How Long Can You Pause a Life Before It Disappears? My Journey from Graduation to Ground Zero

By Malak Radwan

I was twenty-two when I graduated from the Islamic University of Gaza, clutching my degree in English Literature and Translation like a promise—a passport to a future where words would be my refuge, my weapon, my bridge. But war has a way of rewriting destinies in ash. Two months later, the bombs began falling, and the only thing louder than the explosions was the silence of deferred dreams.

January 2024, the northern skyline of Gaza was a jagged sketch of broken concrete and smoke. I sat in our home in Jabalia, the walls trembling with every distant thud of artillery, and made a decision: I would apply to the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Not because the war had paused—it never did—but because I refused to let it erase me.

The logistics were absurd. Tanks encircled our neighborhood like steel vultures. Electricity flickered in and out like a dying pulse. The internet, when it worked at all, was a frail thread to the outside world. I gathered my documents—transcripts, recommendation letters, the fragile evidence of my academic life—and sent them to my brother in Jordan, trusting him to hit send on my behalf. It felt like throwing a message in a bottle into a stormy sea.

Then, in February, a miracle: an email from Doha. They invited me to an interview

The idea of preparing for an academic discussion while the world outside was being unmade seemed almost cruel. But I dressed carefully anyway, as if professionalism could armor me against the chaos. On the day of the interview, I sat in the dim light of a battery-powered lamp, my laptop balanced on my table. The connection stuttered like a frightened heartbeat. Behind me, through the thin walls, the soundtrack of war played on—drones humming, shells crashing, the occasional wail of an ambulance that might or might not make it in time.

On March 28, 2024, another email arrived. Congratulations.

I read it three times, waiting for the words to dissolve. They didn’t. Against all odds—against the tanks, the rubble, the arithmetic of loss—I had been accepted.

People speak of war in terms of what it destroys. But it also forces creation: new ways to hope, to persist, to stitch a future from scraps of chance. My degree will bear the invisible scars of this year—the dates stamped beside my courses will always echo with distant explosions. But when I walk into a classroom in Doha, I’ll carry more than a notebook. I’ll carry the stubborn belief that some stories cannot be buried, not even under the weight of the world.

Acceptance was a lifeline. For weeks, I clung to it—packed my books in a frayed backpack, memorized the route south to Rafah, rehearsed the words I’d say at the crossing: I am a student. My university is waiting.

Then, in May, the tanks rolled into Rafah

The borders sealed shut like a fist. Two weeks before my travel date, the world shrank to the four walls of our displacement. It’s temporary, everyone said. But Gaza has taught me this: when war settles into your bones, it follows no calendar.

Days bled into months. My visa issued in July, its edges crisp with promise—the very month I was meant to walk into a classroom in Doha. Instead, I sat on the floor ofmy room in Jabalia, refreshing news pages on a phone screen, willing the headlines to change. Rafah reopening today. Talks progress. Ceasefire imminent. The words dissolved like salt in water.

We started classes online. For a few surreal days, I was a student again. My professors’ voices crackled through the speakers; my classmates’ faces pixelated into ghosts. The electricity would cut out mid-lecture, and I’d rush to jot notes by candlelight before the battery died. It felt like building a house in a hurricane—every nail bent by the wind.

Then came the final email: my admission was deferred until next year. Not denied. Just delayed—again, by war.

A year earlier, I’d scrambled to send application papers through a warzone. Now, the war had outmaneuvered me again.

People ask how hope survives here. They don’t understand—it doesn’t. You survive despite its absence. You study in the dark because the alternative is surrender. You reread old textbooks because they remind you that words outlast bombs. You trace the outline of a visa you cannot use and whisper: Next year.

A year is nothing here

The same walls. The same window framing a sky that is either streaked with smoke or deceptively blue. The same backpack by the door, its straps frayed from the weight of hopes packed and unpacked a hundred times.

For two months, we dared to exhale. The ceasefire held like a held breath—markets reopened, children kicked soccer balls in streets no longer littered with shrapnel, and I dug out my acceptance letter from Doha, smoothing its creases with a kind of reverence. This time, I whispered to no one.

.Then the bombs returned

.They always do

Nothing is new. Everything is new. The rubble has been rearranged. The grief has new names. The borders are still closed, but the excuses have fresh adjectives.

They tell us war is an interruption. A disruption. But what do you call it when the interruption outlasts the life it interrupted?

I no longer say next year

I say:

I

I am still here.  

I am still here.  

I am still ________