Threaded in Survival: Yara’s Story Through Tatreez

When war shattered the rhythms of Gaza, Yara Alshawa didn’t reach for safety but for threads. A 23-year-old law graduate with a deep belief in the power of community, Yara found herself grasping for something to hold onto amid the noise of airstrikes and the silence of loss. What she reached for wasn’t just fabric or color; it was tatreez, the centuries-old art of Palestinian embroidery. A language of memory. A ritual of resilience.

Out of grief, displacement, and a deep need for grounding, she created Tatreez and Tales, an initiative that blends storytelling with embroidery to create spaces of connection, identity, and collective memory for displaced youth. Her hands, once trembling with fear, began crafting something powerful: a safe space stitched in culture and love.

In a city reeling from destruction, tatreez became her language of memory. A ritual of resilience. A quiet, unshakable form of resistance.

“I always felt like something was missing,” she says. “It was home. I was missing home.”

Displacement had shaken her foundation, but tatreez helped her reclaim it. In each stitch, she found a reminder of who she was, of what she loved. Tatreez was no longer a craft but continuity. It was healing. It was a way to keep going when the world refused to stop falling apart.

In between the uncertainty of airstrikes and the heaviness of daily headlines, Yara found quiet strength in the rhythm of her hands. She turned not only to tatreez, but to other forms of handicraft: crocheting, stitching, creating, anything that gave her a moment of stillness.

“There’s a pause when you’re doing handicrafts,” she says. “You stop thinking about survival, about where your next meal is coming from. You just breathe.”

This deep connection to making, of threading both memory and mindfulness, became her personal anchor. And when paired with her activism, it gave her a sense of direction.

“I’m proud that I kept going,” she says. “Even while living the displacement, the starvation, the tragedy, we still kept going.”

Through her work, Yara began weaving these quiet acts of remembrance into collective spaces where stories could breathe, and stitches could speak louder than silence.

One of the projects she facilitated, Sarda and Darza, in collaboration with the Tamer Institute for Community Education, combined tatreez training with storytelling circles for youth.

“When you’re engaged in these sessions, you start seeing the real power of such spaces,” she reflects.

Tatreez and Tales grew from these moments. It now stands as a space where embroidery and storytelling are intertwined, where each stitch a testimony, each design a portal into identity, resistance, and inherited beauty. Her hands, once trembling with fear, began crafting something powerful: a safe space stitched in culture and love.

The path hasn’t been easy. One moment she carries close is when a strike hit next to her workplace.

“The sound was terrifying. The building shook. I thought that was it,” she recalls. “But then I realized, I was still here. I was still breathing. And I still had dreams. People I loved. A purpose.”

As a young woman, she has also faced the weight of being questioned, expected to stay quiet. But she points to the examples of journalists, doctors, and activists around her, women who refuse to be silenced, as her source of strength and motivation.

Her message to other women is clear:

Don’t wait for things to get better. Start now. Your community needs you, especially when you doubt it the most.

When asked about the future, her voice softens.

“It’s hard to speak about the future as a Gazan,” she says. “But I would say, I hope to breathe. For Gaza to breathe. That’s what I hope.”

And if she had the world’s attention for one minute?

“We are not numbers. We are people. And we need justice. The world has to act. It has to stop the genocide.”