I’ve lived through many wars in Gaza, from my childhood until today. In the past, war was like an unwelcome guest that came and went, leaving behind many scars.

Time healed some of these scars, while others remained painful and indelible. During each war, I lived in the shadow of fear and shock: fear in itself, fear for my parents and siblings, and fear for close relatives and friends.

But the situation changed radically in 2017 when I became a father for the first time. Fear no longer sat quietly inside me; it became all-consuming. Today, as a father of three, I carry that fear multiplied, because my children see me as a protector, convinced I can shield them from terrors they’re only beginning to understand. 

In these moments, it’s my duty to answer the big questions they ask me. They are becoming conscious of complex issues caused by war: questions of life and death, of danger and safety, of staying and leaving, of memory and forgetting.

They find themselves suddenly surrounded by terrifying sounds and images, trapped in a corner with no way out, powerless to stop what is happening.

Fatherhood in philosophy and war

Centuries ago, the blind Syrian poet and philosopher Abu al-Alaa’ al-Ma’arri (973–1057) wrestled with a moral dilemma that feels unbearably close to me now: should we bring children into a world of cruelty and violence?

Al-Ma’arri lost his sight as a child and spent most of his life in seclusion in his hometown of al-Ma’arra. A radical thinker, both admired and controversial, he rejected many conventions of his time, questioning religion, tradition, and even the very act of procreation. On his tombstone, he asked for these words to be inscribed: “This is my father’s crime against me, and I will not commit it against anyone.”

For him, having children was not a gift but a cruelty, an unnecessary sentencing of new souls to a life of suffering.

He argued that true mercy lay in refusing to bring more lives into a world drowning in ugliness and savagery. At first glance, his words feel bleak, even selfish. Yet there is also a stark moral clarity in them, an intuition about a world hurtling further toward destruction.

Al-Ma’arri’s vision stood in total opposition to the traditional idea of fatherhood: the father as a shield, protector, and guardian, a source of safety and belonging. 

For years, I held his words in my mind with a strange mix of respect and dread. 

As someone who loves children, I was, and still am, enamored of the idea of family. Yet I think not having a family in such a brutal place could be the more merciful decision.

Nevertheless, perhaps because of this same instinct, I found myself swept away towards forming a family and having children. This has been a joyful experience - but a costly one, too.

And so, after a few years of marriage, I found myself a father of three. To the extent possible, I strove to be a father embodying all the roles people associate with fatherhood. This seemed both possible and useful until the war, when all the concepts I associated with fatherhood were shattered.

The war has redefined fatherhood for me and my children, totally uprooting its traditional duties and leaving us with a new, strange, and bitter meaning of the role.

Experiencing fatherhood in time of war

A month after the war broke out, we faced the most violent wave of bombing yet near our home in Hamad City, Khan Younis. That night was the first cruel test of fatherhood in my children’s eyes.

The bombing began suddenly after midnight, when dozens of successive explosions illuminated the city with a reddish-yellow glow. The sound shook the walls of the apartment and spread fear in our hearts. We sheltered in the narrow hallway in our home, totally gripped by terror.

My eldest son, eight-year-old Baraa, was shaking, with quivering sides and bluish lips. He held on to me as his body grew colder and colder. This was not just transient fear, but the complete shutdown of a young child who had only ever known the reassurance of our home and my voice.

Yet I wasn’t able to calm him, or even to overcome my own fear for him. I tried to convince him we were safe, and that the bombs weren’t as close as they seemed. But how could he believe me when the walls shook, when the acrid smell of explosives filled the air, when he could see the light of the blasts reflected in the fear in my eyes, and felt me shaking just like him?

I felt like someone trying to convince fire that water won’t extinguish it. Yet I was worried he’d die of sheer terror. So I told him: “In a few hours, the sun will rise, and as soon as it does, we’ll leave the apartment and go somewhere safer.” Baraa started begging for the sun to rise faster.

At dawn, Baraa reminded me that we needed to leave the apartment and that he wanted to go anywhere else. 

As he was urging the sun to hurry up and rise, I told myself that I was wrong, reckless, and selfish to have children here, in this part of the world that has been condemned to death.

And how helpless I must seem now: unable to convince him I’m a father who can protect him from death, unable to explain the complicated realities that he has to experience at such a young age. What a sin, an unforgivable sin.

That night left its first deep crack in his image of me as a protector. And it shattered my own sense of what it meant to be a father.

To mend that broken image, even slightly, I decided we must flee before the bombs got closer, before my children endured another terrifying night such as this one. I made this decision not because I believed I could keep them safe, but because I needed to atone for the unbearable guilt of bringing them into this suffering.

I couldn’t guarantee this decision would succeed. But it was my way of fleeing from the guilt I felt when I looked into my children’s eyes, and the fear that ate at them, when they realised how helpless I was to do anything to protect them.

Thus began an early series of displacements, in which we fled from the fear the children would experience, to places I thought would be safer.

Bread over books

The first real wave of hunger in Gaza began in November 2023. Flour disappeared from the markets, bakeries closed their doors, and food was looted from the UNRWA storehouses, which held tons of bags of flour.

When I finally managed to buy a single bag of stolen flour at an extortionate price, it felt like a treasure.

We experienced a black joy tinged with guilt and confusion, because the flour alone couldn’t make bread, and we didn’t have any way to bake after cooking gas had become unavailable.

We had to bake flatbread using mud ovens, a traditional type of oven mostly used by village families. These types of ovens had become widespread everywhere, and the village women, in a spirit of solidarity and generosity, baked loaves on condition that the families who wanted the bread supplied the fuel, such as cartons or books.

One evening, my wife looked at the shelves I had built over the years and said softly: “Feeding the children now is more important than reading to them.” The sentence was like a slap in the face: I never imagined that my library would be set in competition with hungry children.

Reality unfolded in front of me with all its might. Compared to my children’s hunger during this war, the memories embodied in my library’s books were worthless. I was shocked by the terrifying moment I found myself immersed in. How had things gotten to this point so quickly?

There weren’t many options, but I somehow managed to overcome the dilemma I found myself facing. That was another challenging test.

Some might think I was overreacting because nothing compares to being unable to stop children’s hunger. Yet at that time, I still felt losses with dual feelings: helplessness, but also a fear of becoming mired in this helplessness. “I need to find another way,” I said. I had a special bond with my library - and that is no metaphorical exaggeration, but has been the case for years. So I worked to find another solution.

Although I somehow managed to obtain enough fuel to bake the loaves for the children, without resorting to burning my books, the incident was another early dent in my conception of fatherhood.

Deeper cracks now began to form. I had once been a father who thought he could save his children from hunger, without letting the war corrode his soul, memories, or being. I had thought it was possible to keep this being whole. But the war proved otherwise.

The weakness of fatherhood

In December 2023, after military vehicles entered Khan Younis, I decided we had to flee with the children, after promising myself not to subject them to any more of the ugly terrors that would certainly accompany these tanks. 

We headed towards Rafah. On our first night there, as I was trying to close my eyes to sleep, the sound of intermittent groans and dry coughing filled the room.

Basil, the youngest, was suffering from a severe cold and was barely able to breathe. His face had become red, and his fever rose to a worrisome temperature.

It was past one in the morning, and I sat next to him trying to calm him down, to ease the pain gnawing at him. I held him in my arms and walked back and forth in the room, trying to soothe his pain, but without success.

His breath was constricted, and I began to see a look of fear in his eyes that I wasn’t accustomed to. I felt helplessness and loneliness thicken inside me, like a black cloud.

“If only I were in Khan Younis, close to my mother, she would know what to do,” I told myself. “If only I were near my siblings, or at least in a place where I’d know where to seek help!”

I felt the collapse of the father I had imagined myself to be. Here, in the depths of war, I was not the unshakeable protector I longed to be.

Yet there was no choice but to continue. I left the room and entered a long hallway where several men were sleeping: a man in his thirties, two old men, and some adolescents. I carefully approached the thirty-something man and woke him gently.

He opened his eyes slowly and whispered, “What is it?” 

“My son is sick,” I told him. “He’s coughing a lot, has a high fever, and is having trouble breathing. Can you help me?”

He tried to wake himself up completely. “Honestly, I don’t know what I can do, but wait … let me wake up Abu Bayan, he’s a pharmacist and might be able to help,” he answered.

We woke him up together. Abu Bayan seemed like a calm, relaxed man, with an air of dignity that put one’s heart at ease. He got up from his bed and said, “Alright, what’s going on with the child?”

I explained to him what was happening, and he nodded his head in understanding. Then he said, “I don’t have the right medicine, but take this powder and rub it on his feet. Take this pill, split it in two, and dissolve one half in a spoonful of water. Try to have him drink it, and this will help, God willing.”

I took the medicine and went back to Basil. I sat next to him and started doing what Abu Bayan had advised me. All I was thinking at that moment was: “Does Basil see me the way I want him to see me, as a father who can defend him? Or has the war tarnished that image somewhat?”

Yet I thought that even in my moments of weakness, I was trying to be a support for him. Maybe I couldn’t give him medicine or safety. I did not have all the answers, but I had love, presence, and persistence—small pillars of protection in a world where all else was crumbling.

Amid this war, the conventional pillars of fatherhood have been destroyed, and the stereotypical image of a father that has captivated our culture for so long has disintegrated.

The father is no longer an impregnable fortress offering shelter from danger. Instead, fathers have become suspended between fear and weakness, between feelings of impotence and the burden of never-ending responsibilities they cannot fulfill.

Fatherhood here does not only entail protecting and raising one’s children. It is also a deep existential experience, in which one must confront the continuous collapse of one’s self and identity, at the intersection of morality and pain, where dreams and reality collide.

In this cruel test, the father embodies a deeper meaning of love and sacrifice. Despite his fragility, he strives to create a new life for his children from the ashes of destruction. In his heart echo questions of life, death, and meaning, in a world where safety is nonexistent and the future is fading away.

Fatherhood, now, consists not just of everyday actions: it is rather a continuous act of contemplation and suffering, and a search for a faint light in the pitch darkness.

This article was originally published in Arabic on 7iber.com and translated into English by Samuel Bollier.