The Weight of Motherhood, Words and Survival: Noor Alyacoubi

In a dim room somewhere in Gaza, lit only by what the sun allows through solar panels, Nour Alyacoubi works. She is a mother to a two-year-old girl, a wife, a translator by profession, and a writer by necessity.

Before the war, she spent her days translating. Quietly, intentionally. But when the bombs began to fall, so did the distance between her words and the world. Writing was no longer a hobby. It became a lifeline. A duty. A form of resistance carved not in slogans, but in the heavy weight of truth.

“I realized that my words could reach places I physically couldn’t,” she says. “And that writing was no longer just a hobby, it became a lifeline.”

Nour doesn’t call herself a journalist. But she documents what others don’t. She listens. She writes. She translates pain, whether hers and others’, into sentences. Writing, for her, is more than a task. It is a form of psychosocial debrief, a deeply personal effort to process the unbearable. It is how she documents the days of their lives, their losses, their love. It is her contribution to keeping a record of a live-streamed genocide. She knows the risk. She knows words are not safe in Gaza. But she also knows no one is.“In Gaza, no one is truly safe, whether they work or not, we’re all at risk. So, I choose to keep writing.”

War has many faces, but none more brutal than the one it shows to a mother. For Nour, surviving is not just a personal act, it is maternal. Her daughter, Lya, depends on her for everything: food when it’s scarce, comfort when nothing feels secure, protection when there is nowhere safe to go.

“The pressure of motherhood in war is unlike anything I’ve ever known. It’s terrifying, exhausting, and yet somehow, it’s also what gives me the strength to keep going.”

Hope keeps her moving. Not blind hope. Not soft. But the kind that strains under the weight of reality and still stands. She hopes her words might reach someone; open one heart, one door, shift one moment of indifference into action. She hopes her family, displaced and fragmented across borders, will be whole again.

Twenty one months have passed since she last saw them.

“I still hold onto the hope that I would reunite with my family very soon. Though I very much miss them, this is one more reason that pushes me to work harder.”

Each day starts with the basics: charging phones and batteries through the solar system, cleaning, preparing what little is available. By midday, she begins her six-hour translation shift. In any rare spare moment, she writes articles, interviews, fragments of life in Gaza that no camera can capture.

“I do my best to organize my time and juggle my responsibilities, but the reality is that the line between work and home no longer exists.”

She misses the normal things like waking early, taking a car to work, chatting with colleagues, feeling part of something predictable.

“I try to organize my life to feel a sense of normalcy, but I always fail under the roar of warplanes, the suffering of cooking on fire, the absence of electricity and the fear of bombings.”

And how does she cope?

“There is no way one would cope with a life filled with fear, death and displacement. I just tend not to focus on everything around; not to remember the old days; not to look at old photos, cause if I did, that would make me mentally collapse. I don’t have the option to cope or reject coping.”

As a woman, the demands are endless. She works alongside her husband to support their daughter. She navigates scarcity, inflation, grief. She mothers in a war zone, shielding a child’s mind while her own buckles under pressure.

“I try to stay calm and composed, even when I feel like breaking down. There’s a constant pressure not to cry, not to show weakness because I am her mother, and she looks to me for safety in a world that no longer feels safe.”

Still, she continues. Not because it’s easy, but because she must. Because she didn’t surrender. Because she didn’t stop.

“Even when it was easier to just hide and survive, I kept writing. I’m proud of every story I’ve told, every voice I’ve echoed, every truth I refused to bury.”

She writes from a place deeper than headlines, from the eyes of a mother, a wife, a daughter, a friend. From the everyday losses. From the quiet tragedies. From the moments the world forgets to see.

“That perspective, I believe, brings depth to the stories I tell, leaving an effect, no matter how small, in the heart of who reads them.”

To women who want to make a difference, she offers not inspiration, but truth: survival itself is a form of contribution.

“Whether you write, speak, organize, care for others, or simply survive with strength and dignity, you are already making a difference. You don’t need to be on the frontlines to be powerful.”

Her dreams are simple. That Lya grows up never knowing what it means to fear the sky. That her family will live again under one roof. That their home, now destroyed, will be rebuilt with joy not rubble. And for Gaza?

“I dream of peace. Of safety. Of laughter that isn’t interrupted by sirens. I dream of skies open and quiet, free of drones. Of streets we can walk without fear.”

And if the world were listening?

“See us. Not as numbers. Not as statistics. But as human beings with names, with families, with dreams, and with pain. We don’t want war. We want to live.”