Can you imagine what it feels like to be told that you and your family may be killed if you do not leave your home? That you all have minutes to leave, with no possessions, or face death?
I do. Five times.
Five times now we have had to do this. Five times now, my family has been forced from safety. Sometimes we are “warned”. Orders are handed down by the Israeli military demanding that we must move on within hours. Other times, we only know to leave when the bullets crack against the walls of our shelter. In these cases, we have to run with nothing but the clothes on our backs and what little we can hold in our hands.
Each displacement comes with the fear that our homes will either be destroyed or looted while we are gone. Right now, I’m sheltering in a home belonging to a friend who fled south. More than four families are sharing this space. The buildings across from us have been flattened. Turned to rubble. Every night I worry that we’re next.
Entire streets, neighbourhoods and communities have been wiped from the map. The place I grew up in is unrecognisable, it is just rubble – everything has been and is being taken from us. The constant bombardment creates an atmosphere of fear, and it feels like nowhere is safe. I’ve lost my uncle, some of my family members, colleagues, and friends. It’s devastating. There is no home here that hasn’t lost someone – it’s a shared tragedy across our community.
For the last year, northern Gaza has been the hardest-hit area since the violence in the region started. And for the past two weeks, we have been strangled. Bombing has intensified to levels we have never seen before. None of the violence we have suffered so far could prepare me for the intensity of the current campaign on our home. Over two days, we have been the victim of more bombardment than in all of September. They have cut off the little aid that was reaching us and have demanded that the remaining 400,000 people move. Many of my neighbours are still refusing to move. If the choice is between suffering here, or suffering somewhere else, why should they?
The schools I attended as a child are gone. The remaining ones are operating as shelters for the thousands who have been displaced. My family stayed briefly in a shelter a few months ago, but we decided to move on because the conditions were horrific: thousands of people sharing a single toilet, people unable to walk through the hallways because countless families have nowhere to sleep but the floor, desperate people fighting over the remaining rotten foods.
For six months, we’ve been relying on canned food as our only source of nutrition. The little aid that reaches us is never enough, and our health has been affected. Every day is a struggle for water, which is especially hard to get without any power. Survival has become a daily battle, and moving from place to place while carrying what little we can has drained us emotionally and physically.
Hygiene supplies are almost non-existent, and conditions are deteriorating rapidly due to poor sanitation. People are growing weaker, and the spread of diseases is becoming a serious concern due to the lack of hygiene and proper sanitation. Everyone is sick, most are injured, and many are both. A tiny portion of aid is coming through, but it’s not what we need. Many areas are too dangerous to access, and the aid that does come in is spread too thin across a population with humanitarian needs that are growing in urgency and scale.
The only thing that can stop our suffering is an end to this siege.
It feels like the world is watching but not acting urgently enough, if at all. There is some international support, but it’s far from sufficient to address the scale of the devastation and suffering. A drop of water in the ocean of bloodshed. There are enough dead bodies in our streets to fill thousands of graveyards. We desperately need stronger intervention to protect civilians and ensure that aid can reach those in need.
My greatest fear is that the destruction will continue without end, and that we will lose even more lives and homes. That the world will treat this as normal. It is not normal. It is not human. It is not even animal. It is beyond the imagination of anything of this earth what we are experiencing. What you imagine hell to be, it is that. Probably worse.
