From the Gaza to the Pacific: This is My Story
FocusHuman Testimony & Literature
ResearchInternational Relations & Public Discourse
InitiativesYouth Education & Civic Agency
I was born and raised in Gaza, Palestine – a city that was vibrant, layered, and full of life long before it was reduced to destruction. Growing up there, uncertainty and scarcity were constant realities, but they never defined the boundaries of my ambition. I was constantly curious, determined to create things from nothing, and obsessed with the idea that education could open doors beyond our immediate horizon. Early on, I realized that education is a way to claim the future back when circumstances tried to shrink it. That belief took on a new meaning when, at thirteen, I was selected to join Horizons Academy through Al-Nayzak Organization, opening a path to opportunities and communities. At fifteen, I founded ACT (Action Community Teams) with friends – turning grassroots volunteer work into learning spaces, hospital visits, and workshops for local youth. Service taught me that taking initiative is often the only way forward, and that community care can become collective strength.
That drive pushed me past borders. At sixteen, I was awarded a full scholarship to attend the Global Scholars Program at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa. Leaving Gaza on my own to travel across the African continent was a turning point. It demystified the wider world for me, introduced me to brilliant peers and made me realize that the world was far bigger than the boundaries I had grown up within, and made me eager to explore it.
When war escalated and displaced my family in late 2023, everything familiar was stripped away. Surviving five months under bombardment meant waiting in hours-long queues for water, cooking over open fire, and watching my city, Gaza, being demolished in real time. Yet in those darkest nights, I was determined not to let my future disappear under the rubble.
I, along with part of my family, eventually left Gaza in early 2024 to start from scratch. During that period of dislocation, writing became my ground. Alongside my co-author and friend, Yara Nasser – who was writing from inside Gaza while I wrote from exile – we channeled lived experience into “Gaza, Held in Time”. Published by Daraja Press and cataloged in the Library and Archives Canada, the book was an ethical necessity to build a durable public record of survival and humanity. Seeing it travels to readers in over ten countries, be translated into Spanish, and even find its way back home into Gaza made me understand the reach that a carefully told story can have.
Advocating for education quickly grew beyond my own journey. Remembering the endless unanswered emails I had sent seeking education from inside a blackout, I began writing for The Nation and speaking with international media to amplify student voices still trapped without schools. If I had fought for my own education, I now had a responsibility to fight for theirs.
My path forward in education was shaped by persistence as much as opportunity. Before finding the right doors, I had accumulated repeated rejections from summer programs and boarding schools. But persistence turned the tide: in late 2024, after arriving in Canada, I made the risky decision to move to Jordan to attend King’s Academy on a full-ride boarding scholarship. It meant living far from family when we had just been displaced, but King’s became a second home. I threw myself into academics, conducted independent research through Lumiere Education, and became involved in campus life. That momentum carried into the summer of my junior year, when I attended the Yale Young Global Scholars program on full scholarship, standing on stage at Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall before peers from 160 countries to speak about Gaza with pride. A year later, I finally graduated from King’s – the very same year my mother earned her Master’s degree from McGill University.
Today, that journey brings me to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver as an International Scholar through the Donald A. Wehrung International Student Award to study International Relations. Having lived the tangible, human stakes of foreign policy, displacement, and institutional decisions, my focus now is on combining lived testimony with rigorous political inquiry, public policy, and writing – committed to building systems and educational pathways that turn empathy into lasting, structural change.
