I always thought of Gaza as a place where time folded in on itself. A closed world – dense, familiar, overwhelming – where you grow too fast or not at all.

I was the child my aunts, my older cousins, and even my friends’ mothers would pull into conversations about family issues, relationships, and everyday problems.

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My teacher called me “the sharpened tongue”, not because I was rude, but because I refused to be shaped into someone softer, quieter, more acceptable.

Sometimes, I slipped into the moments that reminded me I was a child – like sewing tiny clothes for my Barbies with my cousins.

But usually, I hovered somewhere between the world of children who didn’t quite understand me and the world of adults whose conversations I somehow understood.

The world calling

On Fridays, my family used to drive from our neighbourhood in as-Sudaniya down the coastal al-Rashid Street to Rafah – about an hour’s drive.

One of those days, Gaza felt less like a cage, more like a home.

I was 12, and my siblings and I joked about old memories – the way my brother used to mispronounce words, the tiny disasters that became inside jokes only we understood.

We didn’t wander far from my parents, talking and laughing, then walking to the shore as the smell of spiced fish and the cool sea breeze wrapped the day in something warm and familiar.

They aren’t grand memories, just mine.

I always knew I would leave. I remember a family gathering when every girl my age was asked where she planned to study – in Gaza, they meant, naming local universities as if the question had no other geography.

When it was my turn, I blurted: “Study in Gaza? I’m going abroad. I’ll be a journalist like my father.”

Some people encouraged me. Others laughed. But I already felt the world outside calling.

When I left Gaza in 2019 at 17 to study international relations, it was the first time I flew on my own, and because I was under 18, I carried a court document permitting me to travel alone.

At the Rafah crossing, I stood between my father and older brother, Omar, memorising their faces.

Once I crossed into Egypt, long hours of waiting rooms and security checks began, the quiet panic of not knowing whether my name would be called to go through or be sent back.

Cairo Airport, then Istanbul, and finally Cyprus – each stop a threshold I had to pass.

At every airport, I was pulled aside for extra searches because of my black passport. Officers asked why I was travelling alone, where I was going, what I planned to study – ordinary questions to them that felt like tests I had to pass to earn a life outside the only world I knew.

Asil Ziara on the beach in Gaza in 2010 [Courtesy of Asil Ziara]

‘You’re not in Gaza anymore’

My first night in Cyprus, I slept more deeply than I ever had in my life.

When I woke to a loud sound, my body panicked, as if it were an explosion. I ran into the corridor only to find suitcase wheels dragging across the floor.

Then my mind caught up with my body: You’re not in Gaza anymore.

That morning, I wandered the dorms looking for a mini market. Someone told me it was in the basement, but I got lost in the corridors, trying to buy an adapter and some toast.

Everything felt unfamiliar – especially the silence.

Nothing hummed, nothing hovered, nothing threatened. The stillness almost frightened me.

My first real conversations were at the English prep course at the university. It was a small classroom that felt like a tiny world: Classmates from Cyprus, Turkiye, Lebanon, Morocco, Libya.

We traded words and accents, and my teacher loved how quickly I learned new vocabulary.

When I told people I am from Palestine, some heard “Pakistan”, or pointed vaguely at their maps; I showed them pictures, then places.

In classes, some asked whether we “actually had a life” there. One person asked, sincerely, if Gaza existed. The confusion wasn’t malicious; it was a vacuum in the world’s imagination where my home is.

Once, in a market, I helped an elderly man find a carton of milk. After thanking me, he introduced himself, mentioning he was Israeli. My chest tightened. I told him my name anyway.

Carrying Gaza in exile

Within my first year, Gaza began to feel far away, like a vivid dream I had woken from too quickly.

Every street I learned, every bus route, every ordinary morning added a layer of distance. That lasted for years – until October 7, 2023, when the dream ended, and the distance collapsed.

During the war, I worked remotely with my father, a journalist in Gaza – translating, monitoring, waiting for his messages to know he was still alive.

Fear found me; I shut myself in a room for months, terrified to sleep.

When I finally slept after weeks, I woke to the news that my cousin Ahmed had been killed.

Ahmed was in his 30s, and everyone used to call him Saddam because he was born on the day Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles on Israel.

He used to call me “ya koshieh”, a teasing nickname that meant “dark-skinned one” – a silly, small joke that somehow felt like protection.

The guilt over his death was immediate and irrational, as if my wakefulness could have kept him alive.

We lost more family: my uncle Iyad and his only daughter, and my uncle Nael and his wife, Salwa. Israel erased an entire branch of our family in a night.

I began to understand how much of Gaza I had carried into exile.

Asil Ziara on her graduation day, July 12, 2023, in Cyprus [Courtesy of Asil Ziara]

I started therapy in Cyprus: talk sessions, then trauma-focused work once I got a diagnosis – post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD.

I’m steadier now, but I don’t think trauma ever fully ends – not for people from Gaza. It shifts, softens, resurfaces. The work is not to “get over it”, but to learn how to live while it continues.

I often say I was born in Palestine, but shaped in Cyprus. Gaza gave me awareness; exile gave me the language to understand it.

Egypt, and later Oman, added new layers to the same unanswered question: How do you carry a home that keeps breaking?

Maybe this is why, over the past two years, I’ve worked and planned to rebuild my life, to pursue a master’s degree in diplomacy.

I want to try to understand the world whose decisions shaped my childhood, the power structures that determined so much of my story.

When people hear “Gaza,” they often think “destruction”.

The people of Gaza are like anyone else – except their struggle is multiplied by forces beyond their control.

My story is one of millions. But I hope it makes someone somewhere feel that Gaza is more than a headline.

Gaza is people.

And people deserve to live.