When cancer becomes good news amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza

In Gaza, where the smell of gunpowder mixes with the moans of the sick and the cries of the displaced, writer and poet Amal Abu Assi penned one of the most brutal and painful testimonies of genocide, a testimony in which cancer of the body intersects with the cancer of occupation.

Israel’s occupation and displacement: more cruel than cancer

Amal Abu Assi said that the tumour that doctors had been warning her about for years had finally made itself known. But the shocking irony is that she did not feel the impact of this news as she did when she received the news of her forced displacement from northern Gaza to the south. There, amid the ruins of her dream and her home, she realised that illness might be easier on the heart than uprooting a person from their land.

She wrote with pain:

I understood the meaning of displacement very well when the news of my cancer was easier on my heart than the news that I had to move to the south, leaving my lofty dream standing alone in northern Gaza.

Thus, she weighed illness on one side and displacement on the other, discovering that Israel’s occupation is more cruel than cancer, and that uprooting a person from their land and their dreams is more painful than removing a tumour from their body.

Gaza: a city fighting death on more than one front

Her words are not just a passing confession, but a mirror of the reality of an entire people being pushed into the open. Amal asks herself with painful sincerity: should she rejoice that her steps are now closer to heaven, bringing an end to this long tragedy? Or should she grieve because she does not yet know how many steps remain, nor when the door of life will close?

Amal Abu Assi, whose body shares the pain of her bleeding land, sums up the tragedy of all Gazans: between the destruction of homes, the loss of dreams, and the absence of security, there is no longer any difference between death from a tumour inside or a shell outside.

She concluded with a cry that every Gazan knows:

Only those who have experienced the harshest degrees of oppression, grief, and injustice can understand this pain. Only the people of Gaza can understand this pain.

It is the testimony of a woman, but it is also the testimony of a nation. Amal Abu Assi, with her exhausted body and full heart, presents a concentrated image of Gaza as a whole: a city fighting death on more than one front, insisting, despite the bleeding, to remain alive, witnessing, and resisting.

Amal Abu Assi: a testimony that transcends the individual

Amal Abu Assi’s story is not just a tale of a cancer patient in a genocide. It is a testimony of an entire nation, a testimony of the bleeding of the body and the bleeding of the land, of a woman whose body shares its pain with her city. She writes from the heart with the fire to document a complex human moment: a moment in which illness becomes a minor detail in the face of the loss of homes and dreams.

With her sincere pain, Amal sums up the image of Gaza: a city clinging to life despite the rubble, hunger, cold, and disease. Her words do not belong only to a personal experience, but echo collectively for all those who have lost their homes, their dreams, and their security.

Amal Abu Assi, writer and poet, no longer writes only literary texts, but also a testament to her homeland, an elegy to life, and a new statement of resilience.

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