I did not deserve to be forgiven with such grace for failing.

My brain just wanted to save one thing in Gaza.

It’s Aug 2024 and sweltering hot in Gaza. Israel kept issuing evacuation orders for areas that had not previously experienced them causing sheer and total mayhem, and then 48 hours later lifting the order. It felt like a dark, cynical game meant to tear at the populations already shredded psyche.

Everything just felt impossible. The unnecessary hurt, suffering, pain, confusion everywhere coupled with the sheer impossibility of even delivering the most basic of items was like a claw to the throat, a cannonball to the soul. I mean it was insane. We could not even get in soap, never mind enough tents. My INARA staff were all fielding frantic phone calls from people in the camps we worked in wanting to know where to go, what they should do. Our team was in turn calling everyone they knew with some sort of transport to help families from a truck to a donkey cart. We could not advise people where to go, there wasn’t anywhere to go. But we could at least try to get them out of a danger zone.

I felt sickened by the helplessness, the inability to even remotely come close to alleviating the misery. What made it all the more aching was the disproportionate level of gratitude even when we were not able to deliver anything. We had managed to secure 20 tents and were delivering them to the most vulnerable of families. Its a horrid calculation but boils down to: if you’re crammed in a relatives tent or concrete space (like you see in the video above) or whatever you don’t get a tent. They go to those who have ended up on the street. While we were out delivering those, a man came and asked us to see his brother, Wael, who had been injured at the start of the war and was still bedridden. They wanted to see if we could get them a tent since they were four families crammed into a tiny space. We couldn’t spare one of the ones we have. Other families were sleeping in the open, I explain, apologizing.

My heart cracked when Wael’s brother said “It’s OK, at least you made him smile.”

I wanted to scream. Scream at the injustice of it all. Scream because we do not deserve to be forgiven with such grace for failing.

But you don’t scream in Gaza, you don’t show your own sad because those around you have bigger screams, a deeper sad. One that they don’t get to “rotate out” from. One that they are not just responding to but living. One that they don’t even have the luxury of screaming or really being sad about because they somehow have to keep moving through the madness.

To this day, despite the so-called ceasefire, people in Gaza have not been afforded the ability to scream or really even begin to process their sad. They still can’t breathe, I mean like really breathe, the way that you do when you’ve gone through something horrendous but you can see the other side of it.

That August 2024 trip, shortly after meeting Wael, after seeing children in ICU unable to be removed from machines bc of missing medical equipment, after having to repeatedly apologize to people for not having any soap or all that much of anything to give them my brain was glitching to say the least.

So when I heard Mohammed call up the stairs of the Gaza guesthouse in a whisper-scream “Arwa, Arwa, come you have to help” and I ran down to see Caramella the cat pawing at a little pink thing my first thought was “you have to save it.”

He looked utterly distressed and terrified.

“Caramella killed a mama mouse and she’s pulling babies out from the couch.” He said. “What should we do?”

Caramella is Hanya’s cat. Hanya and I met in Gaza starting with my first trip there. She worked for GEM (Global Empowerment Mission) and I crashed in their guesthouse. GEM has been absolutely lovely with me and my charity INARA, and super supportive in any way they can. Hanya is hands down one of my favorite humans ever. She also lived in the guesthouse since she was forced to evacuate her apartment in Gaza early on in the war and then her family home in Rafah which is now a pile of rubble.

Now, I’m totally a cat person, but I can also say that Caramella, this fluffy squishy faced fancy breed creature is one of the nastiest cats I’ve met, unlike my three utterly ridiculously over-loving Turkish street rescues. Hanya had just had Caramella shaved so she looked utterly ridiculous with a pompom tail and paws, and i’m firmly convinced she was so mortified it made her even nastier. At least it gave us something to laugh about.

This is about as “friendly” Caramella ever got with me even though I schlepped in cat food for her.

We had also evacuated the GEM guesthouse, which is how we ended up in the house with the gross couch where Caramella had just carried out her mama mouse murder and was now busily dragging out little babies. They were still all pink and squirmy, barely the size of my thumbnail. I don’t know what I was thinking, there was no way they were going to survive without their mother, and even if they had, then what?

I woke up every two hours that night to drip sugar water into their mouths using a tissue. I used a Q-tip to tickle their bellies like their mama would have licked. (I googled what to do). Hanya and I were sharing a room and she was fluctuating somewhere between “Arwa you’re disgusting and I can’t believe you’re making me sleep with rodents” grossed out and both of us totally cracking up, utterly bemused by my efforts.

In the morning I handed them over to a friend to take to an animal rescue org. That evening, when I got back from another miserable day in the field, I asked about the babies. I was told they died. I mean I don’t really think they even made it all the way there, they probably got tossed or flushed.

I remember excusing myself to go to the bathroom, just waves of this toxic suffocating tsunami of anger, infuriation, frustration. I remember wanting to punch the wall and then thinking it would be really stupid to break my hand. It was not about the mice. It was about everything else.

Little could anyone have known that that first summer of the war would end up later being referred to as “the good times”, little could anyone have known that Israel would totally shut Gaza’s borders for months, deliberately starve the population, all the while bombing them to smithereens.

Even mice had a different connotation back then. Sure gross and no one really wants to see one, but now? Have you seen the video of the kid with the skin infection and the mouse in the background? Have you read the stories of children showing up at medical facilities, their tiny fingers chewed by rats? More than 80% of makeshift shelter sites in Gaza are infested with rodents.

Today’s headline is that Israel has rejected Trump’s Gaza plan, the one that Hamas accepted.

And people in Gaza still can’t scream, can’t cry, can’t breathe. And yet they still exhibit such grace.