By Bashaer Abu Muammar
Eid al-Fitr arrives in Gaza like a memory that no longer belongs to the present. The rituals remain, new clothes folded neatly, chocolates arranged for small hands, quiet visits planned between broken streets, but the feeling itself has gone missing.
For many Palestinian families, this is the third Eid shaped by war, where celebration feels more like an act of resistance than joy, and where every attempt at happiness is shadowed by absence.
On the morning of Eid, Noor Yaqoubi dresses her daughter in new clothes and places chocolate on the table, carefully arranging what used to come naturally. Outside, the streets of Gaza remain fractured, heavy with a silence that does not belong to celebration. Inside, she tries to create joy, but like many others, she carries a quiet certainty: this does not feel like Eid.
“The holiday is something we used to wait for all year,” she says, recalling the rituals that once defined it, chocolate, homemade sweets, family gatherings, and long rounds of visits. “But since the war began, Eid hasn’t really come.”
For Noor, this marks the third Eid shaped by loss, but not all loss looks the same. In the early months, it was marked by bombardment, hunger, and fear. Now, even in the absence of constant airstrikes, a different kind of war lingers, quieter, but no less suffocating.
“There’s no intense bombing like before,” she explains, “but people are not living. We are stuck between days when crossings open and days when they close, when goods come in and when everything disappears again.”
In this in-between reality, Eid does not bring relief. Instead, it sharpens what is missing.
For the first time in her life, Noor spends the holiday without her family. Displaced during evacuation orders, they were separated, her parents eventually leaving Gaza for Egypt, while she remained in the north. She never got the chance to say goodbye.
“This is the third Eid without them,” she says. “If Eid comes without my family, then what is the point of it?”
She buys new clothes for her daughter. She brings sweets into the house. She builds, piece by piece, the shape of a celebration, not because she feels it, but because she refuses to let her child inherit only the weight of grief.
“We try to make the children happy,” she says. “But inside, we feel nothing.”
For many in Gaza, the first day of Eid has become the hardest. It is when memories press closest, when people measure what once was against what remains, tracing the distance between past and present.
For Roba Tayyem, that distance is filled with both absence and quiet determination.
Before the war, Eid was “an indescribable joy,” she says. It began with the sound of Takbir, the smell of coffee, and the warmth of family gathered in one place. Preparations were shared, laughter was constant, and the day itself carried a sense of safety before anything else.
Today, that feeling has shifted.
“Everything has changed,” she says. “Eid is quieter now. There is a clear emptiness.”
A mother of two orphaned children, Roba carries the weight of loss into every moment of the holiday. Faces are missing. Familiar places feel altered. Even the smallest details, once taken for granted, have become sources of longing.
“The thing I miss most is the gathering of loved ones,” she says. “The sense of safety, the laughter without worry.”
During the war, Eid felt heavy, she explains, something to endure rather than celebrate. Families comforted each other more than they rejoiced. Now, in its third year under these conditions, the holiday brings a complicated mix of emotions.
“There is a little hope,” she says, “but also pain and longing for those who are no longer here.”
And yet, like Noor, she continues.
“I try to create an atmosphere for Eid, even if it’s simple,” she says. “I dress up, I visit people, I try to bring joy to those around me.”
The joy may be smaller now, she admits, but it matters.
Because in Gaza today, Eid is no longer about celebration alone. It is about persistence, the quiet, deliberate act of holding on to fragments of life, even as everything that once made them whole feels just out of reach. -Bashaer Abu Muammar is a Gaza-based journalist. She contributed this article to the Palestinian Information Center.