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My name is Mayss. For a thousand days, I've been living through the genocide of my people in Gaza. For a thousand days, I've been living in an unending and exhausting cycle of constant terror, mental distraction, immense psychological pressure, and profound loss that devours my soul. I've reached a point where I can no longer define why I'm living or what my goals are. My greatest dream now is simply for my day to pass in peace without losing more loved ones.
For 1,000 days, time in Gaza has ceased to be measured in hours or months; it is instead calculated by the heavy toll of losses, the persistent echo of airstrikes, and the suffocating space between life and death. What the world observes from afar as a protracted political conflict or as sterile statistics is, for us, a reality we breathe, struggle within, and die in a thousand times each and every day.
Today in Gaza our population It is concentrated in less than 30% of the area where we lived a thousand days ago. 1. Today we are living under a calculated policy of forced displacement and systematic starvation, where there is no safe haven anywhere.
This genocide has not only taken us back to square one but has pushed us well below it. I have lost some people from my Family. I have lost our home, my room which was my safe haven, we have lost my father's car, which was our family's main and only source of income. Today I live as an internally displaced person right in front of my bombed-out house, forced to look at its ruins and face my shattered memories every single morning.
No member of my family has been spared this suffering. My father, who already suffers from chronic high blood pressure, has suffered a severe loss of hearing due to the constant carpet-bombing, barrages of fire and terrifying explosions, which have left him with only 40% of his hearing capacity, not to mention the heavy burden of constant anxiety about our fate. As for my mother, her spirit could not bear the weight of such immense grief; after tragically losing her brother, his wife, their daughter and then her own sister, she suffered a trauma a deep and sharp psychological issue from which they are still unable to free themselves or overcome it, living like a body without a soul.
Even innocence has been crushed under the rubble.
My little sister, who was only two years old before the war began, grew up and became aware amid bombings and displacement—not at nursery, nor at school, nor in the safety of her home. She has never known a single day of stability or peace. Absolute terror has caused her deep trauma, making her behaviour increasingly aggressive: this is the painful reality for all the children of Gaza who have aged a million years before their time. Many of them are now scattered across the streets, working at small stalls to ensure a meagre income for their families. Children who, in many tragic cases, have already lost both parents.
I graduated from high school and pursued my passion by enrolling in the’university, but today I am a prisoner of screens, I study entirely online. How much I wish for real, in-person lessons; how I long to experience the normal details of a university student attending an 8:00 AM lecture. But how can this happen if my beautiful university has been turned into a crowded shelter, full of thousands of displaced people, homeless and bereaved? We have been deprived of even our most fundamental right: that of learning and growing.
My family's story is but a mirror reflecting the lives of two million people in Gaza, all united by the same, meticulous tragedy. Today, here, the simplest means of survival have become exhausting daily battles. Endless queues of people stand for long, heartbreaking hours under the scorching sun or freezing cold, clutching empty containers, waiting to obtain a single drop of Drinking water oz of water for basic hygiene.
Life has become an exhausting ritual in search of non-existent cooking gas, forcing us to rely solely on firewood, which emits suffocating smoke that tears at the lungs of children and mothers within tattered tents; tents that have become the new face of our devastated city, unable to offer any protection neither from the summer heat nor from the winter cold.
We live in a completely contaminated and uninhabitable environment for humans, where skin diseases and intestinal epidemics are rampant among the displaced due to the complete absence of sanitation systems and a severe shortage of hygiene products. This comes at a time when medical and civil infrastructure has been systematically destroyed, forcing most hospitals to close their doors. The wounded and sick die in silence due to the lack of even a single dose of medicine or an available hospital bed, a situation exacerbated by the suffocating siege imposed on the movement of people and goods, which prevents them from travelling abroad for treatment. Even the constant hum of Banana (the drones) never leave the sky, not even for a second, etching a constant, agonising noise and deep psychological trauma into people’s minds, leaving us no sleep to relieve our weariness nor any peace to soothe our hearts.
We have endured repeated forced displacements, a constant lack of a permanent home, and a famine that has ravaged our bodies. The darkest period of these 1,000 days was the famine; there were long days when I had nothing but a single cup of water to survive on, yet I was expected to stay strong and hold on. I will never forget the day I collapsed and fainted in the middle of the market: my body was not just ill, it was completely drained, with no food left to burn, not even enough to keep me on my feet.
Behind my story and those of our families lie the bitter and terrifying statistics recorded by Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR). The ongoing onslaught, they write, has resulted in the martyrdom of 73,066 Palestinians (according to official figures) and the injury of another 173,514 since the commencement of the attack on October 7, 2023. Even the rumoured international cease-fire announcements and promises on October 10, 2025, were nothing more than ink on paper; the systematic policies of killing and destruction have continued, claiming another 1,053 lives and injuring another 3,406, while the bodies of 786 victims have been recovered from the rubble following various attacks. Taken together, these systematic policies satisfy the constitutive elements of the crime of genocide under the International law.
Today, as we mark this grim milestone of 1,000 days of continuous suffering and escalating aggression, we ask not much of the world: only to look at us as human beings.
Today, as we mark this grim milestone of 1,000 days of continued suffering and escalating aggression, we do not ask much from the world: only to look upon us as human beings. Human beings who harbour silent dreams and have loving families that have been torn apart. Writing these lines is not just a documentation of pain or a reminder of the profound failure of community international in taking effective action to stop these crimes; it is a desperate attempt to cling to life. It is an assertion of the fact that the details of my home, the pain of my family, and my small story are not just fleeting numbers in reports. We are living stories that deserve to be heard, and we deserve to live in peace.
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