Artist: Tiril Valeur. Flyers for Falastin.

One night in March 2024, at around 11 p.m., I was inside Al-Shifa Hospital with my displaced family, when a quadcopter opened fire at the wall my father was leaning against. One bullet emerged on my father’s right side and another on his left, coming within just a few centimeters of him.

In a frighteningly calm voice, my father said to us, “This is a warning that we need to evacuate the hospital immediately.”

(This was a few days before the main attack on Al-Shifa Hospital, which started on March 18.)

We left the floor where we had been sheltering with our mattresses, clothes and other belongings, and moved to the ground floor. One of the displaced families welcomed us into their room, and asked us to spend the night with them.

My three sisters and I sat around a table in the small room. We couldn’t sleep and cried bitterly, out of fear. If we left the hospital, where would we go?

Whenever I looked at my mother, I found her resting her hand on her cheek and staring into the distance, as if silently telling us that she didn’t know what we should do either.

When the sun rose at around 7 a.m., we left the neighbors’ room and returned to ours. We gathered our essential belongings and quickly left the hospital.

As we evacuated, the quadcopter continued watching us, flying at a very low altitude. Its sound was like that of a large bee, hovering in the sky, becoming louder as it got closer and fainter as it moved away. Its presence made us move even faster.

We made our way to our cousins’ house in Jabalia. I tried to forget what had happened, and to live with my fear of the quadcopters that surrounded us. I tried to ignore their sound, and even the word “quadcopter” itself. I had known since childhood that quadcopters were used for surveillance. But during Israel’s war on Gaza, they have become something else: a tool of killing, intimidation, and siege.

I did not know then that the sound would return to me through the people I loved.

*

In October 2024, after we had moved to western Gaza, my aunts and cousins became trapped in Jabalia, in the north. They remained under siege for more than 15 consecutive days.

During that time, we could barely communicate with them. We tried to call them more than 150 times a day. Each time, the signal was extremely weak because of the siege. Sometimes I received a message from the telecommunications company: “The phone you are trying to reach is outside the coverage area.” Electricity and solar power had been completely cut off, so they kept their phones switched off and turned them on for only a few minutes so they could preserve the battery for essential needs.

We did not ask about food or water, or even about their fear. All we asked was: “Are you all still alive?” I knew they were suffering from hunger, thirst, and fear, but I could not imagine what they were actually experiencing.

After 15 days, the women and children were forced to evacuate their homes and shelters and head south, but they never made it to southern Gaza. Instead, they came to western Gaza, to the house where we were sheltering.

When they arrived, I could see the fear on their faces. They were crying, exhausted and overwhelmed.

My youngest aunt, who is 33 and has always felt more like a friend to me, looked especially shaken. She was carrying a bag on her back. The moment she saw us, she dropped it to the ground, burst into tears and hugged us. “I really thought I was going to die,” she said. “I never expected for a moment that I would survive.”

I gave her a glass of water and asked her to rest.

She lay down and placed her head on the pillow. Then she let out a quiet laugh. “This is the first time in 15 days that I have put my head on a pillow without hearing the sound of quadcopters,” she said.

I was surprised. “I can still hear them,” I told her.

She looked at me and replied, “My dear, we did not only hear the sound of them flying. They also produced the sounds of barking dogs, cats, and crying children.” She told me that when they first heard those sounds, they screamed in terror. Eventually, they began trying to get used to them. Then she told me that, on the final day of the siege, the quadcopter used loudspeakers to order them to evacuate the house immediately.

But their suffering did not end when they left northern Gaza. As they were forced out, quadcopters continued to monitor them. If someone dropped something, they were not allowed to turn back and retrieve it. If someone tried to pick up what had fallen from their hands, the quadcopter would open fire.

*

Since then, the sound of a quadcopter has no longer been associated in my mind with a surveillance aircraft flying above Gaza.

It carries the memory of bullets passing only centimeters from my father; of sitting around a table with my three sisters, crying because we did not know where we would go; of my mother sitting silently with her hand on her cheek, unable to tell us what we should do the next morning. And the memory of my aunt arriving after 15 days of siege, dropping her bag, embracing us, and telling us that she truly believed she was going to die.

Although the war has officially ended, the sounds have not. Whenever I hear a quadcopter flying over Gaza, I am reminded that some things cannot be erased by a ceasefire.

For me, the sound of a quadcopter is the sound of fear.