I have not eaten rice since I left Gaza. The taste is a painful reminder of the genocide.

I have lived in Cairo for three years without eating rice. I did not decide to give it up. I have tried to eat it more than once, but my body refuses. While I know that I am in Egypt, that the food before me was cooked in safety and that no explosion will interrupt the meal, I cannot eat it. In fact, rice is no longer merely rice. It is a period of my life placed back in front of me, asking to be swallowed. Khobeiza—the leafy plant Palestinians have long cooked as an ordinary dish—has changed in the same way.

Its smell returns me to the hunger in northern Gaza. Oud returns me to the siege near al-Shifa Hospital. Fresh bread returns me to my aunt’s house, where more than 30 of us sheltered in a space never intended to contain so many people. War is usually remembered through what can be seen and heard: the flash of an explosion, the roar of a warplane, the sudden absence where a building once stood. But some memories enter the body more quietly.

They remain in the mouth and nose, waiting inside things that once seemed harmless. To me, war smells like oud. It is not the answer people expect. War is supposed to smell of gunpowder, blood, sewage, and bodies trapped beneath rubble. Those smells existed in Gaza also. But when I encounter oud in Cairo, I do not think first of perfume, hospitality, or a clean home. I return to the room near al-Shifa Hospital where my family and I sheltered during the siege.

There was almost no private space left. Our lives had been compressed into a room: people, belongings, fear, and the constant effort to follow what was happening outside. Still, I cleaned. I arranged what could be arranged and wiped what could be wiped. Afterward, I filled the room with the scent of oud. Cleaning was one of the few actions still available to me. I could not stop the bombardment, open a safe road, or know what would happen to us by the end of the day.

But I could try to make that small room smell clean. I could create, briefly, the illusion that we were living somewhere rather than merely trying not to die there. I thought I was changing the smell of the room. I did not know that the room was changing the smell of oud. Now, three years later, the scent can dismantle the distance between Cairo and Gaza in seconds. It does not remind me of the room as much as it restores it around me.

The walls return. So does the crowding. So does the person I was inside that room, cleaning while the world outside it collapsed. The smell of bread carries a different cruelty. At my aunt’s house in northern Gaza, more than 30 people were sheltering together. During the height of the hunger, the smell of freshly baked bread moved through that overcrowded space again and again. Under ordinary circumstances, bread baking would have suggested abundance: warmth, a table being prepared, enough food for everyone who smelled it.

But the smell was larger than the amount of bread we had. There were days when one person’s share was a single loaf. The bread had to provide for a hunger far greater than it was able. Its scent reached everyone before the food did, making the body expect what the ration could not provide. People speak about survival as though staying alive concludes the story. Food entered Gaza; someone found flour; a plant was gathered and cooked; a family managed to eat for another day.

From a distance, the meal appears as a small victory. Rarely does anyone ask what becomes of that food in the survivor’s memory. Khobeiza once belonged to the ordinary vocabulary of Palestinian food. But during the war, it became inseparable from necessity. Now its smell does not reach me as the smell of a plant or a familiar dish. It carries the months in which food disappeared, and people ate according to what could still be found. I cannot isolate its meaning to a single meal.

Its scent contains the repetition of wartime eating, the absence of choice, and the knowledge that food was being consumed not for pleasure but because the body had to be kept alive. In Cairo, rice is everywhere. It appears beside meals without ceremony. Other people lift it to their mouths without having to engage a memory first. I watch something utterly ordinary remain ordinary for everyone except me. I have tried to reason with myself.

This rice was not cooked in Gaza. I am not trapped in the north. I do not have to calculate whether food will still exist tomorrow. But the body does not always accept the distinctions the mind makes. Safety can change the scenery without changing what the food means. Odors can be more emotional and evocative than memories prompted by visual or auditory versions of the same cue. In one study , participants reported feeling more fully transported back to the original event when memory was triggered by scent.

The science helps explain the speed at which the memories return. It does not explain, however, the meaning or the politics in what I remember. The smells that follow me were not created by an accident or natural disaster. Bread became the smell of deprivation because we were being starved. Oud became the smell of siege because I had used it in a room near a hospital surrounded by Israeli forces, attempting to preserve a little dignity while my family was trapped.

The brain may explain how a scent brings the past back. But it cannot make that past neutral. When I arrived in Cairo in May 2024, I had crossed a geographical border between danger and relative safety. The bombs were no longer above me. Food existed in shops. Bread could be bought without counting every person waiting for a share. But leaving forever changed the meanings of many things. This may be one of war’s quieter forms of theft.

It does not only destroy homes, but also takes lives and scatters families. It enters ordinary objects and remains embedded within them. People speak of leaving war as though war were a place: a territory one can exit, a checkpoint one can cross, a distance that can be measured in kilometers. I did leave Gaza. I live in Cairo now. I move through a city where oud can simply be oud, bread can imply abundance, and rice can arrive at a table without history.

But they do not appear that way for me. The border separated me from the bombardment. It did not separate the bombardment from the smallest materials of daily life. Three years after leaving Gaza, the smell of oud still returns me to a besieged room. Khobeiza still smells like hunger. And I still have not eaten rice.