By Reem Anbar

Throughout this genocide, I have yearned to be alongside my people as a musician and music therapist. If I could have been in Gaza, I would have run, oud in hand, across the border.

I have lived through many wars and genocidal waves of repression against Gaza, including witnessing the horrors of occupation and its response to two intifadas. These events made me a musician.

In previous wars, I worked in the schools and camps of displacement as a music therapist, working with children and families to sing, play and perform in the face of colonialist violence. This time around, although my family remained in Gaza City, I have performed internationally on solidarity stages, taking the Palestinian story with me wherever I go.

This journey has taken me to three continents, but my place is Gaza.

Throughout this genocide, I have yearned to be alongside my people as a musician and music therapist. If I could have been in Gaza, I would have run, oud in hand, across the border.

Unfortunately, I could not be with my people in Gaza this time around and so I developed the idea that I should work in the Palestinian refugee camps elsewhere.

They live lives similar to ours in Gaza, constant war, poverty and struggle, particularly in Lebanon. In April 2025, I traveled to Beirut for a series of music workshops, based on my experiences in Gaza and seeking to build a musical bridge of solidarity.

Arriving at Mar Elias refugee camp, I felt I had returned to Gaza. The same smells, sights, styles of houses, and cramped alleyways. Even tea with maramiyya (sage)!

Lebanon, outside the camps, doesn’t have this Palestinian touch. My conversations with the women who work with the children in creches and other projects revealed that we had many similarities, sharing the same musical tastes and traditional recipes.

In the eyes of the children, I saw the same hope and love for Palestine that I witnessed in Gaza. These children have never stepped foot in their homeland but know that their return is inevitable—their bond, unbreakable.

With children at Mar Elias and Borj al-Barajneh camps, dozens of children joined me in musical games, exercises, and in singing “Thob sitti” (My grandma’s thob*), a song written by Suheil Khoury, with lyrics by poet Khaled Juma’. We had planned short, one-hour workshops, but the teenagers kept me for nearly double that time, singing the lyrics as they left:

Embroidered stitch by stitch

To wear on the evening of my wedding

This stitch is from Gaza

This stitch is from Haifa

My grandma has a thobe and shawl

On the thob is an embroidered gazelle

alongside roses and wheat

In a landscape of seven mountains

I was keen that this experience could provide real opportunities to link the children with those in Gaza. At the al-Naqab center in Borj al-Barajneh, I read a message from Olfat, a 12-year-old living close to the ruins of her home in Gaza City:

“I am currently in Gaza in the middle of the war. My life is very difficult but I try to occupy myself with music and playing with my siblings. We have always had pets but they all died in the bombing. I was very sad for them. But after our displacement, we found animals in the street. I took them in and took care of them, along with their children.”

Seven-year-old Muna, who lives in Khan Younis, wrote a message to the children in the Lebanon camps:

“I wish that myself, the children of Gaza, and the Palestinian children in Lebanon could live a normal life in freedom, with proper childhoods. I really hope to meet you one day and I hope that our lives will be better and that life in Gaza will return. I would love for you to visit us one day, to get to know you all, and for you to see how beautiful Gaza will be again.”

At a kindergarten run by the Ghassan Kanafani Cultural Foundation (GKCF) in Mar Elias camp, more than 30 teenagers came to a workshop I had hoped would attract around a dozen. They had attended the center as young children, and their relationships with the women running the center remain strong and beautiful. Touched by the stories from Gaza, they spontaneously wrote their own messages, asking for assurance that they would reach the children in Gaza.

Kareem wrote:

“To the children of Gaza, you are the strongest people on earth. The Zionist enemy is afraid of you because they know your strength. You are always on my mind. May God grant you victory. I love you very much.”

As Israeli planes continued to bomb southern Beirut and the Lebanese south, the children of Borj al-Barajneh sang passionately and dedicated their performance to those enduring the siege in Gaza. Bissan, Ibtisam, Ali, and Hamsa wrote together:

“Children of Gaza, you are in our hearts… God willing, the war will end and we will all return to Palestine. You are stronger than you can imagine and we will stay alongside you until our last breaths.”

My main goal is to shed light on children in camps and children suffering from war and colonial displacement everywhere, and particularly the children of Palestine.

The Palestinians of Lebanon give me the strength to carry on performing, working and fighting for them. Today I am in Lebanon with the children of the camps. Tomorrow I will return to the children of Gaza.

(The Palestine Chronicle)