Qahr: An Arabic word that has come to define the Palestinian plight

Talk to a Palestinian caught up in Israel’s deadly war on Gaza and one Arabic word invariably pops up in the conversation — qahr.

A Google translation shows qahr or its similar variation is part of the vocabulary of different languages with meanings ranging from a sense of grief and human suffering to wrath.

But this Arabic word for the Palestinians encompasses a much deeper meaning, something that has come to define their experience as Israel continues to rage war on besieged Gaza in which more than 22,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed.

Some Palestinians say the word applies more in Gaza because not only are they living through a brutal war, but it also seems like the world is taking the side of the oppressor, despite the disproportionate attacks on unarmed civilians.

“We translate it in the sense of what we see now in Gaza,” says 28-year-old Momen Talal Nassar, a Palestinian man, whose family home in Gaza City’s Rimal neighbourhood has been reduced to rubble by Israeli bombing.

“When a father has to console his daughter who had her hand blown off in a bombing, when the girl doesn’t know that she has lost her hand completely, and when her father lies and says that it's just a wound — this is qahr.”

The word has come to define the misery of Palestinians forced to live in makeshift tents after their homes were destroyed by the Israeli military.

“Qahr is when you find sixty or seventy percent of the country destroyed … It’s when a mother runs back home and says ‘My kids were martyred before they had their dinner’,” says Nassar.

Like many other Palestinians, he has also lost loved ones in Gaza. He and his immediate family do not live in the besieged enclave anymore, but Nassar says he has lost more than 100 extended family members from both parents’ sides.

“Our’s is known to be a family of martyrs even before the war. We had more than thirty martyrs, but most of them were men [who] resisted the occupier,” Nassar explains.

However, he adds, this time the number of deaths in the family has far superseded that figure. “We find [that] within ninety days, we have more than 100 martyrs — most of them children and women, most of them people who were literally sitting at home.”

“There is no English equivalent to the Arabic word qahr قهر. The dictionary says ‘anger’ but it’s not. It is when you take anger, place it on a low fire, add injustice, oppression, racism, dehumanisation to it, and leave it to cook slowly for a century,” writer Khadijah Muhaisen Dajani penned in a post on Instagram that was shared widely.

“And then you try to say it but no one hears you. So it sits in your heart. And settles in your cells. And it becomes your genetic imprint. And then moves through generations. And one day, you find yourself unable to breathe. It washes over you and demands to break out of you. You weep. And the cycle repeats.”

A ‘genocidal war’

Ahmed Firwana had just moved back from living abroad to his native Gaza a few months before October 2023, and was glad to be reunited with his family after spending years apart.

Days before the war broke out, he travelled to Belgium via Egypt, one of the few routes available to Palestinians when travelling abroad, for what was supposed to be a short work trip.

On October 15, he had lost his mother and father, brother and sister-in-law, as well as their three-year-old daughter, his niece, after Israeli airstrikes hit their home.

“When you leave Gaza, you travel on business for six days, and you discover that it is your family's last farewell, and you cannot go back and say goodbye to them, and your entire family had been martyred while you are far away, and you cannot even be there for their final farewell,” 25-year-old Firwana tells TRT World, “You then know the meaning of the word qahr.”

Backed by the US, Israel has formed one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the Middle East, thanks to billions of dollars in aid.

Since 1948, the US has provided Israel with more than $130 billion in military assistance, according to the US Department of State.

In December 2023, US President Biden bypassed Congress for the second time that month to approve the immediate sale covering $147.5 million worth of military equipment to Israel.

Longing for home

Ahmed Maher Kehail lives in Istanbul but he wishes that he was with his family, who are all now seeking refuge in southern Gaza.

“They moved there from the north. Due to the heavy bombings and massacres, they are sheltering in a tent now,” says Kehail. The last time the 33-year-old spoke to his mother and sisters was three weeks ago, as “They don't have access to the internet [for me] to call them.”

He says facing injustice is a hard fact of life that Palestinians live with “from [the] time when we were kids.”

“As a Palestinian from Gaza, we often use the word qahr when we seek even the most basic of our rights,” Kehail says, adding “However, our rights are taken away and we are treated unfairly.”