
On the night of October 6, 2023, I watched the film “Farha,” about the 1948 Nakba. The film shows how the girl protagonist loses her father when he becomes a resistance fighter and is left to fend for herself without her family, home, or dreams.
I was upset to think our grandparents had suffered a similar fate. However, I didn’t imagine that I would ever experience the same degree of anguish. When we awoke to the sound of bombing on October 7, 2023, everyone in Gaza was delighted. We believed that this was our promised day of release. However, after a few hours, the situation became frightful. Israel shut down the North Gaza internet network and began a savage bombing campaign. The noise of the bombs during those early days was terrifying.
At that time my family and I were living in our house in the Sheikh Redwan neighborhood in northwest Gaza. Israeli planes dropped leaflets saying that we should leave our homes and go to South Gaza. It would be a safe displacement, they said. But my dad refused to leave. “Over my dead body,” he said. So we all stayed.
My two-year-old nephew Kenan screamed at every bomb he heard. To calm him we would tell him that they were just fireworks, but it didn’t work. His little heart raced with every explosion, and we were afraid that he would have a heart attack. He also forced us to keep a light on all night in my room where he slept because he was afraid of the dark, even though at that time a light could make us a target. Our days were full of anxiety because we knew we could be buried under rubble at any moment.
We fled from home after an air strike
But the hardest day I ever lived was October 27, 2023, when missiles struck all the houses around us. At the time my mother was in the kitchen making us breakfast. Suddenly the windows shattered and the house shook with the force of the explosions. Dust flew everywhere. My father screamed, “Hurry, there’s no time, they will bomb our house next!”
I don’t know how we all got down the stairs of the house. Kenan was suffocating from the stench of the bombing, but Mama managed to save him with her knowledge of first aid. My hand was slightly injured from flying fragments, but, thank God, no one from my family was seriously wounded.
We kept waiting for Baba, who had gone to get my grandfather and grandmother who lived upstairs. They are old, and the house’s elevator had been destroyed by the bombs, but he finally managed to get them out safely.
We didn’t have time to take anything with us. My sister, who wears the hijab, had to leave without one. I left without shoes and had to walk barefoot over glass and rubble, but then I found a pair of shoes belonging to our neighbors’ son at the door of their house. I put them on and kept running.
Everyone was screaming, and neighbors were looking for their children. A neighbor’s wife who was pregnant fell downstairs as she was trying to escape. Unfortunately she lost her baby as a result.
Then we went to the eye hospital beside Al-Nasser Hospital because it was safe there at that time. After the bombing stopped, my father and brothers returned to the house to fetch important things and money we had left behind. We were then able to escape the neighborhood. Our neighbors, the Zant family, were not so fortunate. They were among more than 50 people still under the rubble.
So then our journey of displacement began, and we traveled from one school to another in search of safety as the Israeli soldiers forced us to move from east to west. We sought refuge in eight different schools, because at that time the schools were relatively safe, but in fact there was danger everywhere. We refused to decamp to other relatives’ houses because these too could be bombed at any time. But one of my bad experiences was when I had to carry water upstairs at Dar Al-Arqam School. I was suffering at that time from this. It was awful for me because I can’t carry things this heavy. Nevertheless, it passed, and I hope it won’t come back.

Nights and days of terror
Every night since the start of the war, I have imagined the scenario of my death. One day when we were sheltering in the school in Al-Remal, my imaginings almost became reality. It was a rainy night in January during what I call the “dark winter” of 2024. We couldn’t sleep because all night Israeli army vehicles were advancing into the area. My father and brothers — all those over 16 — ran away before the Israeli army could arrest them. They left us women and children alone to endure the sound of explosions and shells, and we were terrified because we didn’t have any idea where they were. Were they OK? Were they alive? Would they survive the savagery of the soldiers? We prayed all night that Allah would keep them safe.
Then, at 6 a.m., just before sunrise, my mother saw an Israeli tank from the window of the school where we were taking shelter. Almost immediately we heard people screaming. They were in one of the UNRWA schools in the next street. Soldiers had surrounded the school so that people were unable to leave. The army then fired on the school with artillery. There were many innocent martyrs.
After that, soldiers entered the school and took the men who had refused to leave with the others earlier in the night and arrested them. They beat them and ordered them to take off their clothes in the harsh winter weather. The women they ordered to go to south Gaza.
We managed to run away — though without taking food or anything with us — before the soldiers arrived at our school. It was still raining, and we cried as we walked past the bodies of martyrs on the ground. At this moment our fear was at its peak because we didn’t know where my father and brothers were.
We wandered the streets, lost and crying, afraid we would find them on the ground. But then we got through to them by cell phone. They were OK and had taken refuge in one of the schools in east Gaza. We were now less afraid, but we still didn’t know where to go.
When the next night came, we found a classroom in yet another school whose name I can’t remember. We slept on the floor with thin covers. We were frozen and starved. I couldn’t help thinking of the story of Sally, one of the cartoon programs we watched as kids, and particularly of the scene where Sally finds herself homeless and sleeping on the streets in dread of danger. I had never imagined that I would find myself in her situation someday.
In the morning my father went to the market to get food, while my brothers went to my aunt’s house in east Gaza, which had been bombed recently, in the hope of finding some blankets in the rubble. My aunt had already fled to South Gaza. We stayed in the school for another night, and then moved again to Dar Al-Arqam School. We had an overwhelming feeling of destitution.
We returned to our damaged home
My family ran from death for several months until May 2024. Eventually we were able to return to our own neighborhood after it became a red zone, which meant it was considered dangerous for the Israeli army. When I saw our house again, I stared at it in astonishment, hardly believing we had come back. The structure was still intact but all of the windows had been shattered and everything inside was destroyed. My heart broke because I remembered every moment that we had lived there. But we went in and began to clear up the mess, removing rubble and broken glass, and started our lives again.

I returned to my work as a freelancer in content writing for a company in Saudi Arabia. I also worked as a volunteer teacher at Al-Nasser School. While there I experienced an Israeli attack on the school. At the time I had just finished a class and was sitting in the school garden with my pupils playing around me. Suddenly there was a sound of exploding shells and screaming. I was terrified, but — unlike some of my wonderful students — I survived. I was so traumatized I couldn’t go back to work there again.
There’s no guarantee when you leave your house in North Gaza that you’ll come back alive. So I stay at home and study for my degree in English literature. We continue to live and work under the enormous pressures of war, waiting for it to end. But we sometimes wonder, will it ever end?