My year in Gaza’s tent camps has taught me that humanity is not an idea — it is an obligation.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for those of us living in peaceful countries is not to let comfort make us blind. Because peace, too, can become a veil—one that turns other people’s suffering into a distant backdrop we flip past like a channel.

In Gaza, I came to understand that humanity is not a feeling, but an act. Not an idea, but an obligation. I learned that human kindness does not disappear in war—it merely becomes more raw, more visible.

I spent nearly a year in Gaza during the war. I came as a volunteer aid worker, but above all as a human being. When I look back, I don’t remember statistics or graphs. I remember sounds, smells, faces. The sound of fighter jets tearing the sky apart, the constant hum of drones, the echo of heavy machine guns and tanks—the endless symphony of death.

That soundscape became part of everyday life, like a dark background music you could never turn down.

My work took place side by side with local volunteers and colleagues. Together, we distributed food, hygiene kits, drinking water, blankets, clothes, and shoes for the winter. We organized children’s shows to give the youngest a brief pause from fear, and we built a field clinic where people could receive treatment when hospitals could no longer take them in. But it was never only about the practical side of aid—it was equally about keeping small lights of hope alive in the dark.

Before I went to Gaza, I lived in Sønderborg, wrapped in the safety of a quiet routine. But the attacks of October 7, 2023, and Israel’s overwhelming response changed everything. Like the rest of the world, I watched the escalating punishment unfold.

The images from Gaza seared themselves into my consciousness: the hollow eyes of children after bombardments, small hands clutching hospital beds in the desperate hope that their mother or father was still alive. Elderly men and women climbing out of the rubble of their homes.

The colors drained out of my life. Food lost its taste. My strength training no longer gave me strength. Even the icy water of my winter swims felt gentler than the cold that had settled inside me. I realized how passivity slowly eats away at one’s humanity, one’s integrity, one’s values.

I could no longer remain a spectator. In December 2023, I traveled to Egypt, and after a long, exhausting struggle, I finally succeeded, in March 2024, in crossing the border into Gaza for the first time. Only in January 2025, after a fragile ceasefire had fallen like a thin layer of dust over the land, did I say goodbye and leave Gaza for the last time.

Scenes of solidarity

I remember the endless queues in front of the few bakeries that still had bread. People stood for hours, plastic bags in hand, their hope for food weighed against their fear that a bomb might fall right there.

At the community kitchens, the sounds were different: pots clanging against each other, mixed with the cries of children because there was never enough food. I saw mothers return to their tents with half-filled containers. And I heard children ask, “Is that all?”

A kilo of tomatoes cost the equivalent of 150 kroner—when you could even find them. Most people couldn’t afford them, but I still saw men and women haggling in the markets, as if the act of bargaining itself was a way to hold on to some sense of normal life.

I met children whose limbs had been amputated, yet who still kicked a ball with the one foot they had left. Shattered dreams lay everywhere—but there were also new dreams being spoken of.

The tent camps were no refuge. When heavy rain came, the tents—their only homes—were flooded and torn apart by the wind. The few belongings families had managed to save were reduced even further, washed away or destroyed. Home no longer offered shelter—not from the elements, nor from the relentless war machine pressing ever closer.

And yet, in the cold where hope seemed to wither, I still found people who laughed, told stories, and held on to one another.

Many dreamed of returning to their destroyed houses—not to resume life, but to recover the bodies of their loved ones from under the rubble, so they could bury them with dignity.

I also remember my colleague Mahmoud, an ambulance medic. Every morning he came home with blood on his clothes after long nights spent searching for survivors beneath the ruins. His eyes carried the weight of what he had seen—bodies, children, fragments of what once were people. Fate did not even spare him from having to gather the shattered remains of his own family.

And still, he would sit down with his coffee, take a deep breath, and smile. He found solace in that small ritual, as if the coffee were an anchor holding him to life. To me, Mahmoud became proof that the human being can bear the unbearable—and still insist on being human.

Humanity is an act

I remember an elderly woman who had only her bedridden daughter left. Crying, she told me she could no longer help her daughter stay clean. There was no water, no adult diapers, and her own strength had failed. She wept in despair as she described how her daughter was slowly losing her dignity before her eyes.

Something broke inside me. My heart cried, but I did not. Because in that moment, I had to be more than my own pain. I had to be a hope, a shoulder to lean on.

It was there I understood that humanity is not a feeling, but an act. Not an idea, but an obligation. In Gaza, I learned that human kindness does not disappear in war—it becomes more raw and visible.

When a father shared his last piece of bread with his neighbor’s child, or when a nurse worked night after night not knowing whether she herself would survive, it became clear: even amid the ruins, people insist on being human.

Gaza is a mirror. It does not only reflect the tragedy there—it holds up a question to us here: What does it mean to act when the world is burning? How much dignity can we give up before we lose ourselves?

I entered Gaza weighed down by helplessness. I left it with a realization: that a person truly becomes themselves in the encounter with another’s vulnerability. That burdens, even when they nearly break us, can also open the door to a strength we never knew we had.

Peace can blind us

Today I am back in Sønderborg. Here, the houses still stand. Rainwater runs calmly down the gutters. The sky is blue, the air still. I walk through streets where everything breathes peace—where supermarket shelves are always full, where children play freely, and where war exists only as a distant echo in the news.

But inside me, another reality lives on: children whose limbs were amputated without anesthesia, families driven from their homes by evacuation orders, a mother’s abyssal scream when she lost her children. The contrast between the safety of my town and Gaza’s ruins is so vast it feels almost unreal—as if two worlds that should never coexist do so nonetheless.

And it is precisely this simultaneity that feels so unsettling. That I can turn on the radio in a kitchen where coffee smells rich and water flows freely, while someone in Gaza is at that same moment searching the rubble for what remains. That here we can discuss the weather for the weekend or our next vacation, while families there are discussing how to survive the next day.

The difference is not only unjust—it is almost surreal.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for us in peaceful countries is not to let comfort make us blind. For peace can also be a veil. It can turn other people’s suffering into a distant backdrop we flip past. And yet these realities coexist—they exist on the same planet, under the same sky, in the same moment in time.

So the question remains: What does it mean to be human in a world where one hand can reach into abundance while the other reaches into emptiness? Are we still whole if we choose to look away—or do we become truly human only when we allow another’s vulnerability to bind us to them?