Mirrors That Refuse to Break

MAWASI KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip / PNN / Report by Fidaa Mohammad Abdel-Jawad

In the cramped corners of tents across Gaza, women hold on to fragments of mirrors almost as if they were pieces of their souls.

In wartime, when a mirror meets the soul amid the heat of wood-fired ovens, the prick of sewing needles and darkness creeping into tired eyes, an unusual relationship takes shape with the glass.

Three women from Gaza’s displacement camps have endured repeated displacement, shortages and market monopolies. They have improvised their own ways of coping, using shards of broken glass and dust-covered surfaces to send a message to the world:

“We are here. We have not disappeared. We are still alive.”

Amina, the Fire Baker and the Mirror of the Sky

The smell of baked clay and burning firewood rises from beneath a torn tent struggling against Gaza’s scorching summer heat.

There, Amina, 45, stands with her thin, exhausted frame bent over a clay oven she made herself from earth and stones taken from homes reduced to rubble.

Her face is unlike those of women one might encounter by chance. It seems to carry the imprint of the fire itself.

The flames have darkened her cheeks to the color of baked bread. Shrapnel and longing have carved deep lines into her skin, but the oven’s heat has left the most visible mark, drawing a network of red and black lines across her face that resembles the alleyways of the nearby neighborhood she once knew, now burned and transformed.

Her fingers — once used to examine her face each morning in the mirror above her dressing table — have hardened and darkened with ash. They peel like the trunk of a burned olive tree. Dried dough remains beneath her fingernails, stubborn traces that washing cannot remove.

Amina keeps a small piece of mirror that she once found among the rubble of her home in Beit Lahia.

But she is careful not to look at her face in it. “How can I look at a face that the fire has consumed?” she says as she moves the embers with a wooden stick. “This is not the face I know. The flames swallowed the woman I used to be, and all that remains is this hard mask of a baker trying not to forget what she once looked like.”

Amina prefers to turn the shard over and look at its dull back, where she watches clouds drift across the reflection on the faded metal surface.

She studies a gray cloud or a lone bird, as if searching for her own image somewhere in the vast distance, far from the furnace-like heat that has stripped the softness from her features.

“I used to stand in front of the mirror every morning, fix my scarf and smile,” she says, plunging her fingers back into the cool dough. “My husband, may he rest in peace, would pass by and say, ‘Your eyes are like a full moon.’”

“Now, when I touch my cheek with my charred fingertips, I do not feel the skin of a woman. I feel like a piece of bread everyone forgot in the fire until it burned.”

Amina does not cry as she tells the story. Her tears dried the day her husband and daughter were buried beneath the rubble of their home.

But her voice slowly breaks as she whispers:

“At night, when the camp becomes quiet and the children are asleep, I put this shard under my pillow. Not to look at it, but to feel how cold it is.”

Amina does not need a smooth piece of glass to remind her of the beauty she once knew.

A broken shard is enough to reflect the sky above her and remind her that it is still there, bearing witness to a woman who stands before the oven flames every dawn, hoping the fire will not consume what remains of her days.

Layan, the Tent Tailor and the Mirror of the Needle

I left Amina’s tent with the smell of ash clinging to my abaya and took another route, where the nature of displacement changed and the sounds of manual sewing machines mixed with the noise of surveillance aircraft overhead.

Walking through the crowded lanes between tents is not easy. Mud and sand swallow your feet, and every tent seems to tell a tragedy much like the one before it.

I was looking for another sound, another pair of hands — hands not burned by fire but repeatedly pierced by needles until their fingerprints had begun to disappear.

There I found a young woman who spends much of the day at a sewing machine, repairing tarpaulins, burlap and other fabric used to shelter displaced families, while rarely taking her eyes off a broken phone.

When I reached her tent, the sun was beginning to sink toward the west.

Layan, 23, does not bake dough, but the work has left marks on her hands no less severe than those on Amina’s.

She sits on the packed earth, bent over an old metal sewing machine operated by a foot pedal.

“I repair holes in tarpaulins, burlap and fabric that shelter hundreds of displaced families,” Layan says. “Even my fingers no longer look like those of a woman in her early 20s. They are swollen, pierced and marked by the daily needle pricks.”

The thick needle she drives through the heavy tent fabric rarely misses her fingertips.

Repeated wounds have formed layers of peeling scars over her fingerprints, erasing their natural lines and replacing them with a constant imprint of pain.

She reaches for her broken phone, which has become her only mirror in the camp.

Her hand trembles slowly as she holds it, leaving traces of dried blood and sweat on the cracked glass. Her reflection merges with the contours of her daily struggle.

“I keep this phone even though its front screen has shattered into three long pieces and the light still comes through intermittently,” she says. “I no longer use it for communication or calls. I turned it into a tool to resist forgetting and to recover the face I had before the war.”

Despite the needle pricks and joint pain, Layan takes the remains of a small charcoal pencil each morning and carefully draws her eyebrows.

She also uses eyeliner made from the soot of burning olive oil, as earlier generations of Palestinian women did before modern cosmetics became common.

She moistens her lips with a little sugar water to give them the effect of a missing moisturizer, then combs her hair with the teeth of a broken comb.

She performs these daily rituals sitting amid the dust of the tents, in a space where no one sees her.

A walk through the camp’s narrow lanes reveals another, less visible crisis affecting the psychological and physical well-being of women: the near-total absence of personal-care products and cosmetics, or their availability only at prices several times higher on the black market because of shortages, monopolies and the effects of the blockade.

The shortages, combined with the use of highly saline water and constant exposure to dust and smoke, have contributed to noticeable changes in the skin and general appearance of displaced women.

“Using these alternatives is a daily attempt to preserve my identity and reduce the psychological effects of displacement,” Layan says.

“The broken phone does not show a complete image. It divides the reflection into several parts. But it serves the purpose of checking my features and confirming that I am still here despite the harsh conditions.”

Layan says the rituals are not about appearing a certain way in front of others.

“I do not do these things to appear before other people,” she says. “They are an internal mechanism for dealing with the difficult reality of the camp and avoiding the feeling that normal life has been completely lost during the war.”

Suad, the Firewood Gatherer and the Mirror of Blindness

The journey through the narrow passages between the tents was more difficult than the earlier ones.

Bodies here were weighed down by months of exhaustion, and the voices grew quieter as I approached the more isolated edges of the camp.

This time, my footsteps did not lead to a workshop or an oven but to a darkened room beside a school whose walls had been reduced by bombardment to a hollow shell.

A boy directed me to the shelter of an elderly woman who had replaced natural light with the smoke of damp firewood.

“She does not look into mirrors,” I was told, “but every night she holds the glass to make sure she is still alive.”

Suad, 70, does not need a polished mirror to examine her features.

The blockade and the shortage of medical care have gradually diminished her eyesight.

She was not directly struck by a bomb. Her story began with chronic glaucoma, which had been controlled before the war through regular eye drops and close medical follow-up.

But as the blockade tightened and specialized medical facilities closed or became inaccessible, her medication eventually ran out.

For months inside an enclosed tent, smoke from damp firewood and burning plastic she gathered to cook rose continuously, irritating her already weakened eyes.

“The dryness and inflammation got worse with the war, the bombardment and the toxins in the air,” she says. “By God, it destroyed my eyesight and took away the last light in my eyes.”

Suad’s hands are unlike Amina’s burned hands or Layan’s needle-pierced fingers.

They are dry and cracked, like the bark of an old tree struck by drought.

She slowly runs her right hand along the rough wall of the room, finds a small wooden drawer and opens it with trembling fingers.

Inside is a round pocket mirror covered by a thick layer of dust and mud from the rubble, turning its surface almost completely opaque.

She does not wipe the dust away.

Instead, she leaves it there, as though it were a final protective layer.

When asked why she keeps a mirror she can no longer see through and does not clean, Suad sighs, her voice carrying the weight of decades.

“Because I remember when it was clear,” she says. “In our old home, which was destroyed in the war, it saw me as a bride when I was 17. It saw me when I first put kohl around my eyes in front of it.”
The mirror had witnessed many moments of happiness on women’s faces.

Suad continues:“The mirror saw me laugh. It saw me pregnant with my first child, who was lost in the war. Then the illness consumed me, the eye drops disappeared from pharmacies, and the smoke from burning wood and nylon destroyed the last hope of recovery.”

She ends her account turning the mirror over in her hands.

“The mirror is not only for the face. It is for preserving the soul. The dust consumed my soul just as it covered the mirror, but it has not broken yet, despite all the cracks that tore through our hearts before they reached our bodies.”

“Every night, I touch the glass to make sure I am still alive in my heart,” she says. “Those who are gone do not hold the glass.”

Mirrors That Do Not Break : Three women. Three mirrors.

Their mirrors no longer serve simply to reflect faces. They preserve fragments of memory and pieces of lives transformed by war.

They are only three examples of a much wider reality.

Amina avoids looking at the face altered by fire. Instead, she turns the mirror over and looks toward the sky, searching for the blue above her because something inside her remains beyond the reach of the flames.

Layan faces her broken screen with fingers marked by blood and draws her features with charcoal and kohl each morning, insisting that her face is not simply another piece of rubble to be forgotten.

And Suad holds on to the dust-covered mirror with her tired hands, not to search for an image she can no longer see after the loss of treatment and the effects of smoke, but to feel the solidity of the glass and testify to the survival of her spirit in the darkness.

In Gaza, the mirror is no longer simply an object used to arrange one’s appearance.

It has become a record of endurance.

A tool that shatters into pieces can sometimes reveal more of the truth than an unbroken surface. It no longer reflects only faces scorched by fire, pierced by needles or dimmed by smoke. It carries the image of spirits that refuse to go dark.

In every broken fragment of glass, a woman sits and looks inward, silently telling the crowded camp:

“I am here. I have not disappeared. I can still see myself alive, no matter how broken the world around me has become.”