Against the Loveless World

In times of war, love exists as a profound act of defiance

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It had taken Rania Abu Anza ten long years of waiting and three rounds of IVF to become a mother—a mother of twins. Five months later, her world was shattered in just one horrifying instant in which she lost the twins, her husband and 11 other members of the family to an Israeli airstrike on Rafah. Only hours earlier, she had cradled the five-month-olds, Naeim and Wissam, in her arms, lulling them to sleep. Their home collapsed in the explosion.

“Their father took them with him and left me behind,” Rania whispers through her tears, clutching a baby’s blanket. Her loss is a portrait of love’s persistent fragility in the face of war’s unforgiving brutality. What do we think of when we think about love? What do we think about when we think of war and genocide? In the rubble-strewn streets of Gaza, the besieged cities of Bosnia, the fractured lives in Syria, the horrors of the Rwandan genocide—in war zones across the world, where survival often eclipses all else—love exists as a profound act of defiance, and as the thread that weaves the narratives of those who endure.

An Act of Resistance

The ongoing genocide in Palestine has brought new meanings to the word love and its manifestations. Palestinians, in their resistance, have not forgotten their tenderness and need to love—filial and romantic.