By Taghreed Saadeh
In most wars the world has witnessed, there is a strange human paradox the more intense the death, the stronger people’s desire to live. At the heart of wars, laughter is born, wine glasses are raised, and pianos are played in cellars under fire. These are not scenes from fiction but documented realities in fighters’ memoirs, journalists’ accounts, and films chronicling major conflicts. Unfortunately, Gaza is unlike any of these.
In Sarajevo, the city besieged for years during the Balkan War, people gathered secretly for parties, dressed in their finest clothes. They listened to singer Amira Medunjanin perform under the bombing, with musical bands playing in candlelit tunnels while shells fell overhead.
During the Lebanese Civil War, the city was divided along sectarian lines, yet its lights never went out. Hamra Street kept beating, and the Casino du Liban was a destination even for some political and military leaders, including members of the Palestinian revolution, who found in nightlife a psychological refuge at night before returning to their warfronts by day. Writers like Ghassan Charbel and Samir Kassir documented this paradox of “normal life amid mad death.”
Elias Khoury also captured Beirut’s transformations during the war in his novel Gate of the Sun, focusing in some scenes on nightlife، the bars and clubs.
Art and cinema have not ignored this contrast between life and death in wartime. Roman Polanski in his movie “The Pianist” showed its protagonist playing piano despite hunger and persecution in occupied Warsaw, as if music protected him from death.
And in the classic movie “Casablanca” by Michael Curtiz, despite World War II, the bar remains a place where people meet to dance and sing, as if no bombing or chaos rages outside.
Gaza has none of this luxury. There are no secret parties, no night cafés. There is no “Casino of the Revolution,” no singers to lift spirits under the ruins. The Strip is besieged from all sides, sea, land, and air. Everyone lives under bombardment, among rubble or in a tent without electricity, water, or hope.
In Gaza, no one can escape the crowd; there is no private space for relief. No dark hall to shelter dreamers, no moment of respite from madness. Even funerals are not properly held, as deaths occur en masse without farewells. Children starve to death, as reports from the UN and Save the Children warn of an ongoing famine in the northern Strip. Over 1.2 million people now face “complete food insecurity,” according to global hunger classifications.
In every war, there has always been some margin, a street left unbombed, a neighborhood where people sing, an hour to forget death. But in Gaza, not even those exceptions exist. War dwells and takes root.
The difference between Gaza and other war torn cities lies not only in the number of casualties or the scale of destruction but in the absence of that symbolic space that allows humans to endure.
What Gaza is living through today does not resemble any war, nor does it fit any known scenario. It is a pure tragedy, stripped of all the psychological and spiritual balances that humanity has known throughout its wars.
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