This text was translated from Arabic by Katharine Halls.

I contemplate what Gaza has become after two years of genocidal war. Gaza is the city where I have lived for over three decades, which I have traversed from its southern to its northernmost edge, strolling its streets and spending time with friends on its beaches. And yet I barely know these places now—or rather, I am getting to know them anew.

One day I am walking down the middle of a road, a zigzagging, crater-pocked route littered with the wreckage of what were once homes. Building after building are razed to the ground so completely, I can barely make out where they once stood on either side of the road. I draw up short. “This isn’t the place I know,” I say to myself. “It’s something else, something unfamiliar, something in the process of being reborn—or rather, recycled out of the rubble of its former image, of the place it once was.”

Now a collage of the torn limbs of its old self, the sight before me provokes feelings of confusion, chaos, and agitation. I am a native son of that once and former place, not of the shattered reflection that now ripples across the surface of this reservoir of genocide’s dross. This disfigured place, this new identity that people are now trying to shape out of the ruins before them, thrashes and struggles inside my head, and I wonder: “How is it so seemingly simple for them to recycle the stuff of annihilation?”

The Israeli military vehicles leave behind a vast expanse of destruction. It is annihilation in the truest sense of the word: every neighborhood pulverized so as to erase its physical identity, and with it its existential and epistemic particularities, leaving only corpse-like remains. And yet, out of these remains, something grows and takes shape: a recycled, deformed version of some form of life. From pieces of asbestos sheeting and corrugated iron salvaged from the rubble, people have constructed makeshift facades for destroyed houses now emptied of stones, their remaining walls cracked beyond recognition and threatening to collapse at any moment. These are people trying to rebuild life amid the misery.

There is a frail power to the notion of “daily life” under the bombs: Life may no longer be coherent, but still it clings on tightly, like a wild plant taking root in the crevices.

No phoenix, just a survival instinct

As I observe these fragile attempts to re-create life amid the destruction, the legend of the phoenix rising from the ashes comes to mind. I’ve always found it depressing the way people reach so mechanically for this trope the moment they observe Palestinians trying to resume their lives after being subjected to devastation and displacement. No, we are not phoenixes that miraculously regenerate, and there is nothing mythical about our existence; we are simply desperate to survive. Our recovery and renewal do not betoken some Palestinian will to confront or defy, as the phoenix myth would have it. People simply do their best to stay alive, in all their fragility and despair.

The survival instinct remains alight because it is the clearest, and most insistent: the mother of all instincts. It is this that impels a Palestinian to gather sheets of corrugated iron and repurpose them into something resembling a house on the ruins of their demolished home, and to comb through the rubble, pulling out their and their children’s old clothes that are buried under masonry and torn by shrapnel but that will nevertheless be worn again—not out of defiance but simply because there is nothing else. They chop their furniture into firewood to cook for their children and dig a hole for a black plastic barrel salvaged from the wreckage to serve as waste disposal since the sewage system is out of commission. Extra-large water containers are refilled and placed in the sun to warm so the water can be used for showering. Beside the tent, a patch of ground still saturated with explosives is coaxed back to life with mint, mallow, parsley, and rocket—plants that can later be eaten. Bit by bit, the genocide is beaten and reshaped into something capable of sustaining survival and life.

From rubble to bread

Back in the distant past when I was in elementary school, I remember seeing children from our neighborhood collecting the cardboard boxes tossed out by shopkeepers. Lots of them, in fact. I was perplexed at this, because what were old scraps of trash any good for? That was until the kids explained that cardboard was used to fuel the traditional mud ovens that were used by some families in the countryside, particularly the less well off, for cooking and baking.

A few weeks after the outbreak of war in October 2023, mud ovens returned to widespread use across Gaza after Israel blocked household gas supplies from entering the Strip. Although times had changed and more modern cooking methods were available, many rural families still made use of these mud ovens. And it was these families who, when the gas was turned off, were best equipped to deal with the threat to their ability to prepare food.

Mud ovens were a natural and authentic social response to Palestinians’ needs in the early days of the war. Rural women helped countless families by lending them their ovens for free if they were able to bring their own fuel to burn. And so, Palestinians tossed the wreckage and waste from their former houses into the fire to save themselves and their children from hunger; the rubble of their homes became the very fuel by which they could secure bread. Later on, these ovens became a source of income for families who had lost their earnings, particularly families in rural areas whose livestock had been killed and farmland destroyed, along with their houses, by the Israeli military. This practice remains one of many ways Palestinians have sought to recycle the genocide.

Ash, the new substance of meaning

In May 2024, when the Israeli army withdrew from Khan Younis after a five-month siege, returnees were quick to gather the wooden crates that once contained the missiles the army had unleashed on the city, using these too for fires to cook food for their hungry little ones. To locals, these crates—designed to hold the tank missiles intended to kill them—were simply firewood for cooking. After many months of war, with no access to gas, everything that could be burned was running out: wood, paper, cardboard, even personal collections of books with all their cultural, educational, and emotional value. Also collected were cigarette butts dropped by soldiers in houses they’d commandeered, gathered for the tobacco left over to smoke. Prices have risen so wildly that a single cigarette now costs around ten dollars.

Darker still, many have also had to use the crumbling masonry of their own houses to fashion graves for children they have lost in the onslaught, since all the usual building materials have since disappeared. And thus homes are recycled into burial grounds.

In the war waste left behind by the occupying army, people see nothing but their own bare needs. After months of death and deprivation, everything is reanalyzed according to the logic of instinct and necessity. Gazans create a private symbolic language in which their genocide is recycled into a means of survival that feeds the will to go on living.

The new language: from slogans of resistance to the chemistry of survival

Having seen the war consume their cities, their homes, and their children, the people of Gaza find that the former lexicon of daily life—of their public and private spaces—no longer holds any meaning when faced with the vast, overwhelming presence of death. Against this backdrop, a new Palestinian language emerges, not out of high politics and culture but from beneath the ashes and the rubble. This language says not “liberation” or “sumud” but “survival,” “bread,” and “a child’s body warmed by a fire.”

The famous song penned by the late Palestinian poet Ahmad Dahbour, and sung by numerous Palestinian artists, says: “I swear to God I’ll plant you in the house, O green almond sapling.” Dahbour’s determination, signaled by his use of the oath, emphasizes the desire to bring life into a world choked by ash and death.

Just as the 1948 Nakba caused a fundamental existential rupture in Palestinian life, so too has this genocidal war brought about a rupture perhaps even more devastating than the last. Loss has struck every part of our community. Beloved faces have been taken from us, and vast tracts of Gaza’s built landscape have been reduced to dead gray heaps of wreckage where nothing moves. Hulking figures of death have occupied the green expanses that used to surround Gaza. Something had to awaken life within these dead spaces. And between each tent in the places where displaced people have settled, more and more people are tentatively sowing sprigs of mint, bringing a touch of vivid green to counter the lifeless gray. Those who have lost their homes in the genocide are seeking to give voice to life again in places that are saturated by death.

As I walk among the tents, observing how almost everybody has planted basil in their shade, a verse by Abu Firas al-Hamdani comes to mind: “O you who sows wind among our tents / Sow not, for you are not here to stay.” Unlike the green almond sapling that Dahbour vowed to plant in the courtyard of the house during the 1948 Nakba, the point here is to plant not in order to remain but to reject living in tents. Both attempts—during the Nakba and during the war of genocide—share the urge to kindle life in the presence of death. But sowing basil at our tent flaps does not mean we seek to establish a new way of life amid the reality of genocide.

“Recycling genocide” is thus not a slogan or metaphor; it is a literal description of what is happening in Gaza, where survivors of genocide are given no opportunity to heal and recover, but forced to recycle the instruments of their own death to secure the means of staying alive. Place, home, family, knowledge, ash, wooden crates, charred furniture, mud ovens, sprigs of mint, even the shreds of tobacco from a soldier’s discarded cigarette butt: everything is repurposed and reused, not out of heroism but because the instinct to survive is dogged and enduring, and doesn’t believe in myths.