Alaa Karajah, Writer and TV presenter
A week in Mona’s life in Palestine is like walking a thin thread stretched over a bottomless abyss. At dawn, exactly at three o’clock on the first of November, Israeli soldiers raided her home and her uncle’s home in the town of Qabatiya, Southwest of Jenin in the occupied West Bank — a town that has not known a night without sirens or the heavy footsteps of soldiers on the asphalt. They broke the doors, smashed the furniture, and locked both families together in a single room, while her cousin was dragged outside after being brutally beaten.
At six-thirty in the morning, Mona left the house for work, carrying the exhaustion of the night with her, her bag slung over her shoulder as she walked through dust and rubble into a day that had begun this way.
Throughout the past week, every time I checked in on Mona, her replies began with the same verbs: they raided… they killed… they arrested… they besieged… they demolished… She would say: “Today they arrested my brother, and a few days earlier they took his son. The day before yesterday it was my sister’s son. Yesterday they demolished our neighbour’s house. At the beginning of the week, I couldn’t go to work because the army besieged the town”.
That is how her days unfold — identical, like dawns that never quite arrive — yet she stands, resisting exhaustion with a wry smile, stitching her nerves each morning with a strange, enduring strength. In a land where brutal raids on civilians have become a daily ritual, nothing surprises anymore except those who have never lived it. In Mona’s life, war and the everyday are inseparable; both beat to the same rhythm, where survival demands daily miracles.
Mona is my closest friend, yet it has been ages since we last met. I have lost count of the times we tried to arrange another meeting. Qabatiya lies only sixty-five kilometres from my home in Ramallah, yet a journey that once took an hour and a half now consumes a full day — a day of travel, planning, anticipating danger, stops, detours, and cautious turns through villages and army checkpoints. Every step depends on the whim of a soldier or a sudden closure for “security reasons”. Soldiers hold cars for hours under sun or rain. Fanatical settlers ambush the roads, hurling stones and forcing long, winding detours. The Israeli occupation has turned Palestinian geography into a maze of iron and barbed wire, leaving us stranded on isolated islands. Mona is in the north, I am in the centre, and between us stretches one land — torn by barbed wire, army violence, and armed settler attacks.
Each day for Mona is a struggle to exist under systematic assault. Most mornings she awakens to soldiers breaking in, to the echo of military vehicles. Nothing is predictable — no appointment can be kept, no plan drawn for a full day. All hangs on the next possibility: a raid, an arrest, a martyrdom, or a home demolished nearby. She says: “Time in Qabatiya is not measured in hours, but in the tense waiting that stretches between army raids”. She never knows when soldiers will knock on her door or her neighbours’, or when she will hear of a cousin killed or a friend wounded. Her brother, once her anchor at home, now sits behind bars, alongside her nephew, her niece’s son, and her cousin — four men vanished at once, leaving mothers, wives, children, and relentless anxiety behind. Two years ago, the occupation killed the husband of her closest friend, Ansar, a mother of two.
Mona divides her concern between her brother’s, sister’s, uncle’s, and friend’s homes — all sharing the same pain. Life is no longer merely familial; it has become a network of women supporting one another in the absence of men. Palestinian women are the pillars of the home — bearing the unbearable, raising children, fighting daily battles for survival: securing necessities, enduring fear and anxiety, bracing for the moment when gunfire echoes and they do not know whether it claims someone they love.
The occupation does not only besiege cities — it besieges the rhythm of Palestinian life itself. It forbids “normality”, forbids waking to go to work or school, forbids planning a simple day or week. Everything is postponed until further notice — dictated by a foreign military power. Mona says: “Sometimes I wake and try to make a simple schedule, but I tear it up before I begin, for nothing ever happens as planned”. Living in Palestine is like walking a minefield — uncertain when or where the next step may explode.
Here, the violence of the Israeli occupation — raids, terror, arrests — becomes routine. Night raids turn into ordinary news. Children, from an early age, learn to distinguish bullets from military vehicles. This is part of the assassination of life itself, a tragedy invisible in numbers or headlines. A life impossible to understand, accept, or grow accustomed to.
My friend longs for the simplest things, for rights that should be ordinary. She says: “I miss walking through my neighbourhood, sitting on our balcony without fear of a shell, without hearing soldiers shouting in the alleys.” And I tell her: “I miss meeting you in Ramallah, just to talk freely, without being interrupted by news of another raid or martyrdom”.
The aggression of the Israeli occupation leaves deep wounds — etched into our bodies, engraved upon our spirits — as it reshapes the very faces of our cities and neighbourhoods. In Qabatiya, homes are no longer as they once were: their walls pierced, windows shattered, the air heavy with the acrid smell of gunpowder. Even the trees at the town’s edge — once symbols of beauty and stillness — now bear the scars of bullets. This small town, once vibrant with life, now endures in the spaces between sieges and raids, like a heart that ceases to beat each night, only to be forced into motion again with the morning.
There is another dimension: the violence against Palestinian women forms part of a colonial machinery intent on breaking collective will by targeting the most steadfast pillars of society — the mothers, who bear the weight of the country on their shoulders in the absence of husbands, sons, and brothers. What Mona experiences is mirrored in the lives of thousands of women across the West Bank — in Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem, Hebron, and Ramallah — where the army conducts daily campaigns of assault, arrest, intimidation, demolition, and forced displacement. Today, Qabatiya is not merely a besieged town; it is a magnified reflection of the entire West Bank: a slow, insidious genocide of daily life, one whose details seldom reach the world in the way Gaza’s destruction does. While the Israeli occupation has perpetrated an appalling genocide in Gaza over the past two years, a quieter, yet no less deliberate annihilation persists in the West Bank — one that targets human existence in its most mundane, daily contours.
In Gaza, the ruthless violence inflicted upon women transcends the merely physical; it is existential, striking at memory, body, and identity alike. Countless women carry the scars of profound psychological trauma — some from the loss of their children, others from surviving the immediate terror of bombardments. Many have witnessed the collapse of their daily lives, once anchors of stability and fragile security. Local organisations report that rates of depression and post-traumatic stress among Gazan women have soared to unprecedented heights following the recent war, particularly among mothers who have watched their children perish or endured hunger and fear within the camps”.
This suffering multiplies with every loss, every displacement, every act of poverty inflicted upon them. Divorce and family separation have risen, and the weight of raising children alone grows ever heavier. Yet, in the midst of this devastation, women remain the sinews of society. They organise volunteer initiatives to feed the displaced, offer one another psychological support, and continue to teach children in tents long after their schools have been reduced to rubble. They read them stories to drown out the echoes of gunfire, and whisper promises that tomorrow will bring freedom from occupation. In every gesture, they embody resilience, nurturing life and hope amid the ruins.
In a society worn thin by war, the Palestinian woman remains the steadfast face of humanity amid ruin. Life in Palestine is a relentless test of endurance — most of all for women — whose daily reality stretches across a long lineage of resilience and resistance. Yet it is also a searing indictment of a world that has failed to safeguard even their most fundamental rights to life and dignity”.
Soldiers steal women’s gold, but Mona laughs!
I must tell you: my friend Mona has a sharp sense of humour. Imagine someone with such a light spirit living in such conditions. She has that extraordinary ability to turn tragedy into a dark comedy scene. One evening, as the town prepared for yet another raid — when Israeli soldiers would break into homes and steal whatever valuables they found — she decided to prepare as well, but in her own way. This sordid practice of theft has become routine among Israeli soldiers during raids. Mona, fearing they might ransack her house searching for gold, wore all her bracelets and rings, as if she were going to a party rather than becoming a prisoner in her own home. She sent me a picture of herself, laughing with her trademark ease, and said: “I wore it all so they wouldn’t search and wreck the house. But then I remembered — I’ve just cleaned! Fine, I’ll hand them the gold at the door, better than letting them in to make a mess.” I laughed — despite everything. Only Mona could craft black comedy from the heart of danger, could clothe chaos in wit, as if refusing to grant the occupation the satisfaction of seeing fear, even in her most fragile moments.
I laughed with her, from a heavy heart. Laughter is the only thing that saves us, if only for a few moments — it makes life briefly bearable.
Elsewhere, I hold my phone, hearing the voice of my friend I cannot reach. I write of her, of myself, of all the women striving to breathe in a land weighed down by grief. Here, life is not life as the world knows it — it is daily defiance against erasure. We fall, yet we rise, for surrender is never an option.
Perhaps I cannot reach Qabatiya, and perhaps I will not see Mona soon, but her voice reaches me — clear, steady, like a call echoing through a long night:
“We are here. We are still alive, despite everything”. And this alone — in the shadow of an unrelenting occupation, in a time that seeks to silence us — stands as an act of full and defiant resistance”.
