LGBTQ Palestinians turn to the internet to find a home for their last words.

Prior to yesterday’s hospital blast on Gaza that killed 500 people, the Israeli strikes have killed 2,800 people and wounded almost 10,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Health authorities also said that over 1,000 people are believed to be buried under the rubble, whether or not they are dead. As Israeli troops prepare for a ground assault, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) ordered on Friday for the 1.1 million residents in northern Gaza to evacuate southward for safety.

Now, queer, trans and nonbinary people in Palestine are leaving behind emotional notes on an online map, from grieving relationships that were never able to flourish, to the deaths of past loves killed over the past few weeks.

Queering The Map is an interactive digital atlas that allows people to drop a pin on any location in the world with an anonymous anecdote on the significance of that place—be it a park bench or the middle of the ocean.

In one account in Ramallah, a city in central West Bank, a person wrote: “They shot him. My heart burned. Everyone consoled me for the loss of a friend. They did not know that I lost myself. That bullet killed both of us. They said that you are a martyr, that you are in heaven. I will come to you, my love. Wherever you are, heaven, hell or nothingness, I will come to you.”

The map was founded by Canadian artist and digital designer Lukas LaRochelle in 2017, who describes Queering The Map as “a community-generated counter-mapping project for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space.” Some written encounters are wholesome, reminiscing about the place someone came out in. Some are more explicit, recounting a hook-up story in a small-town library, for example.

As Israel continues to escalate war in Gaza since the Oct. 7 surprise coordinated attacks by  Hamas—an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement— hope is fading. Over 2 million Palestine civilians are trapped in an open-air prison in Gaza struggling to survive in what Palestine’s UN envoy Riyad Mansour is calling a genocide against the Israeli military’s “mighty revenge.”

About 60% of those killed in Gaza are women and children, according to the city’s officials. Yesterday, a hospital packed with wounded Palestinians was blasted, the explosion killing at least 500 people at al-Ahli hospital.

Since this summer, young Palestinians have been sharing their farewell messages in anticipation of the ongoing fight against Israel’s militant occupation. After the IDF ordered for northern Gaza evacuation, young Palestinians express their ongoing anxiety and fear of safety even in southern Gaza, given that Hamas is in hiding.

For LGBTQ Palestinians, Queering The Map is their last hope to declare their truths. It was not, however, originally intended to serve as a hub of parting words.

What started as a class assignment while LaRochelle was a student at Concordia University in Montreal six years ago has surpassed half a million submissions by this summer. The U.S. accounted for over 180,000 of the pins.

Having become a worldwide hub for horrific and joyous experiences of LGBTQ people everywhere, LaRochelle told The New York Times in June that “it’s so important to document our collective history in all its configurations.”

The attacks on Gaza is a circumstance that exists alongside another long-standing battle: the liberation of queer, trans and nonbinary Palestinians.

Last October, Ahmad Abu Murkhiyeh, a 25-year-old gay man who feared subjugation for his identity and had fled to Israel for asylum was found with a severed head and a decapitated torso on the roadside in West Bank. Out of 124 regions in the world, Palestine ranks as third to last pro-LGBTQ rights place, based on a study this year by Gallup.

Israel plays a role in the oppression of LGBTQ people as well, Dorgham Abusalim wrote in the Institute of Palestine Studies in 2018. Abusalim explains that despite Israel’s legal protections of LGBTQ rights, many queer Palestinians have accounted for Israel’s homophobia, having been blackmailed to give Israel intel on their community.

Regardless of any standing on LGBTQ rights, people in Palestine are discovering that nowhere is safe, whether they are LGBTQ or not.

In Jabalia, which is now a refugee camp that is mostly rubble, a dropped pin reads: “I’ve always imagined you and me sitting out in the sun, hand in hand, free at last. We spoke of all the places we would go if we could. Yet you are gone now. If I had known that bombs raining down on us would take you from me, I would have gladly told the world how I adored you more than anything. I’m sorry I was a coward.”

Queering The Map’s website went down two days ago, for unknown reasons. It is unclear how many posts are in Gaza, let alone the unapproved submissions that have been sent to the site.

Nonetheless social media accounts have been sharing what was last seen of the published notes from Gaza on X, garnering almost 7 million views. Reddit’s LGBTQ subreddit thread also shared Queering The Map, which gained over 6,000 likes and over 200 comments.

In another pin in Jabalia, someone dropped a note that says: “I don’t know how long I will live, so I just want this to be my memory here before I die. I am not going to leave my home, come what may. My biggest regret is not kissing this one guy. He died two days back. We had told how much we like each other, and I was too shy to kiss [him one] last time. He died in the bombing. I think a big part of me died, too. And soon I will be dead. To Younus, I will kiss you in heaven.”

Another on the West Bank in Salfit wrote: “The first person I came out to was my father. Whenever I want to speak to someone about my deep secrets, I come to the cemetery and speak to dad. I know if you were alive now, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that I’m gay. But I don’t have anybody else to speak to. Not even my close friends.”

In a feature of Queering The Map, the now-disbanded Ruthless Magazine wrote six years ago that although anonymity is a strange thing to aspire to, it is worth noting that anonymity provides exactly the conditions necessary to give a diverse and persecuted communities the visibility they might otherwise struggle to find.

“But anonymity is distinct from invisibility,” Ruthless Magazine noted in 2017. “It presupposes a crowd in which to lose oneself, with which to be amalgamated. Perhaps it touches on a sense of belonging that so many of us have lacked in our formative years in an othering world. In the case of Queering The Map, anonymity is the basis of our ability to become known.”

Queering The Map is a preservation of real, full and rich lives of queer people living in a place that continues to face demolition.