Hamed is twenty-four years old, but he carries a life on his shoulders that weighs like a hundred. For two years, Hamed has been the eyes of the world. With his camera, he has traversed refugee camps, bombed alleys, and nights without electricity. He has told of fear, hunger, bodies under the dust, but also of dignity and resistance. Not propaganda, not hate: the truth, the bare truth, which makes no noise but remains.
He has worked forSky News, for French channels, for international platforms. He has filmed courageously when everyone looked elsewhere and continues to do so. The war has taken everything from him: his home, the recording studio where he worked, the neighborhood where he lived, and two weeks ago it took away the brother he loved. It has erased places and people, but not their voice. There are those who carry it forward so that Gaza does not die, so that the Palestinian people continue to tell their story.
TODAY HAMEDlives with his family in a camp in Khan Younis. His tent rises and falls with the rhythm of the wind. There is little water, little food. Medicines do not arrive. And he is sick. He suffers from Alport syndrome, a rare and serious kidney disease. In 2019, his mother donated a kidney to him. But hunger, the siege, and lack of care have corroded everything: health, body, hope.
Yet, a thread of light had arrived.
A scholarship in Italy, at the Claudio Abbado Civic School of Music in Milan, as a sound technician. A unique opportunity: to be able to study, work, take care of oneself, and start over. To be able to tell the story of Gaza and the Palestinian drama even from outside. A possible new life. But bureaucracy has gotten in the way, cold as the concrete that covers the ruins.
Italy has signed an agreement only with university rectors – as if we had fallen back to the time of the barons: the Conference of Rectors of Italian Universities is the only one authorized to grant scholarships to students from Gaza. A technical detail, an administrative whim, certainly a mistake – that can be corrected. Italy has an innate predisposition in this: hospitality is a Mediterranean magic that distinguishes us, and I, who have lived outside the borders of the peninsula for almost fifteen years, am a firsthand witness.
It would therefore be enough to adjust the aim, to find a way to transform a brilliant initiative – to have Palestinian students study in Italy in view of a future reconstruction of Palestine – into an inclusive project, which does not risk delegitimizing art in Italy, nor silencing those who could be the voice of the Palestinian people in the world.
THE NAMEof Hamed has, so far, remained outside the evacuation lists of students heading to Italy, despite having a scholarship that includes food, accommodation, paid health insurance, and a guaranteed monthly allowance for three years.
And then there is Jumana, a violinist – also on a scholarship, who writes: "Even in the most difficult moments, I find refuge in imagination: I ride, I swim, I write (...) I claim the right to truly live, to also be a holder of freedom." She, too, a talented young woman with a scholarship not issued by one of the Universities of the Conference of Rectors, cannot leave Gaza.
And then there is Areej, who now weighs 34 kilograms. The Italian doctors who are following her case from Italy say that if she does not leave immediately, she will not survive. Areej has slender fingers that glide over the piano keys like feathers on water. She writes, she plays. She does not have the strength of fighters, but she has a rarer gift: she knows how to tell stories. Like Federico, the protagonist of Leo Lionni's book, who while the other little mice gather food supplies for the winter, feeds on rays of sunshine, colors, and words, becoming the "poet" who will save his companions during the cold when the supplies run out. Thus, artists nourish the hope of peoples when it seems to have set.
Areej has won two scholarships: one at the Belleville School of Writing in Milan, and a second at the Claudio Abbado Civic School of Music, with the guarantee of food, accommodation, and health insurance. Everything. But she too has been excluded from the circuit of "official" scholarships because she is not a university student.
AS IF CULTURE, in Italy, it could only recognize academic titles and not voices, hands, dreams. As if there were a hierarchy even in aid, even in the right to education. Italy, which has been telling its story through art and music for centuries, seems to have forgotten its soul. We are the country of poets who have transformed pain into song, of directors who have taught the world compassion and beauty even in the ruins. We are the land that has made memory a form of salvation.
How can we then close the door to those who, in the darkness, keep a light on? Hamed, Jumana, and Areej are not just three names. They are a possibility.
They are proof that art can still heal where politics destroys, that culture can still unite where borders separate. Denying them a visa, a scholarship, a school desk means denying a piece of our humanity. And for Areej, if she does not make it out to this evacuation, it will be certain death. Art as resistance. Art does not accuse. Art does not kill. Art accompanies.
And yet it is fragile, it needs our support to not die among the ruins of Gaza, like Areej, like Hamed, like Jumana, who do not have the bodies of fighters, but souls capable of healing the world by narrating horror with the mercy that only art can exercise, in a sort of secular religion, of compassion and welcoming of human struggles.