*This article was written in December 2025 under the prevailing conditions at that time.
Genocide changed Gaza’s shape. But it also twisted time itself by the neck, rewired daily routines, and pressed itself into our language. Old words have been given meanings they were never intended to have.
The first is tawajah (هَجَّوت). Originally an imperative form of a verb in Arabic meaning ‘head towards’ or ‘go to’, this word no longer means something as simple as ‘movement’. Instead, people ask, “Do you have a tawajah?” and they mean – “Do you have a permit to travel to access aid?” So, the word now carries the connotation of something else, of humanitarian relief – a fragile guarantee of rice, flour, or canned food for the next week or two.
To get your aid, you go to baraks (سكرب). That word used to refer to simple storage sheds. But now these are spaces where survival itself is tallied out, parcel by parcel. Where you are decides how much you get. If you can get anything at all, that is. In shamal (لماش) – the North – packages are smaller and waits are longer. In janoub (بونجَّ) – the South – aid may arrive faster and slightly better: but nothing is ever guaranteed.
‘North’ and ‘South’ used to be directions, simply. Over years of war, they have come to represent gradations of danger, directions of displacement, boundaries on a map that shift and rearrange the moment you think you understand them. North is now indelibly associated with the evacuated zones: places to avoid, places that swallow up everything once familiar. South is the place that is a single order away. Moving south has never been a choice. Instructions arrive by text message, by leaflet, or by someone screaming: “Go south!” They say it is for your safety. But this is impossible; safety too has lost its meaning.
As our map of existence has shrunk, the language inside our home must stretch to cover what is missing. New words appear out of necessity, and we have no choice but to use them. The children cry out for al-Mukammal (لّمّكلما), a food substitute whose name derives from the verb kammal, meaning ‘to complete’. It comes in small, bright boxes marked with different colours, and contains a nutrient paste for malnourished children. Different colours mark levels of hunger, and the shapes indicate age. Now there are no more sweets left to eat, this becomes a poor substitute to chew on. Our children learn the colours before they understand what hunger does to their bodies.
Meaning has collapsed the same way the skyline has. Since nearly 80 per cent of Gaza’s buildings are broken, structures are no longer described by their architectural beauty, but by their endurance. We have abandoned the language of blueprints for the vocabulary of survival. If you are lucky, a building is waqfa (ةفقاو), meaning ‘still standing’. If you are less lucky, it is mafrugha (ةغرفم), meaning ’emptied’, ‘gutted’, ‘a hollow shell’. If you are completely out of luck, it is waqi’a (ةعقاو), meaning ‘totally collapsed’. To say a house has waqi’a implies that a lineage has been buried under its stones.
When buildings fail, we turn to the shadar (رداش). Once a modest curtain or a canopy for celebration, the word has now been stripped of its former joy. Now, it refers to the sheets of leather and plastic that try to cover you and stand in for a home. Tied and stretched, the shadar tests itself against the elements, letting rain in during winter and trapping heat in summer. It does not promise protection; it only delays exposure. In Gaza, shadar cover the wounds of a mafrugha home, where plastic flaps replace walls. Some houses here can even be entirely made of shadar.
The cost of genocide is more than human lives; the economy has collapsed. There is no work to be found. The struggle lives in the hand that clutches what little remains. In the market, the word on everyone’s lips is not ‘expensive’ or ‘out of stock’, but btemsheesh (شيشمّتب) – a colloquial phrase that means, ‘it doesn’t walk’. It is used for worn-out banknotes, frayed and pierced, faded from passing through many hands, but now no longer in circulation. Because of famine, there are barely any goods to sell or buy. Money itself has lost its value. Hands reach and withdraw; people wander between empty stalls in a quiet loop, holding money that no longer walks.
