By Ali Abu Yaseen
When I returned from Deir al-Balah to my house in al-Shati refugee camp, my friend Ihab came to congratulate me on my safe return. But he was unusually sullen – so much so that sadness seemed to inhabit not only his face but his entire body, his posture hunched and his movements hesitant. Ihab is normally cheerful and upbeat, so I tried to draw a smile from him by telling him a joke. He smiled, but it was dull and lifeless. I had never seen him like this before, so I stopped and asked, “What’s wrong, Ihab?”
“I’m afraid that my aunt, Umm al-Abd ad-Dahir, has gone mad,” he replied. “I love her so much—she is like a mother to me!”
“What’s happened to her?” I asked.
He began to explain: “When the war ended, she returned from the south to her home next to ours in al-Saftawi. She would stand by the rubble of the supermarket where Cola used to work. After waiting there for a long time, she would wander through the neighborhood alleyways. Every time we try to take her back home, she says, ‘I swear Cola is here. Leave me alone! I can hear his voice! I want to bring him home. It’s lunchtime, and he’s probably hungry. I want to feed him’.”
“Every time we take her back home,” he proceeded, “she would go out again looking for Cola. She would swear that she heard his voice and saw him, and she would demand us to leave her and let her be.” Ihab went on, “My aunt was stronger than the toughest men, both physically and mentally. She was a woman unlike any other. Never in her life had she been weak or broken. She was always unwavering – like a mountain – protecting her home and shielding her children like a lioness. No one dared approach her children, her house, or even the neighborhood we lived in, lest they get into trouble. She was, as the saying goes, ‘a woman worth a million men.’”
“But after Cola was killed,” Ihab stressed, “this mountain crumbled and turned into sand, blown by the wind. She was no longer the same person. Honestly, neither I nor the neighborhood were the same after that. Cola wasn’t just my cousin; he was the neighborhood star. Everyone saw him as a son or a brother, and every mother felt he was her own child.”
“He did not become an engineer or a doctor; he didn’t even finish high school,” Ihab explained. “He dropped out of school at the age of twelve and began working at the neighborhood supermarket, starting by delivering groceries to the neighbors. Everyone loved Cola. He was everyone’s son. His name echoed through the streets all day long: ‘Send to Cola,’ ‘Have Cola prepare,’ ‘Have Cola go,’ ‘Can you please call Cola?’ – and on and on. To us, he was more famous than a movie star.”
“He worked like that until he was promoted at the age of seventeen. He was put in charge of the scales at the supermarket, where he weighed items for customers, always smiling. He was smiling even when he passed away! I swear to God, when I carried his coffin, I smelled a fragrance of musk. It unlike anything in the world, filling the air along the way. We did not only lose Cola’s smile; we lost the smiles of the entire neighborhood, as if the light in our eyes had been extinguished and a part of our souls had departed.”
Ihab paused for a moment, then took out his phone and said, “Look how beautiful he was.” I looked at the picture; his face seemed angelic. Ihab began to cry as he stared at the photo. This was the first time I had ever seen him cry.
“He was unfortunate from the moment he was born,” he added. “He had an unusual appearance – extremely thin and very short. He began walking on his tiny legs at just ten months old, can you imagine? And because he was so short, he was nicknamed ‘Cola’. One day my cousin saw him walking one and was completely shocked. He asked me, ‘What is this?? How can he walk when he’s the size of a bottle of Coke?’ From that moment on, he started calling him Cola, and the name spread like wildfire, so much so that everyone forgot his real name. He was simply known as Cola. For a short time, he had another nickname, but it didn’t last. ‘Cola’ remained the dominant name, while the other one, ‘Project Victim,’ quickly faded away.”
“I will tell you the reason behind his famous nickname,” he elaborated. “When Cola was just one year old, the UNRWA was building a clinic to provide medical care for people in the area. The construction took place in winter, and while bulldozers were digging the ground, one of the drivers found Cola trying to keep warm by sitting on the bulldozer’s exhaust pipe! The driver noticed him at the very last moment. Otherwise, Cola would have been run over. The driver took Cola back to his father and warned him to keep a close eye on his son, because had he not been paying attention, little Cola would have been crushed under the wheels. The next day, before starting work, the driver stopped to check around the truck, as Cola had become a source of anxiety for him. Sure enough, he found Cola again, having sneaked over and settled by the bulldozer’s wheels, playing in the sand and smiling. Angrily, the driver went back to Cola’s father and told him to watch out for his son so he would not become a victim of the project. From that moment on, the project workers began calling him ‘Project Victim.’”
Ihab continued: “When the drivers brought construction materials like stones, cement, iron, and the like, they would park far from the project site and step out onto the roadside toward the clinic being built in front of Cola’s house. ‘Where is the project victim?’ they would ask, meaning Cola. They would then lift him up and seat him beside the driver to keep him company during the ride, and once the driver finished delivering the load, he would hand ‘Project Victim’ back to his father. As such, Cola had already acquired three nicknames by the age of one: his real name, which no one knew; his popular nickname ‘Cola’; and the short-lived ‘Project Victim.’”
Cola was always the most vibrant and active among his peers. Everyone in the neighborhood, and even beyond it, knew Cola, because he served everyone and was devoted to his parents, especially his mother—for whom he risked his life throughout the war to bring her food, flour, and whatever else she needed. He was a man in the body of a child. No one saw Cola as a child… until he was martyred. Only then did they realize that he was just seventeen, practically a child. Yet by then, he was already everyone’s friend.
He was only trying to get food in the Zikim aid zone. Ihab mentioned that Cola loved helping everyone he knew by carrying their flour and boxes to the transportation points. He would load heavy burdens onto his shoulders to make things easier for others, walking considerable distances to the nearest means of transport, whether donkey-drawn carts or three-wheeled vehicles. And, of course, he always did that for free.
“On the day of his death,” Ihab spoke through his grief, “he was waiting for the aid trucks to arrive. When he finally saw them after a long wait, he was overjoyed. He jumped with happiness, cheering and calling out to people to come forward, announcing that the aid had arrived. He waved his hand, and, in a split second, it fell limp as Cola collapsed on the hilltop, shot in the head by an Israeli sniper. Cola curled up on the ground, screaming like a newborn, his eyes fixed on the sea—the place he loved most in Gaza. On Fridays, his days off, he would sit on the beach for long hours, pouring his heart out to the sea, telling it his worries and secrets. As he gazed at the sea that last time, he uttered his final words: ‘A bullet to the head hurts, I’m dying…’ That day would come to be known as ‘Sniper Day,’ the day dozens of young men, all under the age of twenty, were shot in the head.”
Ihab continued: “I was sitting at home when I received a phone call from my cousin, telling me that Cola had been shot in the head and that they were taking him to Hamad Hospital. I quickly got dressed and rushed out, arriving at the hospital yard. He was already dead… I couldn’t even bid him farewell. There was a large pool of blood beneath his head. I hugged my nephew, who had been there with him. He kept saying, ‘His last words were: ‘A bullet in the head hurts,,,’’ repeating the sentence over and over as we recited the Shahada, the final testimony of faith, over him’.”
Ihab fell silent, tears filling his eyes. “I have never grieved for anything in my life the way I grieved for Cola. Everyone is mourning; even the streets and demolished houses of the neighborhood are weeping for him. Grief has saturated everything. He was an angel in human form.”
“Who can convince his mother that he has died? The tragedy is that she sees him standing right in front of her. Every time we try to calm her and take her home, she swears by the most solemn oaths that she hears his voice and sees him before her – that she is ready to take him home, but that we are standing in her way. She has remained in this state ever since, caught between grief and madness, unable to comprehend what has happened. Everyone keeps telling her that Cola was martyred and is now with God, in a place far better than this one. Still, she insists, ‘No matter what you say, Cola is not dead. I can still hear his voice calling: Take me, Mother…’”
I don’t know why, but as Ihab recounted this, I was reminded of Hamlet’s father appearing to him as a ghost. There seemed to be a strange parallel between Hamlet’s love for his father and Umm al-Abd’s love for Cola – where the king returns as a ghost, and Cola returns from death.
“They kept trying to convince her that Cola had been martyred. They even took her to the cemetery and had her sit beside his grave, telling her that he was resting among thousands of martyrs who had fallen in the war. She remained silent for a long time, then embraced the grave and wept for her son until her tears ran dry, her voice faded, and her strength dissipated. She wept as bitterly as Jacob wept for Joseph.”
“She returned to the neighborhood,” Ihab went on, “and the moment she arrived, she began hearing Cola’s voice again. She told her husband and children that she now knows that Cola is dead, yet she can still hear and see him. It seems she is losing her mind. She will likely return to the south to live in a tent, far from Cola’s scent and footprints, and the alleyways where he used to play. But if she stays here, she may not survive it intact.” I reassured her: ‘Aunt Umm al-Abd, wherever you go, Cola will remain in your heart and mind. None of us will ever forget him.’ Exhausted from weeping, with dark circles beneath her sunken eyes, she replied: ‘I know, son, but I hate the entire north because it took away my beloved son, my source of support.’”
“Eventually, she took some clothes and returned to the southernmost point, where she lives alone in a tent. I believe she is waiting to die, or perhaps she is already dead, only breathing. Cola is gone, my aunt is gone, my heart has gone with them, and this place has turned unbearably silent.”
Ihab fell silent, tears filling his eyes. “I’ve never grieved or cried for anything in my life as much as I did for Cola. Everyone was in deep agony. He was really like an angel. His spirit wandered through every corner, every stone, every closed door, and every ruined home.” Ihab kept holding his phone, staring at Cola’s photos with trembling hands, as if the images were trying to bring him back to life, as if saying: ‘He is not dead. He is still around.’
The greatest tragedy here is Umm al-Abd, the mother who raised Cola with all her strength, who never knew fear or brokenness. Who could convince her that her son had died? How could her heart accept that this extraordinary child, who once walked on tiptoes, laughed, played, and filled the entire neighborhood with joy, was now nothing but a memory beneath the soil?
I sat beside her at the cemetery, watching her every move and sigh as she touched the soil. I felt her indescribable agony, as the entire neighborhood gathered around her in silence—from every house, every corner, and every pile of rubble— to share her unimaginable pain. Yet amid all the weeping and lamentation, there was one man who did not shed any tears, neither screamed nor collapsed, nor struck his face as bereaved families do, and that man was Cola’s father. A thin and quiet man, he sat on a broken stone at the edge of the cemetery, far from the crowd, staring at the soil as if expecting it to split open so his son might emerge. He neither approached the grave nor touched the earth. He did not hug anyone. His gaze was steady, and his hands clasped on his knees, as if afraid that releasing them would unleash unbearable pain.
I had known this man since I was a child. He was never very talkative, even before the war. He worked in silence and returned home without a sound, as if he were made of clay. But on that day, he was quite different; present yet absent, like a statue shaped from the dust of the neighborhood, neither moving nor breathing—except in pain. I saw people turning toward him anxiously. Some muttered, “Why isn’t he crying? Perhaps he is frozen by shock!” Others exclaimed, “Maybe his tears ran dry before they could fall.” But the truth was that his tears had not yet begun, for he was living in a soundless grief.
After Cola was buried, his father remained seated in the same place until sunset. Everyone else eventually left, and we helped Umm al-Abd walk so she would not collapse onto the grave from exhaustion. But his father did not move. Whenever someone approached to speak to him, he would only nod, then return his gaze to the soil – as if afraid that if he spoke, everything would collapse. Finally, as the sun sank in a moment filled with sorrow, he raised his head toward the sky and murmured in a faint voice, “May God have mercy on you, Cola.” Then he rose slowly and walked back home.
Since then, he became withdrawn. He no longer visits neighbors nor speaks about the war or the martyrs. Even now, he walks alone in the predawn hours through neighborhood alleys that once held his son’s footsteps. He stops before the rubble that was once the supermarket – Cola’s workplace. He gazes at it for a while, then moves on. Some neighbors have seen him talking to himself, muttering unintelligible words. Once, he was heard calling out, “He was so young, yet he eased my burdens.”
He did not weep for Cola, but not a day passes that he does not mourn him behind closed lips. His silence became heavier than any tears, deeper than any scream. He became like a shadow wandering the neighborhood streets, unseen except in moments of silence. At sunset, he would sit outside his house, light a cigarette, stub it out halfway, then light another. He would stare into the void, as if his son were passing by with his familiar smile, carrying the bag of bread and saying, “Mom, I need to go deliver these groceries to the neighbors.”
People say: “Umm al-Abd has gone mad from pain, but Cola’s father buried his pain inside his chest!’ I say that both of them died – but in different ways. She died from unbearable longing, and he died from the crushing weight of silence. He became a wall in the neighborhood, standing firm, not collapsing, yet eroding from within, day after day. Umm al-Abd returned with us to the neighborhood, but she didn’t enter it as before; she lacked the presence and vitality that she had once been known for. Upon arriving home, she began hearing Cola’s voice again. She is convinced that he is still present, even though she knows he has passed away. She acknowledged, “I know Cola is a martyr, but I still hear him and see him. I think I’m going mad…”
She gathered some of her belongings and returned to the southernmost point of Gaza. She now lives there alone, in a small tent, awaiting death or struggling through unseen hardships – no one knows. At times, I feel she is a dead woman walking, carrying a permanent sorrow and unending pain.
Cola is gone, but he did not truly die. He is engraved deeply in every heart and every street. His spirit lingers in every neighborhood striving to survive amid the rubble. Cola is gone physically, but the entire neighborhood carries in its soul everything about him, his silence, his shouts, his laughter, and all of the lingering sorrow.
Ihab mentioned that Cola had a sweetheart from the neighborhood, whose heart had been bound to him since they were kids. He knew every detail about her, and she knew everything about him—his laughter, his struggles, and even the words he uttered without thinking. But after Cola’s death, she changed completely, as if her soul had been torn apart. She became extremely moody, fluctuating between crying and screaming, and drifting between closeness and withdrawal.
Sometimes she would go to the supermarket and search for Cola as if he might suddenly step out from behind the shelves and stand before her. In those moments, she would imagine Cola speaking to her, trying to calm her down. But she would scream at him incessantly, blaming him for everything that had happened. She would talk non-stop for long minutes, pouring out her heartbreak and rage. Meanwhile, Cola wouldn’t respond. He would only listen in silence, as if to say, “I’m here, but I can’t change what happened.” Then she would walk away with her head lowered, and her eyes hidden behind a veil of sadness.
At other times, she would visit him with love and tenderness, touching him gently, trying to hold his hand. She would sit beside him for a few moments, speaking in a low voice with soft words, as if searching for every fragment of Cola. But these moments were rare, and sorrow would quickly kick in again and tighten its grip around her heart.
Ihab has not seen her face since Cola’s death. She now always walks with her head down, hiding her eyes from anyone who attempts to understand or console her. She moves through the streets as if the earth had swallowed her, moving soundlessly without concrete steps. She is like the shadow of Cola that no longer exists. Ihab watches her from a distance and with a heavy heart, feeling her unending grief and tears not yet fallen. Every moment of silence is accompanied by her heart’s cry heard only by Cola’s spirit…
The neighborhood grew dull and lost much of its spark after Cola’s death. Beyond that, it was overtaken by a merciless absence that cast an uncanny silence over every pavement, corner, and stone. As for Cola’s girlfriend, she became the embodiment of that void in human form; walking among people without truly being there, loving without the ability to remain attached, remembering without the capacity to stop. Her head remains forever bowed, as if Cola’s loss had drowned her in his beloved sea, with nothing left in the world that could raise her head again.