On the morning of October 7, 2023, Gaza erupted.

After sixteen years of Israeli blockade, Hamas breached the wall that had cut it off from the world to attack Israel. In the hours that followed, the Israeli army launched an assault on Gaza to “annihilate” Hamas. Since then, the death toll has reached tens of thousands. And tomorrow, nothing will remain of Gaza as we knew it.

Can one be nostalgic for what was unbearable? Guillaume Lavallée takes us with him to the heart of Gaza, a place where life was lived on borrowed time, a precarious existence, prodigiously human but forever bound to a conflict that had become the lifeblood of its children. It is to his own mother, whose memory is fading irrevocably, that he recounts, as well as to us, what Gaza was like, a place where the earth, the sky, and the sea had closed in, evoking the fire that engulfed it, but also the stubborn fire of hope that, just yesterday, refused to die.