In Gaza, the joyous sound of the zaghroota – a celebratory ululation marking weddings and other happy occasions – has faded. In its place: the thud of air strikes, the whine of drones, and the sobs of mourning families.

Weddings have become exceedingly rare. Even those who try to begin new lives find their dreams cut short. The collapse of the economy, constant fear, and heavy grief have forced many couples to put marriage plans on hold.

For Palestinian brides-to-be, wedding days are now memories of imagined futures. Before October 2023, weddings in Gaza were vibrant festivals.

From the henna nights attended by the bride-to-be and female friends and relatives, to the groom’s zaffe – a lively procession of dancing family and friends collecting the bride from her home — celebrations were elaborate and joyous. 

Dozens of purpose-built wedding halls once dotted Gaza, like Pearl Palace and Lighthouse Hall in the al-Rimal neighbourhood, Al-Nour hall in Nuseirat, and, of course, Princess Palace on Al-Sina’a Street in Gaza City was iconic. Teenage girls dreamed of their spacious halls, decked in string lights to counter Israeli electricity cuts.

Today, Lighthouse Hall lies in rubble, destroyed by Israeli air strikes. Others have been severely damaged, like the 130,000 buildings reduced to debris. 

Some halls, like Rose Hall in Tal Al-Hawa, were repurposed as shelters for displaced families from Shujaiya and Zeitoun. Instead of tables clothed in linens and wedding couches (koosha), dance floors were covered with blankets and mattresses.

The destruction has forced couples, who still cling to love – an enduring human need – to replace wedding plans with simple ceremonies within homes still standing, or displacement tents.

Engagement parties, once grand but with smaller guest lists than weddings, are now modest affairs—more intimate, and perhaps made all the more meaningful by the shadow of war and the risk of loss.

Love amid temporary ceasefires

Ola Abdel Rabbo, 22, an electrical engineering student, became engaged to Naseem Abu Subha in February during Israel’s brief ceasefire with Gaza.

The couple had met while studying a web design course and were instantly drawn to one another.

At their engagement party at a relative’s house in Deir al Balah, in the quiet of the truce, Naseem slipped a simple gold ring that belonged to his mother onto Ola’s finger.

“Naseem wasn’t able to buy me the traditional wedding shabka [a gold set with bangles, a necklace, and earrings], as he didn’t have the money and the gold shops had shut down,” Ola recalls. “He promised he’d buy it for me once the war ended.”

Naseem had been offered a job as a software designer in the UK, and the couple had high hopes.

Over refreshments of warm tea and a homemade sponge cake, made with the little flour Naseem was able to find in the aid lines, the young couple celebrated with the few friends and family who had thus far survived the war.

For their wedding, they’d planned to order their cake from one of Gaza’s renowned bakeries, like Badri and Haniya's shop in Rimal, its facade once decorated with sun-faded plastic roses and its window displaying three-tiered cakes with white sugar roses on gold foil bases that would reflect the streetlight.

While Abu Majed, another veteran baker in that neighbourhood, would greet couples with a smile, asking them, "Would you like your cake pink like your love, or white like your intention?"

Today, the smell of vanilla no longer fills Rimal. Instead, those who persevere through the genocide simply ask: "Is there any flour?”

Still, Abu Majed remains optimistic: "When this war ends, I'm going to decorate the first cake with zaatar (thyme, a traditional Palestinian herb) to serve as a reminder of our land’s heritage”.

Frozen memories

At her engagement, Ola wore a dress she had stitched years earlier, white and pink cotton purchased from a merchant on Omar Al-Mukhtar Street.

She remembers Naseem looking at her in that dress, his smile beaming. Love songs gently played on someone’s phone. That moment lives vividly in her mind – a memory she now carries alone.

Just months later, on June 30, at the Al Baqa beachside cafe, Naseem placed Ola’s order; he knew it by heart. Turkish coffee, little sugar.

He wrote something on a napkin and carefully pushed it across the table to his fiancee. It read: “If they ask you why you love her, say it’s because she is the only person who lets you forget the noise of the planes.”

Just after Naseem took a photo of them together on his phone, an air strike hit the cafe. Both were thrown to the ground. Ola’s foot was bleeding, and Naseem lay beside her, motionless. Paramedics rushed them to the hospital, but hours later, Ola’s family confirmed her worst fear: Naseem was dead.

“They finally allowed me to see him. He looked as beautiful as the full moon,” she says.

Ola’s heartbreak is one of many. In homes across Gaza, other brides-to-be clutch memories of fiances they will never marry, like Aseel Al-Ashqar, whose love story met a similarly tragic fate.

Small engagements, big hearts

In Gaza City, Aseel’s family held a small engagement party at a relative's home for her and Ahmed al-Sahhar, just three weeks before the October 7 war began.

The couple was filled with optimism, the kind only those in love feel. 

Ahmed, 28, a doctor, lived in the building across the street from Aseel, 26, and would often quietly watch her from his balcony as she returned from work as a dentist at a small neighbourhood clinic. Eventually, he sent his family to ask for her hand, as is tradition. 

On the day of their engagement, Aseel styled her hair in front of a small mirror and carefully wrapped her hijab, then penciled a line of kohl that she had saved for the occasion. She applied pink lipstick that she had bought a year earlier from Al-Wahda Street, a shop now destroyed. 

If finances had allowed, she would have had her hair and make-up professionally done at the beauty salons in Rimal, like Lamset Nisreen Salon, or Rabab Styles in Shujaiya.

Aseel saved the photos from their engagement on her phone. In the days that followed, she would return to them to relive the occasion.

Weeks later, after the war started, her family's home in Shujaiah was completely destroyed by an Israeli air strike, and the family was forced to evacuate to Rafah. During the displacement, while holding her mother’s hand and running, her phone fell. Was it under the rubble? On the roadside? She doesn't know.

“I no longer have a photo to prove I was going to be a bride… but I remember everything in my heart, the way Ahmed looked at me and the way my hand trembled as I put on the ring.”

Ahmed refused to leave North Gaza. 

“He was working between Al-Awda Hospital and Kamal Adwan. He refused to abandon the sick and injured there, even though the air strikes were increasing at an alarming rate,” Aseel tells TRT World. 

On November 21, 2023, while Ahmed was working in Jabalia, the Al-Awda’s third and fourth floors were hit by an Israeli air strike. He died alongside two of his colleagues.

Aseel says she hadn’t heard from Ahmed in days, and it was a neighbour who brought her the news.

Through tears, she says, “For hours I could not speak or cry. I was in complete shock.”

She adds, “We did not know that our dream of getting married would be shattered and that I would lose Ahmed forever.”

Just as Aseel grapples with the loss of her fiance, other couples confront the fragility of love under siege. 

Engagements deferred, love endures

In January, Ibrahim Abu Shaaban and Laila Ashour from Khan Younis, both in their late twenties, were finally engaged after a five-year courtship. The couple had met at university but were unable to get married until they graduated and Ibrahim had found a job. 

They had intended to get engaged at the end of 2023, but the war postponed their plans.

A year into the war, Ibrahim told Laila that they should stop waiting and get engaged because he wanted “to be with her in all circumstances.”

He had told her, "You don't have to wear a white dress for me to know you're the bride of my heart. Just stay well, and the rest will follow."

Wedding dresses remain a dream in Gaza. Brides once flocked to Retaj on Al-Wahda Street in Rimal, the boutique filled with imported designs from Türkiye. It’s here that master tailor, Abu Samer, was known for his "magic lace touch”, altering any dress to fit a bride perfectly. 

He would say: "Every wedding dress tells a story, and my job is to write the happy ending with thread and needle."

Four days after Israel’s war on Gaza began, Al-Wahda Street was targeted, and the Retaj building collapsed. It’s pure white dresses, reduced to ash.

A haunting image circulated online: a dress hanging from a peg in rubble, dust-covered, with a lace rose still intact. Abu Samer was seriously injured and transferred to Egypt for treatment.

For many brides-to-be, the sight of that lone dress felt like a mirror of their own lives, dreams suspended, waiting amid the ruins. Laila was one of them.

One night, weeks after their engagement, Laila was standing on the rooftop of her house trying to get an internet connection when she received a text message from her fiance. It read, "The war delayed our engagement; it hasn't delayed love. I'm waiting, no matter how long it takes."

On July 11, 2025, while sitting outside his home in Deir al Balah with his brother and cousin, Ibrahim was struck in the neck by shrapnel from an Israeli air strike. He died instantly.

Laila, unable to speak of her loss, allowed Ibrahim’s cousin, Dr Areej Abu Shaaban, to recount her story: “Ibrahim’s father did not bury him straight away. He placed his body in their living room and uncovered his face. They watched over his body until the following morning. His father said he wanted Ibrahim to leave the house as a groom.”

These stories are just a handful among hundreds, yet they stand as a testament to a truth no air strike can erase: the human heart, even in the darkest times, continues to love.