Eid al-Fitr is meant to bring release. It comes at the end of Ramadan, after a month of fasting and prayer, and in Gaza it has always carried its own kind of joy. The day begins with prayer. Men and boys gather in clean clothes, neighbours congratulate one another, friends embrace, and supplications rise with the first light. Families return home for breakfast, then begin the long round of visits to sisters, daughters, aunts, uncles and neighbours. Children wait for eidiya, the money given to younger relatives. Coffee is poured, sweets are shared and doors remain open.
This year, the rituals remained. The feeling had gone.
Sorrow seemed to stand among us. People said “Eid Mubarak”, but the words landed differently, as if everyone knew they were speaking across a vast field of absence. After breakfast with my mother and brothers, at 9.30am my three brothers and I set out and did not return until about 11.30pm. We moved from house to house on foot – transport is too difficult and unreliable.
The streets were full of people observing Eid, we walked as families have always done but the lightness was missing, it felt less like celebration than a procession through loss.
Our first stop was my aunt Om Majid, who had lost her daughter, son-in-law and grandson. A short walk away was my sister Ghada. Before the war, she lived in eastern Gaza. Her home is gone now. She rents a garage and lives there with her husband and children, trying to make a life inside a place never meant to hold one. People do their best to honour the day, however reduced their circumstances, and she did the same. But this improvised home carried the weight of all that had been lost.
Further on was my aunt Om Mahmoud’s half-standing house in western Gaza. She had lost her husband, my maternal uncle, as well as her son Ahmed, his wife Noor and three of their children on the same night, in a single airstrike. In houses such as hers, grief sits in the silence between greetings and in the faces of those receiving visitors.
The same sorrow awaited us at my sister Nabila’s. She had lost two of her sons in the war, as well as her husband, Hani. He was the director of the ambulance and emergency department at the ministry of health in Gaza, and he was killed at a medical clinic in Gaza City. On Eid, families are meant to gather around those they love. But in Gaza this year, absences seemed to occupy more space than the living.
By the time we reached my aunt Malaka’s house in western Gaza City, the pattern of the day was unmistakable. She had lost her son and grandson. But what struck me most were the faces of her surviving grandchildren. This was their first Eid without their father. I looked at them and wondered what Eid meant to children learning so young what loss feels like. Yet their mother had dressed them for the occasion and tried to bring them into the day with joy, refusing to let them feel set apart from other children.
In Gaza now, even celebration has become an act of protection.
The visits continued in the same painful rhythm. At my sister Shireen’s rented house was her widowed daughter Walaa, who now lives there with her two children. At my aunt Nadia’s was her widowed daughter Israa, who now lives with her in a small apartment. In each house, a missing husband, a missing son, an orphaned child, a widow learning to inhabit a life she never chose.
By afternoon, we returned home for a short rest and lunch. Visitors were arriving to see my mother at our family home in the Daraj neighbourhood of Gaza City. Every person brought another chapter of the tragic story. My mother lost her brother, her grandchildren, her sons-in-law and her daughter. Sitting among the guests, I felt that what was passing through our door that afternoon was not only courtesy or Eid obligation, but the full weight of Palestinian mourning.
Later, we went out again. We visited my sister Wafaa, who had lost two of her sons, Mohammad and Mustafa. From there we went to see the children of my sister Amal, whom we had also lost. Her daughters now live with their father after the killing of their mother.
The final scene of the day, when we returned home, was in our sitting room – Gaza’s pain gathered into one frame. To my right sat the sons of my sister Hanan, whose husband was killed. They live with us now, two boys deprived of a father by this war. In front of me my older brother Sobhi, who lost his daughter and her husband, along with his son-in-law’s entire family. The only survivor was their 11-month-old baby daughter, pulled alive from the rubble. A little to the left sat my cousin Raed, he lost his son and his brother. Next to him another relative, Fakhri, who lost five of his wife’s brothers. My brother Mohammed sat beside his injured son, who is still receiving rehabilitation treatment after being wounded in the neck. And in the middle of them all my mother.
That room was Gaza.
Everyone carrying grief. Everyone missing someone. They had arrived through the outward customs of Eid, the visit, the greeting, the coffee, the courtesy, but beneath those rituals was exhaustion and pain.
Eid is supposed to renew the bonds between people. In Gaza this year, it still did, but not through joy, through witness. We visited one another not simply to celebrate, but to acknowledge the dead and sit with the bereaved.
Grief, too, has its rituals.
This first Eid after the ceasefire did not feel like a return to normal life, but a day suspended between faith and devastation, between habit and heartbreak. The Eid rituals, the prayer, the breakfast, the embraces, the visits, the eidiya, survived. But the joy of Eid had been hollowed out. In every home, sorrow waited in the corner.
And so the first day of Eid in Gaza became, for me, a long walk through love, kinship and ruin: a day that began with blessings and ended as testimony.