Journaling the war: How one Gaza student coped with trauma

Gaza student Salma Shurrab kept a diary amid the 60 days of Israel-Hamas war she witnessed, before fleeing to neighboring Egypt.

On Oct 6. Salma Shurrab said goodbye to her hometown without knowing it.  

Breaking her usual midnight curfew, she indulged in a late-night car ride. With her cousin, Rana Alghussain, in the passenger seat, Shurrab, 22, drove through Gaza City singing along to blaring pop music.

“We literally said goodbye to every street,” she wrote in her journal, listing off street names and neighborhoods the duo drove through. “I’m so thankful that coincidence happened because it made me say goodbye to Gaza.”

After surviving 60 days of Israel’s military offensive that has flattened swaths of the Gaza Strip and killed more than 31,000 people, according to local health officials, including several of her friends, Shurrab fled to neighboring Egypt.

The key to her own survival has been what the dentistry student calls her “trauma journal,” in which she spent hours writing about “the good, the bad and the ugly” during sleepless nights. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaza-israel-hamas-war-journal-trauma-student-rcna143226

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