Sama al-Harazin, 14, has kept a diary since primary school. In a notepad with a lock on it - no one is allowed to eavesdrop - she has captured her everyday life and her thoughts about the future. But with the war, another reality takes up more and more space on the pages.
Today, she uses the diary to deal with fear, sadness and homelessness. On the pages, she describes life on the run, the long queues at the water distribution and soup kitchens in the Saraya district, and how the journey to school makes her tired.
- When I get scared, I escape to writing. Life then feels easier, and the fear gradually subsides, she says.
Sama is in ninth grade at the al-Nahda state school. She practices karate and has a brown belt. Her mother was killed in the war in 2014 when Sama was two years old. Older sister Nasma, 28, who helped raise her, says that diary writing runs in the family: the father kept a diary himself.
- The loss and the war seem to have caused Sama to mature too early. She carries a heavy responsibility in a family of twelve people, says the sister.
The family's apartment in the Shujaiya neighborhood has been destroyed. Sama's previous diaries have disappeared into the racial masses.
She allows her sister to send pictures from the diary to DN.
In a note she made during the hunger crisis in Gaza in the fall of 2025, she writes about her father, who was seriously injured and was treated in hospital:
"The hunger got worse. My father was badly injured and stayed in the hospital for a while. Then I was afraid of losing him, like I lost my mother in the war in 2014. I hadn't even turned two years old. I was sad every night and cried for my father. I miss my mother. I used to visit her grave every week."
Even Nada al-Nahhal, 15, writes to preserve the memory of what happened. She is in the tenth grade and now lives as an internally displaced person in the Sabra district of Gaza City.
She started writing a diary in the fourth grade. Back then, the lyrics mainly revolved around everyday life, feelings and pure fantasies. Previous wars in Gaza were given limited space, she says, because they ended after a few days.
- My diaries look completely different now. New words have entered my language: "flight", "starvation", "tarps" and "quadcopter", she says.
Over the years, she filled between 50 and 100 notebooks. Only nine could be rescued from the mobs when the family's home in Sheikh Radwan in Gaza City was destroyed.
She has processed some of the diary entries into a novel. On her birthday, she was given a printed copy by her aunt Maysara Shaaban, who is a journalist.
From the text "The deferred death here" she reads aloud for DN:
"There were days when I cried so much over the house that the tears stopped and my face became like the ground after the bombings, full of small cracks. My father said: 'We are starting over, we are building a new home.' It was not a house of stone but of blue and white tarpaulins. Every night I saw him with the hammer in his hand, as if he carried his heart. He hammered the nails and tried to convince the tarpaulins that they were walls, and himself that we were fine."
When the ceasefire began on 9 October 2025:
"Finally the truce was called. But when it came, it wasn't peace that first made our hearts beat faster. Without fear. It all began on the night of October 9, 2025. It was pitch black outside, but hope was a small flame that flickered between us.
Finally I fell asleep after thinking for a long time. I woke up early in the morning. Finally the news reached dad: our house had been razed to the ground”.
About the return to the razed home, she writes:
"We stood for a long time in front of the place that was once our home. We found nothing, only ruins. Ruins that resembled our pale hearts".
In parallel with school, Nada is now working on a story about the imprisoned chief doctor Hussam Abu Safiya, the former head of the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza. The images of him surrendering to the Israeli military at the end of 2024, dressed in a white doctor's coat, were spread around the world.
She also paints and expresses criticism both of the outside world and of Gazans who exploit the victims.
For Nada, writing is both an escape and a testimony.
- I write both to escape to another world and to document. We die twice if the events are forgotten, says Nada and elaborates:
- The war not only attacks the bodies but also the memory. If we don't document, it will be another death for the victims.
