“I no longer had shelter. No home. Nothing. Only God’s mercy to hold onto.”
In this episode of Women of Resistance, host Sakina Datoo brings us the voice of Falasteen Younis—a mother from Sheikh Radwan in Gaza City, now displaced in the Al-Bureij camp—a woman whose very name is Palestine, and whose life since the war began has become a map of forced flight.
“The situation in Gaza is unbearable,” she says. “We still don’t feel that the war is over.” The nights still belong to quadcopters, helicopters and artillery. “The war is still ongoing. It hasn’t stopped.” And of the peace everyone else is celebrating:
“So where is the peace? I don’t see peace.”
Her odyssey began like everyone’s: waking “to the sound of rockets and shells,” then the order to leave Gaza City for the South. Each flight shrank her world to what one person could carry: “We ended up carrying one small bag each, just enough to walk with.” Deir al-Balah, then point after point after point. “A year and a half running, never resting.” In the war’s final stage, her house collapsed on top of her. “But thanks be to God, I survived.”
The last displacement—the fifth inside Gaza—was the cruelest. Her husband weak with diabetes, unable to walk; no money; carters charging huge sums to help others flee. She stood in the street and asked:
“Who can take me? Anyone at all.”
One man took pity and returned at 6 AM. What could she take? “A few clothes, simple blankets, a few changes, a pot, a spoon, a knife. Just the bare minimum.”
When the truce was announced, she went back to Gaza City in joy—only to find her four-floor home, her street, her whole neighbourhood erased. “I couldn’t even recognise the street. Just rubble everywhere. I was stunned.”
Now, in Al-Bureij, life is measured in containers: queues for salty water, rushes for the fresh-water truck, charity pots that sometimes never arrive. “A day without fresh water is the hardest day of all.” Her tent is torn and ruined; when it rains, it floods. “We end up sitting in the street.”
The cost lives in her, too: “I spent a long time not wanting to speak, not wanting to see anyone. I just cried, cried over the life we reached.” To this day, she says, she sometimes needs therapy sessions “just to calm myself at the very least.”
But it is the children she grieves most:
“If you ask him to write his name, he can’t. To name colours, he can’t, except red, the colour of blood.”
In the studio, Palestinian researcher and activist Ibrahim Abul Essad joins Sakina to place Falasteen’s testimony in its wider context—displacement as method, a ceasefire that never reached the ground, and the witness that keeps Gaza’s names alive.
Falasteen’s demand is not grand. It is dignity: reconstruction, homes, streets, sanitation—”a better life than this.” And to the world’s activists she leaves an instruction:
“Stand with us to the very end. Raise your voices again and again and again.”
In Falasteen’s hands—a bucket tipped over a hand-span of green beside a torn tent—resistance is the refusal to let life itself die. And as long as she keeps watering what remains, the world cannot say it did not know.
