We came out of the sea and stood there for a few moments, looking at each other without saying a word. We didn’t need to. The looks on our faces said it all.
Since the beginning of the so-called ceasefire, as children and families in Gaza try to reclaim small pieces of normal life, even moments of play, learning, and rest have been threatened by Israeli violence. Even the places that are supposed to make them feel safe are potential sites of danger.
By mid-August of this year, the summer heat had become unbearable. It was especially difficult for my little brother Mohammed, who is thirteen and suffers from nosebleeds often exacerbated by the intense sun. Since we could no longer stay inside the tent, which offered little protection from the heat, finding somewhere else to escape it became part of our daily routine.
Mohammed started going to the beach early each morning, where he would stay until sunset. I, meanwhile, sat every day at the cafeteria by the beach. In the last week of August, while Mohammed was sitting with me at the cafeteria, I told him that my friend Jihad, a fisherman, had started teaching swimming lessons. He was excited and quick to share the news with his friend Abd; Mohammed had always dreamed of learning how to swim.
The next day, Mohammed and Abd decided to go to the beach with Jihad. The first two days went well. Even without proper swimming equipment, Jihad focused on teaching them the basics and helping them overcome their fear of the water. They used whatever they could find, including empty water bottles tied around their bodies to help them float.
Hassan Herzallah
Hassan Herzallah ties empty soda bottles around his younger brother Mohammad’s body to help him float.
I watched Mohammed from the cafeteria, and when I talked to him about the lessons, he said he was happy about the time he was spending at the beach. It felt like he was doing something that belonged to childhood again: learning a new skill, playing in the water. The genocide has forced children to think about things far beyond their years, but for once, he was enjoying the type of normal moment that so many children here had been deprived of..
But that moment did not last long. On the third day, I decided to go swimming with them. I left my bag at the cafe and headed to the sea at around 7:30 a.m. When we got into the water, Abd was wearing the water bottles that helped him float, but Mohammed didn’t want to use them. “I want to rely on myself, especially since you and Jihad are with me,” he told me. “I don’t need to wear anything.”
He got into the water with me, and we started practicing how to swim and stay afloat. “Just wait, Hassan. Give me a week and I’ll be a better swimmer than you,” Abd laughed. I teased back, “Will you be better than me with the bottles on, or without them?”
About an hour into the lesson, we heard gunfire coming from Israeli military boats nearby us in the sea. At first, we didn’t think much of it, but panic soon began to show on Mohammed and Abd’s faces. Abd asked Jihad whether the gunfire was directed at us or was just random. Before Jihad could answer, we heard more shots being fired in our direction. We didn’t know whether or not we were the target.
Jihad told me to keep an eye on my brother while he tried to pull Abd, who was now screaming, from the water. Mohammed was about ten feet away from me, and the nearby explosions made it difficult for me to swim toward him. I watched him struggle to stay above the water. It felt like I was watching him drown in front of my eyes.
When I finally reached him, he grabbed onto me in terror. We were both close to drowning because he was flailing in the war, until Jihad came to help us. Once the sounds stopped, we somehow managed to make it to the beach.
We came out of the sea and stood there for a few moments, looking at each other without saying a word. In Gaza, children can’t learn or play without fear of Israeli violence.
Jihad stopped giving swimming lessons. The course had been about more than teaching children how to swim—he saw it as a chance to give them a small piece of the normal life they had lost to war. But after escaping Israeli gunfire in the sea, he questioned whether it was possible to do so in a place where the sea could suddenly turn a source of joy into a threat.
Meanwhile, Mohammed and Abd have sworn they will never go back into the sea.