Artist: Noor Milhem
Gaza by The Sea
CrossFireArabia- August 21, 2026
What the Sea Leaves Behind
By Ibrahim Isam
I was standing on a rock farther along the same shoreline, some distance away, waiting for a seagull to cross before the setting sun so I could capture it in a photograph.
But the man who appeared in the frame caught my attention more. He was not a fisherman, nor had he come to the sea looking for a catch. He was simply a passerby who had found a piece of an abandoned fishing net on the sand. He picked up one end and walked toward the water, as if a human being, when life grows narrow around him, needs nothing more than a small possibility to try his luck.
I tried to bring the scene closer with my modest cameras. I did not know what he was really searching for: a fish, a little sustenance, or perhaps something that could not be seen.
I watched him and thought about the strange nature of being human. We reach our hands into the unknown, not because we know what will come back to us, but because something within us refuses to stop trying.
The sunset was pouring its gold across the water, without promise or question, as though reminding us that sustenance is not always what we carry home. Sometimes it is the space that remains in the heart for hope, the capacity for acceptance, and the eyes that are still able to see beauty amid so much weariness.
I had come waiting for a seagull, hoping to make a photograph, and instead I found another image—one I had never been looking for.
An image of a human being reaching toward the sea, not knowing what would return to his hands, and doing it anyway.
Perhaps that is the whole story:
to strive without demanding certainty from life, to hope without resisting what comes, and to leave the unknown its share of the story.
For some forms of sustenance never arrive in the net…
they arrive in the heart, when it learns to keep trying, and then leaves the rest to the sea.
