Fatima remembers everything. At 82, she had lived through five wars, three intifadas, and more ceasefires than she could count. She no longer followed politics. She no longer believed in borders. But she believed in memory. And in the sky.
“The stars are the only thing that hasn’t left us,” she often said. “Everything else comes and goes. The land. The homes. Even the people. But the stars, Allah keeps those for us.”
She had lost her husband in the first war, her eldest son in the second, her home in the third. Yet each night, Fatima looked up, not for drones or planes, but for constellations.
Because for her, the sky was where Gaza still lived.