Music in the key of hope

Eva Maria Ghannam will sing at a fundraiser for Palestine on Sunday in Dunedin. PHOTO: SUPPLIED

Eva Maria Ghannam will sing on Sunday for the mothers and children of Gaza, for the brave souls of the flotilla and all who hold out hope, she tells Tom McKinlay.

A moment of unalloyed beauty escaped from the rubble of Gaza last month and echoed around the world.

A music teacher and a small group of his students gathered in a rough shelter to sing a song of resistance, Sheel Sheel Ya Ajmal Sheel.

Ahmed ‘‘Muin’’ Abu Amsha, before the war a musician and educator at the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, had composed the song to drown out the relentless buzz of Israeli drones that haunt the territory’s every moment.

In a video posted from beneath their makeshift canvas, he leads the singing, taking the opening note from a drone hovering overhead before his choir of young Palestinian voices - the Gaza Birds Singing - joins in harmony to create a joyously defiant barrier of sound against the horror of genocide.

‘‘So, this is the idea of the song that we’re going to make, the baddest sound in this war to something beautiful,’’ Abu Amsha says by way of introduction.

On Sunday, Tāmaki Makaurau-based singer Eva-Maria Ghannam will sing their song at a fundraiser in Dunedin, lifting their voices with hers.

It will not be difficult for Ghannam to find that opening note, the sound of the drone, as she too has heard its buzzing malevolence.

Ghannam was born and raised in Lebanon and returned with her family for a visit earlier this year.

She begins to tell a story from that time, but pauses to leave the room where one of her children is playing.

‘‘I lied to my kids about it,’’ she explains.

The Israel Defence Force (IDF) bombed Beirut a short distance from where they were staying, she continues, on the eve of the celebration of Eid - some months after a ceasefire was agreed.

‘‘So, I didn’t tell my kids about that - but my kids did learn about the drones that were hovering over us every day, the Israeli drones.

‘‘Even when we came back to the bush here in Karekare, my daughter, who’s nearly 4, she could hear someone with the electric saw. But because it’s buzzing, she said, ‘oh, Israeli drone’. I’m like, ‘no, dude, please no’.’’

Ghannam says last year’s Israeli invasion of Lebanon involved a new level of destruction, the assault impacting extensively across the country.

‘‘This time, they were following the displaced people all over the country, and the country’s not big. It’s just the size of Otago.’’

Yes, the IDF issued warnings, sometimes, before the bombs fell, but the people of Lebanon do not have bomb shelters, because they are living on their own land, she says.

‘‘Whereas, if we’re aggressors, then maybe when we build our settlements, then, yes, we know that we’re not in the right, and we build safe houses for people to go hide in if we’re under attack.’’

Ahmed Abu Amsha and the Gaza Birds Singing. PHOTO: SUPPLIED

The war in Lebanon - which saw three children killed just this past week in an IDF drone strike - is part of a collective pain felt across the region in the past two years, she says.

Most acutely in Gaza, live-streamed to the world.

‘‘It is just next level,’’ she says.

In Auckland, Ghannam also works as a doula - supporting and accompanying mothers through their pregnancy.

For her it is another lens through which to witness Gaza’s tragedy.

‘‘Women are having to give birth without anaesthesia if they’re having a C-section,’’ she says. ‘‘Sometimes doctors have to operate on dying women to get the baby out.’’

As her work also extends to breastfeeding advocacy, she’s acutely aware of the struggle of mothers in Gaza, starved beyond the ability to feed their newborns.

‘‘Even if you were to give them formula, the water is not clean enough - if you can find water. And formula is not allowed in. Even the doctors who are trying to get there to volunteer their time, from outside of Gaza, are not allowed [to bring it in]. The baby formula is confiscated.

‘‘So, yeah, what are you left with? It is a systematic war on the humans who are trying to live there.’’

The United Nations reports that in the first half of 2025, only 17,000 births were recorded in Gaza, representing a 41% decline in birth rate over the past three years. The scale of suffering for new mothers and their babies has been described in a UN report as ‘‘beyond comprehension’’ and birth outcomes ‘‘catastrophic’’.

‘‘Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group’’ is one of the five definitions of genocide under the UN convention. A country is guilty of genocide if it intentionally commits any of the five.

The all-afternoon event at the Southern Youth Development centre in Dunedin will raise money for Rozana, which supports people in Palestine as well as Palestinian refugees here.

A classically trained singer, who in Lebanon was a mezzo-soprano with the Antonine University Choir, Ghannam has performed widely since moving to New Zealand, including singing the Lebanese national anthem before international sporting events.

Ghannam is scheduled to sing twice, performing folk and traditional songs from Lebanon and Palestine. Many tunes are shared between the two, she says, and indeed parts of Syria.

‘‘We are kind of the same people.’’

Some of the songs are by Fairouz, a living legend in Lebanon known as ‘‘ambassador to the stars’’.

‘‘She is a total Arab diva. Her songs range from love songs and patriotic songs to even having specific songs for Palestine.’’

Then there will be traditional Palestinian lullabies, taraweed, though the content of some of those songs has changed, Ghannam says, in the decades since the Nakba.

‘‘They had to be changed eventually from being a love song, or a song that you sing to your child, to a song of longing when you’re separated from your loved one, or maybe your child who’s been martyred.’’

But there will be love songs too, because it is part of everyday life, she says.

‘‘Singing to beauty and love and belonging, and the land that we once had. And, inshallah, we’re going to come back to.’’

She’ll also be raising her voice for the New Zealanders sailing towards Gaza as part of a flotilla, in an attempt to break the siege and deliver aid. They include Auckland-based Rana Hamida, also a singer, who was to have joined Ghannam at the fundraiser this weekend. Instead her boat, one of 51, is heading east across the Mediterranean, closing on Palestine.

‘‘So, we’re holding them in our thoughts and prayers as well, because this is their last stretch.’’

In this and the wars gripping Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, Ghannam quotes the Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous about holding on to hope.

‘‘I’ve got it in my mind in Arabic, and sometimes it’s not easy to do the switch to English,’’ she says, pausing. ‘‘OK ... ‘We are doomed by hope, and come what may, today cannot be the end of history’.

‘‘There is that little spark of hope that’s always there,’’ she says. ‘‘That is driving us. Because that’s the essence of being human, I suppose.’’

Or as Abu Amsha says on his website, songsfromtherubble.com: ‘‘Our group is not just a musical project. It’s a human cry that tells the world: We love life. We love music. We want to live with dignity and peace like everyone else.’’