Diana Shams’s book, written on a phone amid the ruins, details a reality where survival, not screen time, is the primary concern.
Diana Shams used to be preoccupied with the familiar anxieties of modern parenting: how much screen time was too much, the perils of excess sugar, or which cartoon character should adorn her son’s upcoming birthday cake.
“I thought being a mother meant sleepless nights, picky eaters, school runs, messy rooms and too much laundry,” Shams writes. “I used to think motherhood was hard.”
That was her perspective before the conflict that decimated Gaza began. The Israeli offensive has resulted in over 68,000 fatalities, mostly civilians, and reduced entire cities to rubble, an outcome a UN inquiry has identified as genocide.
During a brief truce in early 2025, as Shams and her family were clearing debris and attempting to repair their home, a friend abroad suggested she write a book about her experience. Her laptop was lost beneath the wreckage, so she wrote the entire manuscript on her phone.
Her book, A Different Kind of Motherhood, is the 27-year-old’s testimony of raising children amidst constant violence and imminent danger.
“No one prepares you to raise children through sirens, smoke and screams,” she writes. “No one teaches you how to keep a child calm while the sky is falling. No one explains how to carry your baby through fire, hunger and fear – and still sing to her at bedtime.”
Shams’s work does not attempt to provide answers to these unanswerable questions. Instead, it offers a window into her family’s ordeal and memorializes the other Palestinian mothers she knew—those who were killed or who lost their children.
“I wrote this book not just for myself,” she explains, “but for every mother in Gaza who has rocked her baby while the ceiling shook. For the women who gave birth in shelters, in the dark, with no medicine. For the mothers who lost a child and kept living – because they had no choice. Because there were others to protect.”
Even before this war, life for Shams and her young family was far from normal in the besieged strip, widely known as the world’s largest open-air prison.
Despite the siege, she had strived for normality in the small details of her life. She and her husband lived with in-laws after their firstborn, Karim, arrived, eventually saving and borrowing enough to own their own home. They finished painting it just in time for the birth of their second child, Rose, in early 2023.
Seven months later, only one day into the latest war, a neighbor’s house was bombed, forcing them to flee. After moving repeatedly, they finally traveled south, sleeping in their car until a tent became available. They have been living in and out of tents ever since.
“Sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I thought about mothers in other countries,” Shams writes. “Mothers abroad who raise their children in comfortable homes, who open a fridge full of cold water, who press a button and a fan or an air conditioner cools the room. Mothers who tuck their children into soft beds with clean sheets and watch them drift to sleep without fear.”
Speaking by phone from Gaza, Shams says that even the most graphic news reports cannot capture the lived reality, especially for mothers. “Who can understand what it means for my daughter Rose to take her first steps in mud and dirt?” she asked.
The book was not a planned project. Shams had simply been collecting her thoughts as notes on her phone. “This book is not written in comfort,” she states in the text. “It is written in stolen moments between survival and grief, in the quiet hours when my children finally sleep, and I can let the weight of everything crash into me.”
As the daughter of a journalist, Shams also found a degree of comfort in documenting her daily life on TikTok—showing her children playing in the sand, her search for baby milk and nappies, and cooking over firewood.
“One rainy night – I used to love the rain before the war – I nearly lost my mind when our tent flooded,” she said. “Everything was soaked and I was terrified my children would get sick. I found myself grabbing my phone and recording a video.”
She was shocked when the video went viral, drawing immense sympathy and supportive comments from Western audiences. “I was touched by every word people wrote in support of me,” she said. “That’s when I felt I had to be a voice for all the mothers in Gaza who have none.”
While social media provided an outlet, it also served as a painful reminder of a cruel imbalance, allowing those facing destruction to see, in real time, the simpler lives of others nearby.
“In other countries, mothers are worrying about homework, grades, screen time. They visit schools, choose tutors, plan university paths,” she writes. “They post photos of ‘first day of school’ and decorate lunchboxes. Here, we are just hoping our children survive long enough to have a first day again.”
