’s singular, fierce mission was to get the baby to Türkiye for treatment.

Alia, Amira said, was hope. The child's fragile life was the last defiant stand of the family bloodline, chased across the Gaza Strip from Shati to Gaza City, to Nuseirat, to Rafah, to Al-Mawasi, to Deir Al-Balah, then back to Gaza, a relentless, forced migration from the jaws of genocide.

Yet, hope didn't last much longer. Like thousands of ill Palestinians left to die by the collapse of care and the cruelty of starvation, Alia, just a few months old, perished.

Sumud personified

Amira’s grief was monumental. She refused to surrender the small, lifeless weight to the morgue's medics. She stayed through the night, a silent figure among dozens of shrouded martyrs, holding her baby and insisting the child was only sleeping.

The flight of despair resumed when the ceasefire collapsed on November 30. The bereaved wife and mother bundled her few possessions and dragged her surviving son and daughter into the maze of displacement.

Soon, her focus hardened into a core of iron will. She plotted their future with a stark, defiant purpose: they would marry, they would have children, and they would bestow all the names of the lost upon the new generation.

Then, on October 1, 2025, an Israeli bomb found their tent, now a temporary sanctuary in Deir Al-Balah. Amira and her daughter were spared. Her elder son, Mohammed, was not. He was 23.

Reviewing my phone messages to Amira is a devastating chronology of condolence, a testament to relentless, cumulative loss.

Her story is the distilled, agonising experience of every Gazan. While the International Court of Justice (ICJ) continues its measured "investigation" and "deliberation" on charges of genocide, for Amira, the atrocity is not a legal term; it is the lived realities experienced by all of Gaza, and her survivors.

The last time we spoke, she was once again fleeing with her daughter, a solitary mother fighting to preserve the last drop of her bloodline.

Amira is more than a loving mother; she is the embodiment of a heroic resilience that remains unfathomable to the world outside Gaza. She is the witness to an ongoing genocide, and the survival of her teenage daughter is the ultimate, defiant act of resistance.

In Amira’s story, the intimate and the collective converge. Her experience offers a human lens through which to grasp the scale of what Gaza has endured.

Unprecedented and unparalleled

Two years into the genocide, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has deepened to levels the United Nations has described as unprecedented in recent history.

The raw statistics of the destruction underpin Amira’s personal tragedy: more than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed, tens of thousands more remain missing under rubble, and nearly the entire population has been displaced, often multiple times, just like her family. Entire neighbourhoods lie in ruins, while famine and disease spread in overcrowded shelters.

Amira's struggle for survival is mirrored by the collapse of basic infrastructure and services for the entire strip. Electricity is almost entirely absent, leaving households in darkness and hospitals reliant on dwindling fuel reserves to run life-saving equipment.

The impact on health has been catastrophic: Gaza’s medical system has collapsed under the weight of mass casualties and shortages. Because of Israel’s relentless bombing and siege, doctors are forced to operate without anaesthesia and treat wounds with minimal supplies, a collapse of care that led to the entirely preventable death of Amira's infant daughter, Alia.

The struggle for food is a constant, technical threat to life. Malnutrition has become widespread, particularly among children, a crisis that culminated on August 22 when famine was confirmed for the first time in Gaza with the release of a report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). 

This led to a joint statement from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), UNICEF, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO), who urged an “immediate and full-scale humanitarian response given the escalating hunger-related deaths, rapidly worsening levels of acute malnutrition and plummeting levels of food consumption, with hundreds of thousands of people going days without anything to eat.” 

Furthermore, education has nearly collapsed, with most schools destroyed or repurposed as shelters; UNICEF reports that most children in Gaza have not attended school regularly for two years.

The persistence of such conditions poses a stark question: how has this been allowed to continue? Despite the severity of the crisis, international action has been severely limited.

At the United Nations, ceasefire resolutions have been repeatedly blocked by US vetoes, leaving international efforts stalled while the crisis deepens and aid convoys face restrictions and blockages at border crossings.

Governments have issued repeated statements of concern, but these have rarely gone beyond rhetoric. While calling for restraint or humanitarian access, few have imposed sanctions, suspended arms transfers, or pursued accountability mechanisms. 

Amira's harrowing journey, therefore, is not just a personal one; it is a microcosm of a system-wide failure, a heroic struggle for survival against both relentless genocide and famine, and a paralyzed global community that offered Palestinians plenty of rhetoric and no meaningful action.

*Name changed to protect identity. No identifying details or images have been used to ensure the safety of the survivor and her family.

Romana Rubeo, an Italian journalist, contributed to this article