My brother Yazan running from Israeli fire. Photo: anonymous friend of Yazan’s

My mother always used to punish us for watching horror movies. She would yell at us whenever she discovered we were doing it.

“My dears, you’ll end up afraid of everything and stop being brave,” was Mom’s admonishment.

We would steal the phone and hide in a corner of the room, gripping it tightly. Our hands trembled with every terrifying sound in the movie, our hearts racing, our breathing becoming heavier with every scene of killing or dismemberment, as if we could feel everything ourselves. Sometimes we screamed and cried. We thought constantly about those scenes and became afraid of the dark, of noises in the nights, and of being alone. Yet we never listened to our mother; we kept watching those films.

We always comforted ourselves by saying that they were only movies, that every scene was crafted by screenwriters and acted out by professionals, nothing more. Yet part of us never truly believed they were fake. The villain would chase the victim, sever his hands, and drive metal into his stomach, and blood would splatter everywhere. Every scene stole our breath and shocked our minds, making us decide never to watch horror movies again because we had become cowards and could no longer sleep at night. Despite that, we always returned to those movies, convincing ourselves once again that the characters were just acting.

Then came the day that proved truly horrifying.

When the war on Gaza began on October 7, 2023, we tried to process what was happening. It was not the first conflict we had endured. But this war did not resemble what we had lived through before or what we thought we knew. The nature of war changed, giving us entirely new meanings for fear and horror.

After two-and-a-half years of unimaginable horrors, during a passing conversation, my 17-year-old brother Yazan said, “If I watched a horror movie now, I probably wouldn’t be scared at all.” This might sound like a statement of courage, or a sign that he had become a man, but the truth was entirely different.

Yazan went several times to the American aid distribution points during the peak of the famine to bring us some food after days of hunger and suffering. He would go on foot at night from Gaza to Khan Younis, running to reach a barrier of rocks and stones behind which he could hide, while Israeli tanks stood only 10 meters away. For half an hour, the tanks would fire shells without stopping. His heart would nearly stop from fear and shock as the shells would pass before his eyes, he told us.

Once, his closest friend, the only son in his family, was also trying to bring food back to his parents. After lying on the ground because of the shelling, he stood up to change his position. The tanks fired again, and a shell struck his abdomen, tearing his body into two halves in a fraction of a second. Yazan told us that his own legs turned to strings and could no longer hold him up.

When the shelling stopped, Yazan rushed forward and gathered his friend’s body parts into the bag that was supposed to carry food. He told us that as he did this he was repeating over and over “Mom, come… Mom.” I shudder to imagine him, his eyes overflowing with tears, and his entire body trembling. Yazan and his friend should have been in school, surrounded by books.

As the famine worsened and the American aid points were shut down, Yazan started going to Zikim, where trucks loaded with flour arrived while thousands of people waited, hoping to get a single sack. Despite our desperate attempts to refuse to let him go, he insisted on bringing us something to eat. When he got to Zikim, soldiers would be shooting everywhere, seemingly taking pleasure in watching starving people collapse to the ground. Many young men were killed before Yazan’s eyes.

He told us, “No one looks at anyone else. All of us are exposed to death. Whoever gets injured remains lying on the ground while everyone steps over them trying to get the flour.”

One time, thousands of young men and women were fighting around the truck until one young man fell beneath its wheels as it moved forward. His skull was crushed into pieces. The sight must have been unbearable. Yazan was terrified, and he decided to go back home. When he came back that day, his face looked pale and frozen in shock, as if he had just watched a particularly gruesome scene from a horror movie.

But the truth is that he had lived through real horror, over and over again.

When rats and weasels emerge like starving monsters from beneath the ground into the tents while everyone is sleeping, biting children’s faces and leaving lifelong disfigurement, this too is a horror.

When a quadcopter drone speaks to you like some alien creature, it feels like it is freezing the blood in your veins because at any second it may fire a bullet and kill you.

When families are forced to accept the reality that their home no longer has walls, they cover it with bedsheets and continue to live indoors despite everything, only for that house to suddenly collapse on everyone within it, killing some and injuring others. Simply because they live in Gaza.

Our life in Gaza is a life that has surpassed every horror movie ever made. There is no longer any reason for Yazan and I to be scared of horror movies.

Gaza has become the city of horror.