💍 Weddings on the Rubble: 54 Palestinian Couples Just Defied a Genocide
In bombed-out Khan Younis, brides in the “dress of joy” and grooms in black suits stood on shattered concrete and promised each other a future anyway.
Family,
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You really do have to see this to believe it.
In Khan Younis, a city that has been bombed, invaded, and besieged for nearly two straight years, where whole neighborhoods are nothing but broken concrete and twisted rebar, something happened this week that I would’ve thought impossible if I didn’t see it with my own eyes.
Fifty-four young Palestinian couples gathered together to get married.
The grooms put on crisp black suits. The brides wore the Thawb al-Farah — the traditional Palestinian “dress of joy,” embroidered in red, white, and green, the colors of a land the world has been trying to erase. In the video, the contrast is shocking: formal clothes, white veils, embroidered dresses, all set against a backdrop of shattered buildings and exposed steel.
They didn’t rent a hotel ballroom. There was no pristine banquet hall. They built a stage on top of the ruins themselves. They put their chairs on the same concrete that Israeli bombs had smashed. They walked down an aisle that winds through wreckage.
They chose to get married in the shadow of the rubble because they refused to let the people who destroyed their homes also destroy their future.
I want you to sit with that for a moment. Not rush past it. Really picture it.
For two years, Israel has tried to break these people in every way possible. They’ve dropped 2,000-pound bombs. They’ve flattened schools and hospitals. They’ve starved families. They’ve assassinated writers, doctors, journalists, children. It was never just about territory. It was about psychology. It was about making a people feel that there is no point planning for tomorrow.
And yet here is Hikmat, a 27-year-old groom who lost his home and now lives in a tent, standing next to his bride in that dress of joy, on top of what used to be their neighborhood, saying:
“Despite everything that has happened, we will begin a new life… God willing, we will rebuild brick by brick.”
That sentence right there is more powerful than any speech in any parliament I’ve heard in these two years.
The Dress of Joy Will Rise Again
Some people look at scenes like this and ask, “How can they celebrate when there is so much death?” I understand why that question comes up, but I think it misses what is actually happening.
What the evidence shows — in Gaza, in Palestine, in Black communities here, in every place oppressed people have fought to live — is that joy is not a denial of suffering. It’s a tactic of survival.
When you’re facing an enemy that openly fantasizes about erasing your future, getting married becomes a form of resistance. Having children becomes a form of resistance. Putting on a traditional dress that your grandmother wore, in the same patterns your great-grandmother’s hands stitched, when soldiers and politicians are trying to rip you out of history, is an act of defiance.
One of the organizers, a man named Shareef, explained why they chose this particular place in the ruins. He said they wanted to send a message to their own people and to the world: “The dress of joy will rise again.”
They didn’t choose that spot by accident. They chose it to say: you can level our homes, turn our neighborhoods into moonscapes, blow holes in every wall we’ve ever known — but you are not going to stop us from loving each other, from forming families, from rooting ourselves in this land.
You can drop bombs on apartment buildings. You cannot bomb away the love a people have for each other and for their homeland.
What It Means to Match Their Courage
Watching these couples dance on that stage — brides in white, grooms in black, families ululating and singing while surrounded by ruin — I kept thinking of what it means for us, outside of Gaza.
If they can stand literally on top of the rubble of their old lives and promise to build a new one, then at the very least, we cannot act like spectators. We cannot just repost clips and wipe our tears and move on.
Their courage demands something from us.
It demands that we refuse to look away. It demands that we keep telling the truth about what has been done to them, even when the news cycle moves on. It demands that we help meet their emergency needs in real, material ways. And it demands that we keep pressuring our own governments — the ones sending the weapons and the money — to stop fueling the destruction that created that wedding stage.
They are literally building a ceremony on the ruins. The least we can do is stand next to them, not just emotionally, but practically and politically.
Family, if this story strengthens your sense of who the Palestinian people are — not just as victims, but as a people who insist on life in the face of death — I’m asking you to help me keep telling these stories. Please click here to become a member so we can keep The North Star free for the entire world, including the people whose weddings are happening under siege. And if you’re in a position to hold this work up at a higher level, please click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member.
Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun
Don’t Stop Here…
Don’t let this wedding be the only glimpse you get of Palestinian life and resistance.
Read the reporting and testimonies coming out of Khan Younis. Seek out the voices of Palestinians who are documenting their own joy and grief. Revisit our recent pieces on the so-called “ceasefire” that exists on paper but not in the morgues, on how families are trying to hold their lives together under constant threat, and on the everyday acts — weddings, graduations, new babies, reopened shops — that say to the world, “We are still here.”
And then tell me how you’re holding up. Does seeing these couples get married on top of the rubble give you hope, or does it make you furious at what has been taken from them — or both at once? Share your heart in the comments. Let’s talk about it, and let’s make sure their joy doesn’t disappear into the feed as quickly as the bombs that tried to stop it.
I can’t quit watching
I have been feeling angry and furious at being a powerless witness of the greatest crime that I have seen in my lifetime, the genocide in Gaza, but seeing and reading this story gives me a little relief and I share the sense of hope that these couples are sharing and expressing to the world. I appreciate the courage, the resilience and the defiance that they show to the world and to the criminal forces committing the genocide. We have to help them rebuild brick by brick their houses and their city. They are strong, may God give them a very long and happy marriage.