“My son would ask me for a piece of bread, and I couldn’t bring him any. I would sit beside him and cry.”
In this episode of Women of Resistance, host Sakina Datoo brings us the voice of Areej Raed Naji Al-Ajla—born in 2004, married, mother of two young sons, and, since 18 March 2024, the wife of an abducted man.
Areej’s odyssey begins in flight: from her home in Shuja’iyya under heavy bombing, to Al-Nafaq Street, and finally to Al-Shifa Hospital, where she sheltered for nearly five months—until the occupation army entered. “They separated the women from the men,” she recalls.
“They beat the men brutally in front of our eyes. They grabbed us by our hair, tore off the hijabs we were wearing.” People walking were run over by tanks; many were executed before her. “It was a real genocide. We saw martyrs torn apart, and we didn’t know if we were awake or dreaming.”
Then came the famine of the North.
“There was no food in the markets, nothing at all. We began eating corn meant for animals, grass from the ground, just to stay alive.”
Clean water didn’t exist; they drank from the sea.
“The children had skin diseases. My son would ask me for a piece of bread, and I couldn’t bring him any. I would sit beside him and cry.”
And through it all, the absence: her husband taken on 18 March 2024, in Ramadan, while he was fasting. Seven whole months of silence. She searched for him among the martyrs at Al-Shifa and found nothing—until his name surfaced on a list from Ofer Prison.
“And I knew he was alive. But after that, I knew nothing.” Released detainees describe prisons with no food and no water, nothing but one change of clothes. Others were freed; he was not. “We need him. It has been two years without him.”
When the army withdrew, Areej returned to a home she could recognise only by its kitchen walls and tiles. Now she lives in a tent that floods: “In the heat, the tents are fire. In winter, water pours in, and we drown.”
In the studio, British-Palestinian journalist Yousef Al Helou joins Sakina to place her story in its wider context—Gaza’s mass abductions, its detained civilians, and the journalism of witness that keeps their names alive.
Yet Areej’s final word is not despair but hope:
“Maybe it’ll never be the same again, but we still hope.” She prays for one thing only—a return: “We want to sleep with our children feeling safe, with no occupation army to terrorise us.”
In Areej’s hands—pinning laundry to a line strung between tents—resistance is the daily refusal to disappear: motherhood, memory, and waiting turned into witness. And as long as she lifts her children’s bedding above the rising water, the world cannot say it did not know.
