On March 18, Mayar Kabaja faced another close call. She was on a WhatsApp video chat with her boyfriend, Hatem Saadallah, late at night while her family slept. Suddenly, she heard loud explosions near her apartment in the central Gaza town of Nuseirat. The window beside her shattered.
Ms. Kabaja, 24, went into shock. “I didn’t feel anything anymore,” she said. She dropped her phone as she heard the sounds of buildings nearby collapsing.
“What shocked me was not the explosions themselves — I had been through this many times,” Ms. Kabaja said, “but the fact that the war had returned” after a temporary cease-fire collapsed. “My hope of traveling and seeing Hatem died all at once,” she said.
In the chaos, she stopped responding to Mr. Saadallah’s texts. Panicked, he contacted her mother, who reassured him they were OK.
The next day, Ms. Kabaja finally texted him back: “Hatem, you should move on. Forget about me, I’m stuck here.”
Mr. Saadallah, 25, had evacuated to Cairo from Gaza with his parents and two brothers a year earlier, in April 2024, just before the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt closed. Ms. Kabaja remains in Gaza with her family. They have been separated by the closed border since.
When they first met three years ago, before the Israel-Hamas war began, life was entirely different. They were university students who were also software engineers at Dash, a software company in Gaza City.
Ms. Kabaja said she still remembers the first time she saw Mr. Saadallah in the office. It was August 2022, and Mr. Saadallah had just returned from a monthlong program at Georgetown University called the MEPI Student Leaders Program, which was sponsored by the U.S. State Department.
At Dash they would occasionally greet each other, Ms. Kabaja said, except for the “two times we talked and gossiped about our boss.”
In June 2023, to her surprise, she saw him on campus at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. It was finals week, and it turned out they both studied there, though neither had seen the other on campus before.
“I said hi,” Ms. Kabaja recalled. “In this moment, I feel something.”
Mr. Saadallah, who grew up in Gaza City and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer software engineering, was struck by her smile. “She just lit up,” he recalled. They caught up for a few minutes before parting ways.
Afterward, she followed him on Instagram, and he started sending her memes and cat reels. By August, they were texting every day, and in September, he asked her out on a date.
Instinctively, Ms. Kabaja, who grew up in Rafah, declined. “I have no experience before Hatem,” she said. “My first date in my life was with him.” After confiding in her mother, who encouraged her to give it a shot, she went back to Mr. Saadallah. “I organized the words to make him another time ask me,” she said, explaining that she hinted to Mr. Saadallah that she wanted him to ask her out again.
On Sept. 27, 2023, they had their first date at Al-Bahar, a seafood restaurant by the beach in Gaza City, where they inadvertently wore matching tan outfits — Ms. Kabaja in a dress and Mr. Saadallah in a button-down shirt.
Over fresh fish, rice, salad and soup, they talked about work and former colleagues. He was seated in front of her, with the view of the blue sea behind him.
“You don’t like to see it?” Ms. Kabaja recalled saying. “It’s so beautiful.”
He responded, “Not more beautiful than you.”
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Ms. Kabaja blushed hard, feeling flustered.
After the date, they bonded over being the eldest siblings and serving as caretakers in their families and communities. Mr. Saadallah worked for a nonprofit called Code.X on weekends, teaching children how to code. Ms. Kabaja, whose father died when she was a few months old after being shot in the head by Israeli soldiers at his clothing shop, had helped raise her triplet half siblings. They traded stories about their childhoods. She said she was a troublemaker; he was shy.
“She understood me very well,” Mr. Saadallah said.
They were young and falling in love, chatting every night until they fell asleep with their hands still gripping their phones.
“The night of Oct. 6, we were talking,” Mr. Saadallah said. “And then I slept, and I woke up to Oct. 7.”
Mr. Saadallah evacuated his home in Gaza City days after Oct. 7 in flip-flops and fled to his grandparents’ home in Khan Younis, where he lived with multiple families. He sought privacy by sitting in his father’s car, where he talked with Ms. Kabaja on the phone.
“When I was talking to Mayar, that was kind of a relief time that made me feel a little bit human,” he said.
“In the hard situations, we became more close,” Ms. Kabaja said.
In December 2023, Mr. Saadallah evacuated again to the Al-Mawasi area and stayed in a tent in the yard of a family friend’s house. There, he had no internet or cell service, but if he walked south toward Rafah, he could get some signal. One day, he managed to get in touch with Ms. Kabaja, and they planned to meet near her apartment in Rafah.
He hopped on a truck, and they saw each other for the first time in nearly three months. “This is the first time he touched my hand,” Ms. Kabaja recalled.
The walk “felt normal during a time that was very not normal,” Mr. Saadallah said. “It was very humanizing and it made me feel intimate and a little bit safer.”
They managed to see each other a few more times in the following months, with Mr. Saadallah traveling long distances. In February 2024, they met by the sea in Rafah, where he took selfies and made silly faces to cheer up Ms. Kabaja, who was depressed.
That same month, Mr. Saadallah received news that his apartment building in Gaza City had burned. For months, he had clung on to the possibility of returning home — even when the past few winter months had been especially terrifying.
“A couple of bullets landed at the roof of the home that we were staying at,” Mr. Saadallah recalled. “There was this constant bombing and shooting — like whole nights, all the time, for like two months maybe.”
Losing his home was the last straw. “Even if the war ends, where are we going to go back?” he said. He created a GoFundMe campaign and raised enough money for his family to cross the border to Egypt: $5,000 per adult, $2,500 per child. The move was set.
A few days before evacuating to Egypt on April 7, 2024, he sat with Ms. Kabaja in a park. They shared maftoul (couscous) — but without chicken, which is a luxury in Gaza — that she had made for him, and sweets that he had brought for her.
“We held hands again, and also I told Mayar that she should start thinking of me in terms of husband material, because I’m very serious about this,” Mr. Saadallah said. It was the last time they saw each other in person.
That wasn’t a part of the plan, however. They had hoped that Ms. Kabaja would also raise enough money so that she and her family could evacuate to Egypt. But in May 2024, the Rafah crossing closed. (Israel had agreed to open the Rafah crossing as part of the October cease-fire deal with Hamas but kept it closed.)
In May 2024, Ms. Kabaja evacuated to Khan Younis and stayed with cousins, who would all be killed in Israeli airstrikes the next year. In July, she stayed in a tent there for 40 days. “When I was in the tent, I feel I love him,” she said.
“I got to know him more, and he helped me more because he evacuated and everything is good now with him,” Ms. Kabaja added. “So he just focused on me and supporting me.”
Ms. Kabaja said that her bond with Mr. Saadallah, who has resumed work in Cairo as a contract software engineer, gave her the strength to keep going. Whenever she’s afraid in the middle of the night because of the bombing, she calls him, and his support and presence on the phone gives her a glimmer of optimism.
“He has a good heart,” Ms. Kabaja said. “All the time he ask about me.”
In August 2024, she and her family settled in the apartment in Nuseirat, a town that has suffered less destruction than the rest. (They pay rent using money raised by a mutual aid fund-raiser organized by Stephanie H. Shih, an artist in New York.)
They started talking about marriage in November 2024, with plans to marry as soon as the borders reopened. But after her window shattered this year, Mr. Saadallah tried to speed up the process so she could feel the security of marriage. After a cease-fire deal was reached in October, they were wed, though not in the way either had imagined.
On Oct. 27, Ms. Kabaja sat in a courthouse in Nuseirat, surrounded by her relatives, while Mr. Saadallah was connected via an international phone call. With power of attorney, his uncle Khader Saadallah signed the marriage license on the groom’s behalf. Mohammed Al Shaer, a government official, officiated.
Since the October cease-fire, things have been a bit more stable for Ms. Kabaja, who has resumed classes virtually at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. (There are no live sessions because the campus is now in ruins.) Mr. Saadallah has been giving Ms. Kabaja coding assignments so she can practice whenever her internet is good and there is enough food around to focus. She has also been taking belly dance classes at a gym close to her apartment.
They talk about their hopes for a reunion, the future — she has never left Gaza before and yearns to travel — and their dreams for their wedding reception. For now, they are happy to have completed the legal portion, and they are feeling more positive than ever. “He is not like a part of my life,” Ms. Kabaja said. “He is everything now.”
In November, Mr. Saadallah was accepted to a master’s program at Bocconi University in Milan, where he plans to move to in the coming months. They hope to be reunited there.
On This Day
When Oct. 27, 2025
Where The Primary Sharia Central Courthouse
A Remote Wedding Mr. Saadallah was connected via phone call during the legal ceremony. Though he couldn’t join by a video call since the courthouse did not have internet, he called Ms. Kabaja on FaceTime as soon as she returned home.
A Party With the Girls After the ceremony, Mr. Saadallah’s uncles had lunch at Ms. Kabaja’s apartment. Later that day, she held a small celebration with her sisters and some neighbors. She wore a red traditional dress, and they had some baklava from Al Qadi Sweets and danced to Arabic music, including “El Tannoura” by Fares Karam and “Badna Nwalee El Jaw” by Nancy Ajram.
Sadiba Hasan reports on love and culture for the Styles section of The Times.
The post She’s in Gaza. He’s in Cairo. Separated by a Closed Border, They Married Remotely. appeared first on New York Times.
