Ramadan in Gaza… Tables Waiting for the Absent

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Minutes before the Maghrib call to prayer, when the noise of the camp softens slightly and the murmur of supplication rises from the tightly packed tents, Souad Mhanna sits at the edge of her worn canvas shelter. She smooths the corners of a small tablecloth laid over a wooden crate she has turned into a table.

With careful hands—as if adjusting the features of a beloved face—she places a modest plate of rice and a few dates, then nudges a cup slightly to the right. She gazes for a long while at the seat across from her and sighs.

The chair is empty, yet its presence is heavier than any body.
“I leave his portion as it is,” she says, her voice laced with hope. “If I remove it, I feel I’ve betrayed him.”

Mohammed, her eldest son, has been missing for months. He left with the wave of displacement from the north of the Strip to the south in January 2024, carrying a small bag, a few documents, and a quick promise to return. Since that day, no certain news has come. No call, no witness, no grave to visit. Only a suspended absence hanging between two possibilities that gnaw at a mother’s heart.

Mohammed used to be the last to begin eating at iftar, deliberately delaying his first bite until he was sure everyone else had their share. He was the first to knock on her door before suhoor, whispering playfully, “Mama, suhoor is a blessing.” Now there are no knocks on the tent flap, no heavy footsteps breaking the stillness of the night.

“If they told me he was martyred, I would cry and the waiting would end,” Souad says. “The missing keep you suspended between sky and earth… unable to mourn, unable to rejoice.”

At night, she recalls his voice as it was—clear, near, as though absence were only a passing trick. At dawn, she counts footsteps that never arrive. She cooks what he loved and keeps the clothes she pulled from beneath the rubble of their destroyed home. Sometimes she washes them though they are clean, then folds them slowly, as if postponing the admission that their owner is gone.

Not far from Souad’s tent, ten-year-old Maryam sits beside her mother, holding a small prayer bead strand, its green beads faded and worn, wrapped around her delicate fingers. Her father used to wake her on the first day of Ramadan, gently patting her shoulder and saying, “Today is the fasting of champions.” If she completed a full day of fasting, he would give her a simple gift—a small toy or a colorful book.

This year, Maryam awoke to a heavy silence. No father’s teasing voice, no kiss on her forehead. She looks at his usual place at the table, where her mother has left a space nothing can fill. With shy innocence she says, “I wanted to tell him I fasted a whole day… and I didn’t cry.”

When the call to Maghrib prayer rises, she lifts her hands in supplication but pauses, as if searching for another hand to hold. She remembers how he used to take her to Taraweeh prayers, walking slowly so she could keep up, whispering a long prayer before iftar. Now, she prays alone.

“I ask God to visit me in my dreams,” she says, “so I can tell him that I’ve grown.”

In another tent nearly flooded by rainwater, Moataz Abdu sits turning over a broken lantern in his hands. Its glass is cracked and its light no longer works, yet he keeps it as though it were treasure. Each year, his daughter Layan insisted on decorating their home with colored paper she made herself. Laughing, she would say, “Joy is a duty, Baba.”

Layan was killed in a sudden strike. The lantern remains a witness to the last Ramadan they shared. “At the first iftar after her,” Moataz whispers, “I couldn’t lift the spoon. It felt as if the bite betrayed her.”

He tries to keep her memory alive in his own way. He distributes dates in her name and tells her younger siblings about her laughter, her beautiful stubbornness, the first drawing she made of a lantern bigger than the page itself. Each story is told as if it might fill a gap that cannot be filled.

“Layan was my soul,” he says. “I believe she has gone ahead of us to a more spacious place… but loss is merciless, and Ramadan turns over wounds as if searching through them.”

As for Salma Ali, the rhythm of her life has completely changed since her husband’s passing. He used to handle every detail of the month—buying decorations, hanging lanterns, returning home with small bags hiding surprises for the children. Today, she sits with her little ones around a simple table, preparing what little is available, smiling with visible effort.

At suhoor, she wakes them gently—not to train them to fast, for they are still too young—but to break the loneliness of the night. She sits among them and teaches them a new supplication each evening. She feels she is building, through them, a bridge that connects her to his memory; that when she speaks of him, she keeps him present in their smallest details.

“He used to work extra hours just to buy them a lantern,” she says. “I’m afraid they will forget his voice.”

This is how Ramadan passes in Gaza.

It is no longer a month measured by the number of dishes or the decorations in the streets, but by the number of empty chairs around the tables—and by the names whispered before iftar.

The devastation has not only taken lives; it has taken the details that once defined the month: the knocks for suhoor, the laughter at Taraweeh, the crowded markets, the scent of fresh bread at sunset. The month has become a long test of patience, and the prayers have grown longer than usual.

And yet, despite everything, mothers still set plates for the absent, fathers still hang broken lanterns, and children still raise their small hands toward the sky—as if to say that loss, no matter how vast, cannot extinguish the flame of hope.

Here, fasting from joy becomes another lesson in endurance.

And memory becomes a table that never stands empty… no matter how far loved ones have gone.

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