Beneath What Remains~ 3 min

By Abdallah Qudaih

I used to think destruction was loud.

Explosions. Sirens. Buildings collapsing.

But I learned that real destruction is quiet.

It is waking up inside a tent and realizing this is no longer temporary.
It is learning how to sleep lightly because fabric walls do not protect you.
It is knowing that rats and insects move at night and you cannot stop them.

This is where I live now.

There is no electricity. No refrigerator. No fan in the summer heat that turns the tent into an oven. We charge our phones at paid charging points when we can. Water arrives by truck four days a week. When it comes, I carry buckets one hundred meters and pour them into a small tank. By afternoon, the water is warm from the sun. We drink it anyway.

We sleep on thin mattresses on the ground. Your back hurts. Your body never truly rests. Privacy does not exist. Safety is a word that feels theoretical.

But this is only the present.

Before the war, I lived in Khuza’a, east of Khan Younis. A farming town. Quiet. Steady. My father had a clothing shop in the market. We owned agricultural land across different areas greenhouses full of tomatoes, fields of wheat and peas. We raised sheep, chickens, ducks. Before and after school, I fed the animals. We had a dog who guarded the farm. I loved him. We lost him in the war.

We were not poor. We were not desperate. We had land, work, dignity, routine.

Now the house is gone.
The land is inaccessible.
The farm is destroyed.
My old phone with all our photos is still under the rubble.

When I say “under the rubble,” I do not mean only concrete.
I mean an entire life buried.

Some families are still inside houses. A small number of buildings survived. Others rent homes, but rent is extremely high. Only those with money traders who accumulated wealth, organizers who controlled large donations, or those who already had strong resources can live that way. Most ordinary families live in tents.

War does not affect everyone equally. Even inside catastrophe, inequality survives.

This is why I write.

Not to shock.
Not to perform suffering.
Not to compete with numbers.

Numbers count the dead.
Details explain the living.

I write because if I do not record these details, they will disappear like everything else.

I write because survival without testimony feels incomplete.

I write because I am still here.

And as long as I am here,
I will refuse to become a statistic.

Abdallah Qudaih is a 17-year-old Palestinian writer. Last December, as a way to help support his family, he published his first book: Beneath the Rubble, an overwhelming account of his experience during the ongoing genocide. Buy it here.