a woman sat beside her husband in a heavy silence that resembled mourning. Neither spoke a word—everything that could be said had already turned to ashes, just like everything around them. In their hands, a torn photograph of their son who is no longer with them, and the broken remains of dishes that once gathered the family around a single table.

The place alone bears witness to what once was—and what can no longer be. Their silence was not weakness, but the language of those too broken to speak amid the madness.

In this corner of Gaza, memories are not built to be told—they are either buried with their owners or carried on the shoulders of the living. The assault continues to bleed through every alley, as if pain itself were not enough. The streets echo with groans, and the sky promises nothing but more bombing. The couple refused to leave the rubble—as if unwilling to part with the last fragments of a life gone by, even if reduced to dust.

Silent questions flooded their minds: What now? When will this nightmare end? Their fate, like that of so many others in the Strip, was as unclear as smoke. The present hurts, the future is absent, and time here is not measured in hours, but in loss. With every passing moment, something else is lost: a home, a child, a memory—or perhaps even the ability to dream.

Longing and the scent of missing bread Everything around them had changed—except longing. The scent of missing bread, the voices of children who once were, the echo of footsteps that used to fill the space with life—all of it returned like ghosts in their memory. The rubble was no longer just debris; it had become a witness to a long story of loss and survival—a story too heavy for words, told only by the tears that are never shed, so as not to weaken the heart's last defenses.

And in the evening, when the sound of planes quieted for a moment, the husband leaned against the stones while his wife gazed at a sky that was no longer blue. Nothing was certain—except that they were still together, bound by the same heavy sorrow, clinging to the fragile hope that tomorrow might carry a little less pain than today.