Stories you won’t hear...
Ola lost her entire family to the war.
To ease the ache of her orphaned heart, Ola Abed Rabbo found love in Naseem. He brought light back into her life.
But yesterday, Engineer Naseem Abu Subha was martyred, joining her family in death.
Now, Ola is left without a mother, without siblings, and now... without her beloved.
They were both among the martyrs of the Al-Baqa Café . Her fiancé, her love he was there.
On the day he was martyred, she said:
“He sat beside me, picked up the phone, and we took so many photos. He was glowing with joy, telling me how beautiful the pictures were. He was always searching for something special to give me.”
They ate cookies, drank coffee, munched on chips and falafel sandwiches.
“Time, as always, passed too quickly. Our endless list of saved-up conversations never found enough time to be told even if we sat together for a lifetime.”
Sometimes he talked of traveling together. Other times, he wished her mother could meet him. Then he'd speak of his friends, and of the heroic journey he undertook to win her heart as if conquering the world.
“He held my hand tightly the whole way. And when we spoke of death, he would say, ‘Let’s not worry. If we die we die together.’”
Then suddenly, a deafening explosion.
“Naseem cried out, ‘Ow, ow!’ We collapsed to the ground. My leg was bleeding. I tied it with the tablecloth. I begged him: ‘Naseem, please, tell me your head is okay. Just stay alive.’”
She turned to see blood gushing from his back. He was already gone.
But she kept hope thinking he only lost consciousness.
He was taken away in the ambulance. She dragged her bleeding foot tendons torn — somehow following after.
“I arrived at the hospital in the ambulance right after his. They had already placed a rod in his leg and moved him somewhere else. I sat in a chair while they began my treatment. My father stood beside me, crushed by his tears.”
She pleaded,
“Baba, is Naseem okay? Please tell me he’s alright.”
Her father whispered, “I don’t know… he’s in intensive care. They won’t tell us anything.”
Everyone around her whispered. Hours later, they finished treating her partially.
They wheeled her outside, and her cousin came to her side.
“She gently tapped my shoulder. I asked her, ‘He’s martyred, isn’t he?’ She said, ‘Yes… we brought him to you so you could see him one last time.’”
He looked like the moon. No more beautiful than the moon.
“Alhamdulillah for this immense loss. O Allah, reward me in my calamity and grant me better than it. I bear witness, my Lord, he deserved to be a martyr for I’ve never known a heart more tender than his. So loving. So merciful.”
“I entrust him to You, my Allah until I meet him again.”
Another story... from Khaled, about the grave crisis in Gaza:
“Everyone’s talking these days about the shortage of graves in Gaza. Let me tell you how I buried my sister.”
On the day his eldest sister was martyred, the land narrowed in on them, and even the cemeteries could no longer carry the dead.
Their camp, Al-Bureij, was sealed off by the occupation army — they were forcibly banned from burying her in her own hometown.
They knocked on the gates of the cemeteries in Nuseirat and Al-Zawayda, but death was faster than the ground, and even the soil had no room for its children.
Their only hope was the cemetery in Deir al-Balah.
But when they arrived… no grave.
“I sat for a whole hour beside her, just me and her body, under the shadow of a lonely tree — as if waiting for permission from the skies to bury our pain. Waiting for the earth to grant us a patch of farewell.”
Then the cemetery supervisor came, his voice cracking:
“There are no graves… but there’s a mass grave prepared for seven martyred girls from the Ismail family in Al-Maghazi. Would you accept your sister to be the eighth?”
There was no other choice.
“There is no more room in this land, not even for the dead. There are no more rituals of farewell, except this stingy soil — and this heart that no longer knows where to place its heartbreak.”
Today, Gaza doesn’t know where to bury its children.
The graves are full.
The grief is overflowing.
And sometimes...
the shade of a tree becomes the only shroud for those we love.
And so many, many stories will be shared just so that even a single fragment of what we live through every second, every minute, can be felt.
Stand with us donate now and share 🇵🇸❤️🙏
We have no source of income during this war
we survive solely on the mercy of donations.
That’s all that keeps us alive.
Not jobs. Not savings. Just the kindness of strangers…
while everything else around us is reduced to rubble.
I read every word of these haunting stories with my heart. Always you elevate these tragedies with a healing reframing: Ola’s momentary distraction from her grief to dedicate her lover to Allah, because his heart was so tender and good, and the gift of the shade of a tree becoming a shroud … This is such a gift. I am so sorry for the destruction of this precious cafe, this place of respite and relative normality. They take everything away from you, these Israelis, but you will always have your words.
Very sad.