Forbidden luxuries

Confessions of an Exiled Palestinian

©Eman Mohammed

Content warning – this post discusses suicidal feelings during genocide.

Dublin, 4 May 2026 4:00 PM here | 6:00 PM Gaza, Occupied Palestine.

The pot on the stove has been cold for hours, but I turn the dial anyway, watching the blue flame catch and die. My phone leans against the chipped salt shaker, its screen glowing through the dust that blankets my aunt’s kitchen. The livestream stutters, then clears. A voice I would know in my sleep cuts through the static and asks if I have eaten. I lie and say yes, while smoke rises slow from where we once sat drinking tea thick with fresh mint.

Appetite does not leave all at once. It fades in small, cruel steps. First the taste for cumin and cardamom slips away, then the will to step outside into ordinary daylight, and finally the quiet belief that tomorrow might still be worth reaching for. When your family starts measuring flour by the spoon and calling it survival, your own stomach learns to tighten in shame. I sit here in a city that does not shake, safe only because the bombs are falling somewhere else, and still I starve with them.

I remember kitchens from before. My mother’s hands pressing dough into a metal tray while the radio played old songs between bursts of static. We used to fight over who got the crispest edge of the bread. Hunger was only a guest back then. Now it owns the room.

The thought of ending it has lived inside me for years. It sits there, heavy and quiet, waiting for me to finally give in, and yet I cannot. Not because I am strong, far from it, but because suicide has become a luxury the oppressed are not allowed. To take my own life would be to hand them exactly what they want, one less witness, one less voice, one less Palestinian who refuses to disappear.

I turn the dial off. The flame dies. I pick up the phone again and watch my cousin roll mulukhiyah like a cigarette. He giggles bitterly as he says, “They banned cigarettes again… so now people are smoking mulukhiyah instead. They take anything that might help us endure their torture, or God forbid, live another day.”

I sit at this table and wait for the screen to update. I do not look away.

This is the sentence of staying, and I will carry it.