Gaza Woman Jailed and Starved for 40 Days Because She Chose Jesus

Gaza Woman Jailed and Starved for 40 Days Because She Chose Jesus

They thought hunger would break me.

But even as my body failed, something stronger held me, and I knew I was not alone in that cell.

They locked me in a Gaza prison cell and stopped my food for 40 days because I said the name of Jesus.

I should have broken.

I should have denied him.

But Jesus walked into that cell and I was never hungry again.

That is not a metaphor.

That is what happened to me.

And before you scroll past this, I need you to understand that what kept me alive in that cell was not my strength.

It was his.

Stay with me because the part that will change how you see everything comes at the very end.

My name is Nour Khalil.

And I am from Gaza.

I was born into a world already on fire.

Gaza is not a place you choose.

It is a place that chooses you and then shapes everything about who you become before you are old enough to understand what is happening.

The streets I grew up on were narrow and loud and crowded with the particular kind of life that exists only in places where people have learned to keep living despite everything working against them.

Children played between buildings that had bullet holes in their walls.

Vendors sold bread and vegetables beside the remains of structures that had been destroyed in one conflict and never fully rebuilt before the next one began.

Life in Gaza had a rhythm that outsiders could not understand from the outside.

It was exhausting and resilient and full of a beauty that did not announce itself, but was there if you knew where to look.

My father was a school teacher.

He taught Arabic language and Islamic studies at a boy’s secondary school three blocks from our house.

He was a serious man, not unkind, but not warm, either.

A man who expressed love through provision and discipline rather than through affection.

He woke before dawn every morning to pray.

His voice low and steady in the room beside mine.

And I would lie in my bed listening to the sound of his recitation.

The way some children fall asleep to music.

The Quran was the first thing I heard every morning of my childhood.

It became the baseline of my inner life before I had words for what inner life meant.

My mother was the warmth my father did not provide.

She was small and quick-moving and funny in a way that surprised people who met her for the first time because Gazan women of her generation were not expected to be funny.

She had a laugh that started somewhere deep in her chest and worked its way up.

And when something genuinely struck her as funny, she could not contain it no matter where she was or who was watching.

She embarrassed my father sometimes with this laugh.

He would look at her with an expression caught between love and exasperation.

And she would look back at him with her eyes still bright and unrepentant.

I was the middle child of five.

Two older brothers, a younger brother, and a younger sister who arrived when I was seven and immediately became the center of our household’s universe in the way that youngest daughters sometimes do.

I was the quiet one.

Not shy, exactly, but observant.

I watched people carefully.

I listened to conversations I was not meant to hear.

I stored information the way some people store objects, accumulating details about the people around me that I did not always know what to do with, but could not stop collecting.

I was also, type from the time I was a small child, deeply religious.

This was not unusual in Gaza.

Almost everyone around me was Muslim and most of them were serious about it.

But my faith was more interior than most.

I was not performing obedience for my father or my community.

I genuinely loved Allah.

I genuinely found comfort in the prayers and the fasting and the sense of being held inside a framework that told me exactly who I was and where I belonged and what was expected of me.

The certainty of Islam was not a cage to me in those years.

It was a shelter.

And in a place like Gaza where so much was uncertain and dangerous and outside your control, a shelter was not a small thing.

I was 15 when the war of 2014 happened.

I will not walk you through the details because they are not details I can narrate without losing the clinical distance I need to tell this story clearly.

What I will tell you is that our neighborhood was struck twice.

Our house survived the first strike with damage to the roof and one exterior wall.

A family two doors down did not survive the second strike.

Their daughter had been in my class at school.

Her name was Sana.

She was 14.

I went to her funeral and stood beside her grave in the afternoon heat and felt something happen inside me that I did not have language for at 15, but have spent the years since trying to name.

It was not a loss of faith.

It was more complicated than that.

It was a question that pushed up through the grief like something sharp pushing through a soft ground.

Was if Allah was the all-powerful sovereign of the universe, if every death was decreed in his wisdom, if Sana’s death was part of a plan that my human mind was too small to comprehend, then why did the plan feel so wrong? Why did justice feel so absent from the scene of that grave? I did not ask anyone this question.

I was 15 and I was female and I was standing at a funeral in Gaza.

I buried the question the way the earth buried Sana and I went home and I helped my mother cook and I did not speak of it again.

But the question did not stay buried.

It never does.

I was a strong student and my teachers noticed.

My Arabic teacher, a woman named Miss Amal, who wore thick glasses and marked papers with a red pen that she pressed into the page with more force than was strictly necessary, uh told my parents when I was 16 that I should be pursuing university-level studies after graduation.

She said I had a mind that was wasted on secondary school curriculum.

She said I needed more than Gaza could give me.

My father heard this with a complicated pride of a man who believed education was important and simultaneously believed that daughters who were too educated became difficult to manage.

He thanked Miss Amal and told her he would consider it.

At home, he told my mother he was not sure it was wise.

My mother, who had her own views about what was and was not wise, said that if their daughter had a chance to study properly, they should not be the ones to close that door.

She won.

She usually did, quietly and persistently and without ever appearing to challenge my father’s authority directly.

Uh I graduated from secondary school in 2017 with the highest marks in my class.

Through a combination of my academic record, a scholarship from an international education organization, and my father’s eventual agreement, I was accepted into a degree program in journalism and media studies at a university in Amman, Jordan.

It was not far.

It was made by the standards of most Western universities not a prestigious institution, but it was outside Gaza.

It was a chance.

I left on a morning in September when the air was already hot and dry and the light had that particular flat quality it gets in Gaza just before the heat of the day peaks.

My mother held my face in both her hands at the door and looked at me for a long moment without speaking.

Then she kissed my forehead and said, “Come back the same person you are leaving as.

” I told her I would.

I I believed it when I said it.

Amman was a different kind of city from Gaza in almost every way.

It was larger, calmer, more varied.

It had neighborhoods where wealthy Jordanians lived in modern apartments beside shopping centers with Western brand names and neighborhoods where Syrian and Palestinian refugees had built new versions of the lives they had lost elsewhere.

The university campus was in a part of the city that felt deliberately international, full of students from across the Arab world and a smaller number from Europe and America who were there on exchange programs or language studies.

I arrived with two suitcases, a phone with my mother’s number at the top of the contacts list, and the same faith I had carried out of Gaza.

I wore my hijab every day.

I prayed in my dormitory room five times a day.

I fasted during Ramadan with the same discipline my father had modeled.

In every observable way, I was the faithful Muslim woman I had always been.

But Amman had things Gaza had not had.

It had a library with books I had never been allowed to read.

It had professors who asked questions instead of providing answers.

It had students from backgrounds that challenged my assumptions just by existing.

It had a Christian community that was simply present, quietly and undramatically, in the form of students who wore small crosses around their necks and attended church on Sundays and talked about their faith the way I talked about mine, not as something secret or transgressive, but as something ordinary and central to who they were.

I had grown up with a very specific understanding of Christians.

They were the people behind the governments that funded the weapons that destroyed Gaza neighborhoods.

They were, in the political framework I had been raised inside, synonymous with the Western powers that opposed Palestinian rights.

They were, in the religious framework I had been raised inside, people who had corrupted the original message of Jesus and built a false religion on top of a true prophet’s name.

They were not people I expected to find sympathetic or interesting.

The first Christian who challenged this understanding was a girl named Mia.

Mia was from Australia.

She was on a year-long exchange [clears throat] program studying Arabic and Middle Eastern history.

She lived two doors down from me in the dormitory, and she had the habit of leaving her door open when she was in her room.

Uh, which meant I walked past her study space several times a day and gradually absorbed the fact of her existence.

She had a large wooden cross on her desk beside her textbooks.

She had sticky notes on her wall with Bible verses written on them in both English and Arabic.

She had a way of looking at people that was entirely direct and entirely without guile, as though she had never learned to filter her attention through social performance.

She introduced herself to me on my third day.

She said she had been hoping to talk to me because she was trying to improve her Arabic, and she had heard from someone in the administration that I was Gazan, and she had never met anyone from Gaza before, and she was curious about my life there.

She said this with complete openness, not as a project, not as a political statement, pure just as genuine curiosity about another human being.

I was guarded at first.

My political and religious training had given me clear categories for Western Christian women, and none of those categories were neutral.

But Mia did not fit the categories.

She asked about Gaza the way someone asks about a place they want to genuinely understand, not to confirm what they already believe.

She listened when I spoke without preparing her response while I was still talking.

She told me about her own life in Brisbane with equal openness, her family, her church, the things she was uncertain about, the things she was sure of.

We became friends, carefully at first on my side, more freely on hers.

Over the months that followed, Mia did not preach at me.

She did not try to convince me of anything theological.

She simply lived her faith in my presence and let me observe it.

She prayed before meals without making a production of it.

She would sometimes say she was going to church and invite me along without any pressure when I declined.

She mentioned Jesus in conversation the way I mentioned Allah, not as a debate point, but as someone she was in an ongoing relationship with.

I found this disorienting.

The Jesus I had learned about was a prophet who had been misunderstood and misrepresented by his followers.

The Jesus Mia described was someone who had told her on a specific afternoon two years earlier, while she was sitting on a beach in Queensland, that he loved her and had a plan for her life.

She spoke about this with such matter-of-fact certainty that I could not dismiss it the way I would have dismissed a performance.

She was not performing.

She was describing something that was simply and factually true for her.

I started asking questions I told myself were academic.

What did Christians actually believe about the Trinity? What did the resurrection mean to modern Christians who were scientifically educated? How did Mia personally reconcile the violence done in the name of Christianity throughout history with her personal faith?
She answered every question thoughtfully and without defensiveness.

She also started asking me questions about Islam that were equally sincere, and I found myself for the first time in my life trying to articulate what I actually believed versus what I had been taught to believe, and discovering that the gap between those two things was larger than I had known.

The question that Sana’s grave had planted in me seven years earlier surfaced again.

I told Mia about it one evening, about standing at my classmate’s funeral at 15, and feeling something that did not resolve.

Mia was quiet for a moment.

Then she said something I have thought about many times since.

She said she did not think God designed suffering.

She said she thought suffering was what the world looked like when it was broken, and that the story of Jesus was the story of God entering the broken world, not to explain the brokenness from a distance, but to be broken inside it, and then to to to demonstrate that broken things were not the end of the story.

I sat with those words for a long time after she said them.

I did not convert in Amman.

I want to be clear about that, because the truth matters, and I will not dramatize the timeline for the sake of a better narrative arc.

Or what happened in Amman was that a door opened inside me that I had not known was there.

A door that faced a direction I had been taught there was nothing to face.

I did not walk through it yet, but I could see through it, and what I saw through it was not the enemy I expected.

I graduated from the journalism program in 2021 and returned to Gaza.

I came home to my mother’s kitchen and my father’s prayers and my younger sister who had grown into a young woman while I was away and my neighborhood that had been damaged again in 2021 and partially rebuilt again in the exhausting cycle that Gaza knew better than anywhere else on earth.

I was a
journalist now.

I began writing for a small digital outlet that covered daily life in Gaza, not military analysis, not political commentary, but the texture of ordinary existence.

The stories of teachers and fishermen and women who ran small businesses and children who were learning to read in classrooms that had been rebuilt three times.

I believed in what I was doing.

I believed that telling the truth about ordinary Palestinian life was a form of resistance that mattered, but I had brought the open door back from Amman with me.

And in the quiet of my room at night, I was reading a Bible that I had downloaded onto my phone before leaving Jordan, reading it quietly and carefully and with a growing sense that what I was reading was not the corrupted nonsense I had been taught, but something alive in a way I could not dismiss.

I was reading it the night the question became a decision.

What I am about to tell you is the hardest part of this story to tell, not because I am ashamed of it.

I am not ashamed of any of it.

But it is hard to tell because it involves people I loved, and describing what they did to me means describing the limits of what people can do to each other when fear and religion and shame are tangled together into something that feels like righteousness but is not.

Someone found the Bible on my phone.

I do not know exactly how it happened.

I have my suspicions, but I will not state them as facts because I cannot verify them, and because the here you who matters less than what followed.

What I know is that in the spring of 2023, my father came to my room one evening with my phone in his hand and the Bible application open on the screen, and the look on his face that I had never seen before.

It was not anger in the way I knew his anger.

It was something more fundamental than anger.

But it was the look of a man whose understanding of the world has been structurally threatened.

He asked me one question.

He asked me if I had left Islam.

I had rehearsed this moment in my mind dozens of times.

I had prepared careful deflecting answers.

I had planned to say it was research, professional curiosity, that I was covering a story.

I had planned to give him an answer that would close the door he was pushing through and buy me time to figure out the rest of my life before this moment came.

But when he was standing in front of me with his face looking like that, I could not lie.

I told him yes.

The next 12 hours are not something I will describe in detail.

What I will tell you is that by morning, my situation had left the private domain of my family and entered a larger and more dangerous one.

Gaza is a small place.

Okay, extended families have reach.

Community structures have authority.

Religious institutions have power that operates outside any formal legal system.

I was taken to a detention facility that operated under the jurisdiction of the local religious authority.

I was placed in a cell.

I was told that I had committed apostasy and that the appropriate response to apostasy in an Islamic framework was a process of correction and return that would begin immediately.

I was told I would remain in detention until I publicly recanted my faith in Jesus and returned to Islam.

They stopped my food on the first day.

I want to tell you what 40 days without food is like, but the honest answer is that after the first week the hunger itself becomes something your body adapts to in a strange and terrible way.

The first 3 days were the worst in terms of physical pain.

My stomach cramped continuously.

My head ached with a pressure that sat behind my eyes and would not lift.

I was given water and only water.

The cell was small and the light came through a single high window that let me track the passage of days by the angle of the sun.

They came to me regularly.

A religious official and two other men.

They would sit across from me and ask me to recant.

They would read Quran verses at me.

They would explain with the patience of people who believed they were saving my soul that what I had done was a temporary confusion.

That Jesus was a prophet and that the Bible I had been reading was a corrupted text that had led me away from the truth.

They said if I simply said the shahada sincerely, everything would be resolved.

Yeah, my family could take me home.

My life could return to what it had been.

Everything could be as it was.

I listened to them every time.

I did not recant.

I need to explain why.

Because I think some people watching this will find the explanation insufficient or will doubt that a human being can endure 40 days of starvation for something as intangible as faith.

The explanation is not that I was especially brave.

I am not especially brave.

I am a journalist from Gaza who grew up watching neighbors bury their children and keep living.

Endurance is something Gazans learn before they learn to read.

That was part of it.

But the larger part was something that happened in that cell around the fifth day.

I had been praying.

Not the formal prayers I had grown up with.

Though I had no prayer mat and I could not orient myself toward Mecca from where I sat and my body was too weak for the physical postures I had been trained in since childhood.

I was praying the only way I could, which was by talking into the dark of that cell.

I was talking to Jesus the way Mia had described talking to him.

Not as a theological proposition, but as a person who was present.

I told him I was afraid.

I told him I did not know how long I could do this.

I told him that if he was real, I needed him to be real right now and not in a general sense, but in this specific room on this specific night.

What happened next, I will describe as accurately as I can, knowing that it will sound different to different people depending on what they already believe.

The fear left.

That is the most accurate description I have.

It did not decrease gradually the way fear usually does when a situation becomes less threatening.

The cell was as threatening as it had been 5 minutes earlier.

The hunger was the same.

The situation was the same, but the fear simply stopped.

It was replaced by something that I have tried to find a word for many times and the closest I have come is this.

It felt like being held.

Not physically, but the way you feel held when someone who loves you and who is stronger than you puts themselves between you and the thing that is frightening you.

I felt covered.

I felt known.

I felt accompanied and I felt with a certainty that came from somewhere other than my own reasoning that I was not going to die in that cell.

I want to be clear about something.

I was not given supernatural food.

I was not miraculously fattened.

My body continued to weaken in the ways that bodies weaken when they are deprived of nutrition.

By the second week, I could not stand without holding the wall.

By the third week, I was spending most of each day lying on the floor of the cell because sitting required energy I did not have.

My body was failing in every clinical sense, but I did not recant and I did not die.

And every time the officials came to me and asked me to say the words that would end the hunger, I looked at them and told them quietly that I could not.

They asked me why.

They were genuinely baffled.

They were not cruel men in the way that cruelty is usually understood.

They believed they were performing a service to my soul.

They could not understand why a young woman who was visibly suffering would not simply say a few words and end it.

Yet they asked me what Jesus had given me that was worth this.

I told them.

I told them about the night in my dormitory room in Amman when I had first read the Gospel of John and reached the part where Jesus looked at a woman who had been publicly shamed and condemned and said, “Neither do I condemn you.

” And something in me had broken open in a way that nothing in the religion I had grown up inside had ever broken open.

I told them about Mia and the beach in Queensland.

I told them about the fifth night in the cell and the fear that left and what replaced it.

I told them that what Jesus had given me was not an answer to every question I had ever asked.

It was a presence that stayed when everything else left, including food, including safety, including the approval of everyone who loved me.

One of the officials looked at me for a long moment after I said this.

He did not respond.

He stood up and left the room.

He did not come back for 3 days.

My mother was allowed to see me once during the 40 days.

She came on the 22nd day.

I could hear her before the door opened.

Her quick footsteps and the sound of her voice asking someone a question in the corridor.

When she came in and saw me, she went completely still.

I had lost a significant amount of weight.

I was pale in the way that people become pale when their body has been redirecting resources for weeks.

She sat beside me on the floor and took my hands and looked at me with an expression I have no adequate words for.

She did not ask me to recant.

That surprised me.

She asked me if I was all right.

I told her I was more all right than I could explain.

She stayed for 1 hour.

She brought food that she hadn’t been told she could bring and had brought anyway.

And when the guard came in and took it away from her, she looked at him with the full force of the look that had made my father occasionally step back over the years of their marriage and the guard left the room without the food.

My mother fed me small pieces of bread and watched me eat and did not speak about faith or Jesus or Islam.

She just sat with me and held my hands and occasionally said my name in the way she had said it at the door the day I left for Amman.

When she left, she paused in the doorway and turned back.

She said she did not understand what I believed or why I believed it.

She said she was frightened and confused and heartbroken.

Yet but she said she knew her daughter and she knew I was not someone who did things without reason.

She said, “When this was over, she wanted me to tell her everything.

” The door closed.

I sat on the floor of my cell and cried for the first time in 22 days.

On the 40th day, something changed in the atmosphere of the facility.

I could hear increased activity in the corridors.

Voices speaking quickly.

The sound of phones being answered and answered again.

By that afternoon, I was told I was being released.

I never received a complete explanation.

What I pieced together later from various sources was that international human rights organizations had become aware of my detention.

That journalists, some of whom I had worked alongside, had written about my case.

That a combination of international pressure and internal concerns about the publicity of a young female journalist being held and starved for 40 days had made my continued detention more problematic than my release.

I walked out of that facility on the 40th day into an afternoon in Gaza that looked exactly like every afternoon I had ever seen there.

Flat light, dust in the air, the sound of traffic and children and distant construction.

Nothing had changed in the world outside.

Everything had changed in me.

My body took time to recover.

I will not romanticize the physical aftermath of 40 days without food.

It was not immediate or clean.

My body had to be brought back slowly and carefully by people who knew what they were doing.

The international organization that had secured my release also arranged medical care and a safe location outside Gaza where I could recover without the threat of redetention.

But I need to tell you about the day I walked out of that cell.

Because the moment itself, the exact sensation of stepping through that door and feeling the outside air on my face was not the dramatic liberation that narratives like this one usually built toward.

It was quieter than that.

What I felt was not triumph.

I had not defeated anyone.

I had not won a legal battle or an argument.

I had simply refused to stop being what I had become and the world had eventually made space for me to walk out of the place that had tried to make me stop.

What I felt stepping into that Gaza afternoon can’t was the same thing I had felt on the fifth night in the cell when the fear left.

The presence that had covered me inside the cell was covering me outside it.

Jesus had not been in the cell and then returned to somewhere else when the door opened.

He was simply with me.

In the cell and out of it and on the road that led away from that place and in the car that took me to safety and in the first real meal I ate and in the first night I slept without the sounds of a detention facility outside my door.

He was simply with me.

That sentence is the whole story.

Everything else is detail.

I am recording this from a safe location that I will not disclose.

I am no longer in Gaza.

I am no longer in the Middle East.

I have been resettled through the help of a Christian humanitarian organization in a city in the United States where I have been given the time and the safety and the resources to heal and to rebuild and to figure out who I am on the other side of everything that happened.

I want to tell you about the rebuilding because I think the rebuilding is as important as the suffering.

And the suffering is what most people focus on when they hear a story like mine.

The 40 days in the cell the starvation the officials with their patient demand for recantation.

These are the dramatic elements and they are real.

But the rebuilding is where the faith actually has to work day by day without the adrenaline of a crisis to sustain it.

I wake up every morning in a quiet apartment and there is a window that faces east and the morning light comes through it and falls across the floor in a way that I find for reasons I cannot fully explain deeply moving.

I make coffee.

I sit at a small table with my Bible and my journal.

I write.

I pray.

Not the formal structured prayer of my childhood though I understand why those structures existed and I do not dismiss them.

I pray the way I prayed on the fifth night in the cell by talking by telling Jesus what I am afraid of and what I am grateful for and what I do not understand and what I need.

He answers not always in ways I expect not always immediately but the presence is consistent.

The covering is consistent.

The sense of being known and accompanied through the specific texture of my specific life has not lifted since the night in the cell when the fear left and something else took its place.

My mother and I speak by phone.

It is complicated.

She is my mother and she loves me.

And she is also a devout Muslim woman living in a community where what I have done is understood as a profound betrayal of everything that holds people together.

She does not pressure me to return to Islam.

She also does not ask me about Jesus.

We talk about ordinary things about her health and my health and my younger sister who is now engaged to be married and the neighborhood and the food I am eating and whether the weather in America is as strange as she imagines.

Sometimes at the end of a call she says she loves me.

I say I love her.

The call ends and I sit with the complexity of what it means to love someone across the distance created by a faith they cannot share.

I do not have a resolution to offer you about this.

I have the love and the distance and the ongoing reality of both.

My father has not spoken to me directly since the night he found the Bible on my phone.

My brothers follow his lead.

This is a grief I will not ask you to minimize by telling you it has been healed by faith.

It has not been healed.

It has been held.

There is a difference.

Healing suggests the wound closes.

Being held means you are not carrying the wound alone.

Jesus holds this particular wound with me.

That is the most honest thing I can tell you about it.

I have begun writing again.

Journalism was my training and it remains my instinct.

But I have been writing about the experience of Christians from Muslim majority backgrounds about the specific kind of courage required to hold a faith that your community understands as treason.

I have been writing about Gaza not as a political thesis but as a place I love and grieve and carry inside me.

I have been writing about the 40 days in a way that I hope reaches people who are living their own version of a cell not necessarily a literal one but the kind of internal confinement that comes when you are required to be something you are not in order to remain safe.

A journalist from a major American outlet that read some of my work and contacted me.

She asked if she could interview me.

I said yes.

The article was published and more people read about my story than I had expected.

My inbox filled with messages from people I had never met.

Most of them were from Muslims in Western countries who had been reading the Bible quietly and alone and who said my story had given them permission to continue.

Some were from Christians who said they had not understood what conversion from [clears throat] Islam actually cost.

Some were from people with no religious framework at all who said something in my story had made them wonder for the first time whether the question of God was worth taking seriously.

I read every message.

I respond when I can.

Because here is what I know about the 40 days that is different from what I knew before them.

I know what happens to a person when everything that normally sustains them is removed.

The food the family the community the religious framework that has always provided the map.

I know what is left when all of those things are gone.

So I I know it not as a theological proposition but as an experience I lived for 40 days in a cell in Gaza.

What was left was Jesus.

Not the Jesus of the arguments I had been trained to make against him.

Not the Jesus of the political anger I had grown up inside.

Not a concept or a comfort or a coping mechanism a presence a covering a voice that called me by name in the dark the way my mother called my name in the doorway of that cell on the 22nd day with the specific and personal knowledge of exactly who I was.

I have heard people describe faith as a crutch.

I understand why they say this.

From the outside belief looks like something a person reaches for because they cannot stand on their own.

I thought this once.

I no longer think it.

What I experienced in that cell was not me reaching for something because I was too weak to stand.

It was me standing when every physical and psychological indicator said I should have fallen because someone was standing with me.

That is not a crutch.

That is a companion.

If you are watching this from a country where you can hold a Bible without consequences I want you to understand what you hold not as an obligation to feel guilty as an invitation to take seriously what you have been given access to without cost.

I paid 40 days of hunger for the right to say Jesus is Lord without being forced to unsay it.

You can say it right now without consequence.

Say it like it means something because it does.

If you are watching this from a place like the place I came from a Muslim majority community where the name of Jesus is not safe to say out loud I want you to know what I know.

The presence that found me in a cell in Gaza will find you wherever you are.

The covering that kept me from breaking will cover you.

The Jesus who walked into my worst 40 days and stayed until I walked out the other side is not a Western Jesus or an American Jesus or a Jesus available only to people in safe countries.

He is the one who said he would never leave or abandon the people who called on him.

I called on him in a Gaza prison cell with an empty stomach and a body that was failing.

He came.

He will come for you too.

My name is Nour Khalil.

I was born in Gaza.

I survived 40 days without food in a cell where they tried to make me stop believing.

I did not stop.

And I will not stop.

Because the one I believe in is worth every single one of those 40 days and every hard thing that comes after them.

His name is Jesus.

And he is in every cell where his name is called.