Dragged from the ruins of her home in Deir al-Balah, Warda Mslah was pronounced dead. Her
lifeless body was wrapped in cloth, ready to be surrendered to the earth. The morgue doors shut
behind her, sealing her among the nameless rows. Yet in the hours that followed, beneath the
chill of metal and ice, a faint and defiant breath returned.

“It is impossible,” she recalled. “I was under the rubble for two hours, my heart stopped, they put
me in the shroud and into the fridge. My family came and said goodbye. But God wanted me to
live.”

Stories like Warda’s don’t often survive the news cycle. All too often is Gaza’s daily destruction
measured in statistics — number of casualties, people injured or displaced. Her survival
punctured that anonymity. What happened to her was not symbolic, not metaphor, but a literal
return from death in a place where death has become horrifyingly routine.

When I met her in Cairo nearly a year later, the aftermath was still written into her body. With a
surgery scheduled for the following Monday to remove shrapnel from her skull, burn scars
tracing her face and arms, and her hands stiff from the platinum fixators inserted into broken
bones, the lasting effects were clear. But some injuries were harder to name. “The first thing I
remembered when I woke up,” she said, “was the air. I smelled it and saw the light. I didn’t know
what had happened.”

She spoke about a vision she had whilst in intensive care. “Baraa came to me,” she told me, her
voice trembling. “He was only a year old when he died, but he came as a boy of four. He gave
me water and washed my wounds. He said, ‘Oh flower, God willing you will heal and come back
better than before.’ Then he turned, waved, and disappeared into the white.” That was how she
learned he had been killed.

Her husband, her son Baraa, and several relatives died in the strike. She and her daughter Mimi
survived. “I lost my husband, my son, my in-laws,” she said quietly. “We were six martyrs in that
house. And I was almost the seventh.”

Today Warda lives in Cairo with Mimi, her five-year-old, sharing a cramped apartment with her
sister on the outskirts of the city. They did not come by choice. She was evacuated through
Rafah, as part of limited medical transfers arranged in the weeks after the initial bombardment.
What was supposed to be a temporary refuge for treatment has become an indefinite holding
pattern. The Egyptian government grants Palestinians only a 45-day tourist visa for evacuation,
and these rarely extend beyond that; most Gazan evacuees now live with legally expired visas,
unable to renew, and thus locked out of basic rights.

Without valid documentation, every day comes with added uncertainty. She cannot formally
enroll Mimi in school — registration requires residency papers, which she lacks. Private
schooling comes with financial and bureaucratic hurdles that are nearly insurmountable. Each
errand across Cairo is an act of calculated risk: the risk of scrutiny at checkpoints, of being asked
for a permit she cannot present.

“We thought leaving would be easier,” she sighs, “but alienation is hard.” The arrangement offers
no safety, only stasis.

Her daily routine now is treatment and waiting. One operation has been performed in Cairo;
others are still needed, especially for shrapnel lodged in her neck. “If they remove the fragments
wrong, I could be paralyzed,” she explained.

She does not speak about politics or with anger. Instead, she lingers on what it means to survive
when others did not. “My youth has gone,” she said. “I live with fragments in my body. Some
people say I am lucky. But when I look at myself, I see a ghost.” And yet she insists she loves
life. “God gave me candy,” she said, using the Arabic phrase for an undeserved gift. “I love to
smile, I love to go out. I love life.” In moments she seems almost defiant in that claim — not in
denial of what she’s lost, but in refusal to give up what remains. She points at Mimi, restless at
the edge of our table, and smiles. “I want her to study, to become a doctor, to treat me, to treat
others.”

But Cairo has narrowed her possibilities. Medical bills accumulate, schools demand paperwork
she can’t possibly provide, and the future is made of waiting: waiting for treatment, for papers,
for news from Gaza, for a horizon beyond exile.

“We talk on WhatsApp with my father in Gaza,” she said. “But not always. The internet is bad.
Sometimes weeks pass.”

Gaza is never far from her. She dreams of her home, though she knows it no longer stands. She
longs to return but fears what that would mean. “I love Gaza,” she told me. “It is in my blood.
But if I go back and see my house, see my son under the rubble, I will die again. So I stay here,
with Gaza in my heart.”

She does not frame her experience in the rhetoric of resistance or martyrdom. There are no
slogans in her speech, no abstractions. What comes through instead is the exhaustion of survival,
the quiet rearrangement of a life stripped to its core. “I was supposed to be buried,” she said, her
voice flat, almost expressionless. “But I came back. Now I just want to live in peace, to see my
sisters, to raise my daughter. That is all.”

Based on an interview conducted in Cairo in July 2025. Warda Mslah (مصلح وردة (consented to
have her real name used.