On a gray afternoon, the sky over Gaza was too heavy to hold love and too narrow to bear even a glimpse of joy.

Marwa sat at the edge of a torn mattress, wearing a white dress—half borrowed from a neighbor, the other half sewn by her mother on a powerless night. Around her eyes was a faint darkness, not from kohl, but from sleepless nights spent counting bombs and martyrs.

“Will it be postponed?”
Her mother asked while adjusting her veil.
Marwa replied, her voice firm like Gaza’s soil:
“No. We’ll go through with it. If anything happens, I want to be his wife, not just his fiancée.”

In the house across the street, Mohammed stood in front of a cracked mirror, adjusting a white shirt that had just been washed. He shaved with an old razor and smiled at himself, even though the window had just shattered from a nearby explosion. He told his brother:
“Bring me paper and a pen. The sheikh doesn’t have anything to write with.”

“Where from?”
“My old notebook. The one I used to write down people’s debts when I worked at
the grocery.”

The marriage officiant arrived, pale-faced and soft-spoken.
In the background, Israeli warplanes roared, as if protesting the union.

“Let’s move quickly,” the sheikh said, glancing nervously at the door. “It’s not safe here.”
Mohammed stood, Marwa beside him, her father between them.
The sheikh raised his voice:

“Marwa, do you accept Mohammed as your husband according to the Book of God and the Prophet’s tradition?”

Before she could answer, a bomb fell in the neighboring street. The house trembled. A curtain fell. Her hands shook.

She looked into Mohammed’s eyes and said: “I do…by Allah, I do…”

Mohammed signed his name in a hurried scrawl. Marwa wrote hers with trembling fingers. The witness was Mohammed’s younger brother, signing in red ink—the same one used to record the names of the martyrs.

No ululations. No photographer. No wedding procession.

But when it was done, she whispered to him:
“We belong to each other now…even if the whole world isn’t with us.”

He smiled and replied: “We’re together…despite the world.”

That night, they slept in a classroom-turned-shelter.
It wasn’t a wedding night. There was no music, no flowers, no gown dancing in the wind.

But she held his hand.
He rested his head on her chest and said:

“Gaza wrote our story in blood and on old paper… but it wrote it.”
“And nothing can erase it,” she whispered as she fell asleep to the sound of bullets.

The End…and the Beginning.

A true story—repeated every day in Gaza. Not just because they love, but because they insist on living…even through war.

Alaa Alburai, Kufi Productions