Last week, an Israeli air strike killed Mohammed Abu Hatab, a television journalist, along with eleven members of his family, in his home in southern Gaza. He was the thirty-sixth confirmed member of the media to die in the current conflict, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. That number steadily ticks upward. An overwhelming majority have been local Gazans trying to cover the crisis amid continual bombardment. Until recently, no new foreign journalists or independent organizations have been allowed in to witness what is happening.
Since early October, I’ve tried to capture fragments of life in Gaza from afar, largely through WhatsApp conversations with people there and with Palestinian Americans. It seemed that every other person knew someone who had died.
Hossin Shaqur, an insurance broker who lives in Santa Barbara, California, was born in the Jabalia refugee camp, in northern Gaza, after his family was displaced in 1948 from a village that is now part of southern Israel. In 1967, some of the family moved to Qatar and eventually to the United States, but his sister, his nieces and nephews, his cousins, and his aunts and uncles remained in Jabalia. Since Israel’s bombing campaign began, Hossin told me, he has been able to confirm that nearly seventy of his relatives have been killed. The neighborhood his mother’s family lived in was levelled. The last he heard, his sister was still alive. “But I don’t know if she’s alive right now,” he told me over the phone. “We are glued to the TV. You watch the news for a couple of hours, do something, and you come back and something new has happened. It repeats itself.”
A few days after the bombing started, many Gazans thought they might find safety in the south. Noor Harazeen, a young journalist based in Gaza City, left her home and travelled with her husband and their children to Deir al-Balah, in the middle of the Strip. When Noor messaged me from there, she had not had a drink of water for more than twenty-four hours. There were almost no potable sources; she and her family had been subsisting on juice.
Soon after Israel launched its war on Gaza, in response to Hamas’s October 7th attack, military planes dropped leaflets in the north, including in Gaza City, warning residents—about a million people—to evacuate. Families struggled to decide what to do. Almost immediately afterward, an air strike hit a road in Gaza City that was considered a “safe route,” reportedly killing seventy people. (Hamas blamed Israel for the attack, though the Israel Defense Forces has denied responsibility.)
Even in the south, bombings seemed random. One late afternoon in the first week, Alaa Zaher Ahmed, a third-year medical student, was designing a poster for breast-cancer awareness in her room in Khan Younis. “Suddenly, everything started shaking and I found myself in darkness,” she told me over voice notes. “Couldn’t see anything.” First, she noticed that she was still breathing, and then that she couldn’t move one hand, and then that her head hurt. She touched it and felt on her fingertips “a viscous fluid.” Blood. Alaa tried to move, but her legs were pinned down and she couldn’t feel them. Above her was something mysterious, heavy, concrete.
It may have been ten minutes, she guessed, before she heard muffled voices that seemed to grow louder. Alaa started to scream and knock on the concrete above her. A neighbor pulled her out of the rubble. Rescue teams and relatives continued to dig through the wreckage. After several hours, they unearthed most of the rest of her family: her mother, brother, and nephew, all dead. Her home, which was three stories, “went down like biscuits,” she told me. Amid the caved-in remnants, the few things that remained recognizable—a mattress, sofa, pink cloth—were blanketed in dust.
The United Nations estimates that more than half of Gaza’s population has been displaced since the beginning of the war. People have been scattered into preëxisting refugee camps, or to homes of friends or relatives in different cities, or to schools or hospitals. Adnan Sawada’s family is one of the scattered. Adnan, fifty-five years old, runs a transportation company and lives in Maryland. His family, who live in Sheikh Radwan, in northern Gaza City, decided to move after the leaflets sprinkled down. They took a mattress, some clothes, toys for the kids, food, and ended up, like Noor, in Deir al-Balah.
Adnan hasn’t seen any of his siblings in thirteen years. Months ago, he spoke to his eldest brother, Shaban, over the phone. Shaban was giddy with excitement; his son was to be married, and soon he would have a grandchild. “I’m old and enjoying life,” Adnan remembered him saying.
What Adnan knows, as relayed to him by his nephew, is this: On the afternoon of October 16th, Shaban and another brother were talking outside a house. The brother went inside. Suddenly, there was a blast, and everything shuddered. When the brother emerged, he found Shaban on the ground, bloodied, one leg gone. Shaban was rushed to the hospital, but by the time the doctor could see him, he had died. “He died from bleeding, obviously,” Adnan told me, “but the whole reason was the bomb.”
The long wait to be seen by a doctor had become common by then. Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital, the largest in the Strip, was buckling under an inflow of injured men, women, children, and babies. Tarneem Hammad, a writer based in Gaza who works with humanitarian-aid groups, told me that doctors were describing the hospital as a “slaughterhouse.” There were too many dead people arriving, or unable to be saved. With supplies running low, some people were cut and sutured without anesthesia.
“Journalists are sleeping on the floors of the hospital,” Noor told me, on the morning of October 17th. “It might be at least safer than other places.” That calculation changed rapidly. Later that day, a blast at Al-Ahli Arab hospital, also in Gaza City, killed around a hundred people; the cause remains unclear, though evidence suggests a rocket launched by a Palestinian militant group. Recently, a doctor in Gaza sent me a video of smoke ballooning into the sky after an Israeli strike near Al-Quds hospital. Last week, Israel hit near the entrance of Al-Shifa hospital. (A spokesperson for the I.D.F. said it will “strike Hamas wherever necessary.”)
Not long after Noor arrived in Deir al-Balah, I received another note from her. “You can sleep and never wake up,” she told me. “You can sleep and wake up on the news of the killing of your family members. No one is safe if he is Gazan or a foreigner. No one is safe if he is a citizen or a militant. No one is safe if he’s a doctor, journalist, nothing.”
As the days went on, some Gazans who had initially evacuated decided to return home. Bombs were falling on those who sought shelter in the south, too. The Gaza Strip is only a hundred and forty square miles; it seemed to matter little where one was. Tarneem told me that she and her family made the “difficult decision” to stay put. “The calculation here right now in Gaza is either you have been bombed, or you are just waiting to be bombed,” she said in a voice note. “So if I were to live my last days before being bombed, I just want to be at my home around my family.”
Four weeks ago, Nabil Alshurafa, a medical researcher living outside Chicago, was on the phone with his mother, Naela, a retired sixty-six-year-old hair stylist who had recently travelled from California to northern Gaza to visit her own mother. Nabil could hear the pounding of bombs in the background. When Nabil was a child, he and his family were living in Kuwait, where his father was a doctor. Nabil was a U.S. citizen, the only one in his family at the time, and when the first Gulf War broke out, the American government quickly airlifted them back to safety. He assumed something similar might happen now.
The day after the Hamas massacre, Naela had gotten into a taxi and raced south, toward Rafah Crossing, the only access point on Gaza’s border with Egypt. The gate was overrun and she was unable to get out. Two days later, she made a second attempt. She was in line to get her passport stamped, just ten minutes away from Egypt, when an explosion shook the border gate. Nabil heard about the blast from his uncle, who didn’t know if Naela was alive; it was hours before Nabil heard that his mother was safe.
Panicked and desperate, Nabil filled out a State Department crisis intake form. The e-mail response he eventually received advised American citizens in Gaza to consider going to Rafah. A week later, when I spoke to Nabil, he was crying. Naela was still inside the Strip, along with some four hundred other U.S. citizens, while Israel hit Rafah repeatedly. For almost a month, not a single American was able to leave. On November 1st, as legal and public pressure mounted, President Biden announced that the evacuation of American citizens would begin. Naela was on the list, and the next day, she walked into Egypt. Her family remained in Gaza.
Even before the war, Gaza was one of the most difficult places in the world to get into and out of. There hasn’t been a functioning airport since 2002, when Israel bulldozed the runway. After Hamas’s electoral victory in 2006, Israel implemented a blockade that severely limits the movement of people and goods. Sixty-five per cent of people in Gaza live in poverty, and around half are unemployed. Families with means and opportunity try to send at least one child abroad to study and work. Yahia Abuhashem, a thirty-four-year-old data scientist in Chicago, left Gaza fifteen years ago and hasn’t seen his parents or siblings since. One brother is a dentist, another an engineer, and a sister is a paralegal—they are lucky to have such jobs, he told me, or to have any jobs at all. Still, he sends several hundred dollars from the U.S. regularly to supplement their incomes.
Yahia’s parents’ apartment building, in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, was struck in the 2021 war, he told me. (At the time, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found what appeared to be a pattern of the I.D.F. targeting residential buildings. “In some cases entire families were buried beneath the rubble when the buildings they lived in collapsed,” Amnesty wrote.) His parents spent two and a half years renovating and rebuilding, and, this August, they finally moved back home. As soon as the recent bombardment started, the family left again and headed south: some to Khan Younis, some to Rafah, and some to Nuseirat. Tel al-Hawa was bombed soon after, and again several days after that.
According to the United Nations, forty-two per cent of Gaza’s housing units were destroyed by Israeli bombing in the first three weeks of the assault. That is already a stale figure. It’s difficult to know how many people are underneath the resulting rubble, how many of them might still be alive. In an interview with Sky News, Mark Regev, a former Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom and a government adviser, insisted that Israel doesn’t target civilian structures. “War is very, very difficult,” he said. When the journalist pushed him on mounting civilian deaths and residential buildings, he responded, “They are Hamas targets.”
On a recent evening, I visited Dorgham Abusalim, who works in communications, in Washington, D.C. He left Gaza in 2006 to study abroad and has returned only a couple of times. In his living room, the television was set to Al Jazeera Arabic. He pointed to his laptop, which, he told me, was usually tuned into other news channels, too. As we spoke, his hand never strayed far from his cell phone, on the seat next to him. He was part of several chat groups that delivered updates from the ground—a stream of information that came through slightly faster than Western media reported it. A head start of even a couple of minutes meant less time between panic and relief, or panic and grief.
Two nights earlier, at 1:30 A.M., his phone dinged with notices about Deir al-Balah, where his parents and a sister live. Dozens of people had been killed. Frantic, Dorgham called his brother in Canada, who tried his parents’ number repeatedly. Dorgham tried, too, but the call didn’t go through. For hours, he scrolled through each update that came in. He zoomed in on images of familiar streets, searching for a flash of a neighbor’s house, or his school, or his own home.
Finally, around four-thirty, his brother called and told him to go to sleep: “They’re alive.”
“I’m up & writing this on the sounds of bombings,” Tarneem, the aid worker, told me in a message over WhatsApp on October 24th. It was the middle of the night. “We’re tired. I am tired,” she said. Food was low; she had not been drinking enough water. “I do not sleep, the sounds of explosions I hear all day and night are getting into my head.”
That same day, Noor, the journalist, sent me a voice message. “I’m alive, actually,” she said, with what sounded like surprise. She was still in Deir al-Balah. “It translates into the city of dates,” she said, “because it’s full of date trees.” The attacks had intensified in the past few days, and she had been reporting from Shuhada Al-Aqsa hospital. “We’ve seen so much things we’re not supposed to see,” she said. Bodies, injuries, children, women. “Yeah, it has been really hard.”
Recent satellite images of some parts of Gaza reveal the aftermath from above. Most of the once white rooftops are blanketed in gray. Blocks of buildings that once stood appear now as smudges. The Strip is pockmarked with craters. Last week, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, said that Israel had dropped more than ten thousand bombs on just Gaza City, an area smaller than Manhattan. The air, I’ve gathered from several reports and from people I’ve spoken with, smells of smoke, dust, rotting corpses, sewage.
Yahia, like many other Palestinian Americans, has been trying to contact his representatives in Congress to plead for help to keep his family safe. The week after the bombardment started, he reached out to his senator, Tammy Duckworth. He shared with me the letter he received in response. It opened with “Thank you for contacting me about Hamas’ horrific terrorist attacks against Israel. I condemn, in the strongest possible terms, Hamas’ brutal violence that began on October 7, 2023.”
More than ten thousand people have died in Israel’s retaliatory attack, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Recently, President Biden said that he has “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.” In an apparent response, the Gazan authorities published more than two hundred pages of names of the dead, along with their I.D. numbers, gender, and age. The staggering number of children killed—more than four thousand as of this writing—prompted UNICEF to call the situation “a growing stain on our collective conscience.”
Late on the evening of October 27th, Gaza went dark. Israel cut telecommunication services; no one could use the Internet or the phone. Media and international organizations announced that they had lost touch with their colleagues. All the people I was talking to on WhatsApp stopped responding.
That weekend, Israeli troops pushed into Gaza. After nearly two days, reportedly under U.S. pressure, Israel restored lines of communication. (Other blackouts have followed.) Everyone I had spoken with on the ground slowly started getting back to me. In the following days, Israeli bombs wiped out parts of the Jabalia refugee camp, near where Hossin’s sister lives. Tarneem sent a message, her voice quiet and shaky. She was sick. When the phone lines were cut, she told me, neighbors carried the injured and dead in donkey carts. For the first time since we started talking, she admitted, “I’m not handling anything emotionally.”
Just prior to this article’s publication, Nabil sent me another update: an airstrike had killed his wife’s uncle and aunt, along with three of their children and three of their grandchildren. ♦
