Her mother said no to a phone. Then came the Gaza genocide
Until recently, her daughter accepted the rule: no personal phone before finishing secondary school, no social media. If Eman needed WhatsApp for school, YouTube for
Until recently, her daughter accepted the rule: no personal phone before finishing secondary school, no social media. If Eman needed WhatsApp for school, YouTube for homework, or to speak to friends during the COVID pandemic, she borrowed her mother's device. Everything passed through Beirut first before it reached Eman. The arrangement was not born of blind obedience. Eman describes herself as stubborn, and arguments over phones, curfews and going out were hardly uncommon. But, as her parents' only daughter, she also trusted that the limits they set came from a desire to protect her rather than control her. Beirut's rules were strict, but they were far from unusual. In Gaza, relatively few teenagers aged below 16 own smartphones, and even among wealthier families, whether a child has a phone often depends as much on parental approval as financial means. In Eman's class, only a handful of girls had phones of their own. Most borrowed a parent's device, and owning one before finishing school was considered a matter of luck rather than expectation. Eman wanted one all the same. Her close friend, Hanaa, had her own phone throughout their school years, and Eman remembers pleading with her mother for one too. The arguments were frequent, but Beirut never relented. The family rule was simple: no personal phone until she had finished school and turned 18.
At the time, the wait felt impossibly long. Looking back now, Eman can scarcely imagine what finally receiving that long-awaited phone would come to mean. During the genocide, though, the phone became something else entirely. She would carry Beirut’s old iPhone 11 Pro Max as her family fled their home under Israeli bombardment, climbed onto rooftops during communications blackouts that lasted for months, and uploaded videos capturing these moments that would eventually reach millions. The phone became a torch when there was no light, a camera, a witness, a notebook, a map, an archive, a classroom, a newsroom and, increasingly, a responsibility. It transformed Beirut, too. The mother who had once refused to let her daughter have a phone now became the one urging her to use it. The device Eman now hands back to her mother each night is different. For her 18th birthday, her parents spent 6,000 shekels ($1,950) and bought her a brand-new iPhone 16 — a bright pink handset tucked inside a plastic case decorated with roses and butterflies, its lock screen a smiling selfie. In the weeks that followed October 7, 2023, the family's 300-year-old home in Gaza's Old City was destroyed. Their current apartment sits barely 100 metres away, in eastern Gaza City.
The BriefWire