Ahmad Shamiya was The Hand that illustrated the civilized face of the new Gaza. Its streets, grand hotels, restaurants, wedding halls, conferences’ centers, and the modern university buildings. Behind every architectural marvel was Ahmad’s hand and his rich imagination.
Over twenty years ago, he returned with his family to his homeland after spending quite a long time abroad. A family that, to say the least, embodied elegance, refinement, creativity, knowledge, and literate, as if three-quarters of those qualities were poured into them, and the remaining quarter was distributed among the rest of us.
We came to know them well when my eldest brother, Rami, married their dear daughter Rasha. Throughout all those years, we got to realize how nice and kind they were.
At the beginning of the war, his parents, Jamil and Fadwa, and their youngest son, Mohammad, were martyred. Today, Ahmad has gone as well. Before he left us, Ahmad witnessed how his work has turned into ruins and clouds of ash. Whenever Ahmad used to walk through Al-Rasheed Street, under his architectural masterpiece buildings which he designed, he would proudly say, not in a poetic manner only, but with deep and honest feeling of belonging to the place:
“This city is mine. This sea is mine.”
How much did this war take away from us before it killed us?
How many looked to Gaza as being part of us and as our own personal kingdom, though all that one of us owned in it was just a 120-square-meter apartment?!
Yousef Faris
14/05/2025
