This post is also available in: Français (French) العربية (Arabic)
Written by Rola Abu Hashem – Journalist and correspondent for Radio Nisaa FM in Gaza
Day 1 of the aggression on Gaza: Saturday October 7, 2023
It’s six thirty in the morning. It was supposed to be a normal, calm day, one with rest and more sleep. It’s my children’s weekly day off from school.
But the reality of this day turned out to be very different. I woke up terrified by the sounds of rockets being successively fired by the resistance, all at the same time from all the governorates of the Gaza Strip.
At first I thought, like all residents of the Strip, that it was just experimental missiles the resistance was firing towards the sea… but the sheer number of missiles launched, which continued for hours, told us otherwise. And this was later confirmed by the speech of the Chief of Staff of the Al-Qassam Brigades, who announced the start of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in response to the Israeli occupation’s violations in the city of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The sound of the missiles was so intense it woke my children up, and they looked at me with question marks on their faces. I tried to calm them down a little.
Then my husband, who was on his way to his job at a government school, called me to tell me that the atmosphere was tense and mysterious. He asked me to quickly prepare a bag with our children’s basic necessities and leave the house. We’d been living in an apartment in a residential tower for a year, in a border area north of the Gaza Strip that was a hotspot during previous wars on Gaza. It wouldn’t be safe for us to stay there if things were to develop.
Before the picture became totally clear, the Ministry of Education announced the suspension of the school day, so my husband came back home. At that point, I quickly tried to pack what I could think of for myself and our four children in a small bag. Then we left the house.
As we tried to make our way out of the circle of danger, we had to walk for about an hour before we could find a car that would take us to the parking lot of cars that were heading to the south of the Strip. We had decided to go to my family’s house there, thinking it would be a less dangerous area than others. Then we had to wait a long time, again, before we could find a second car that would take us south to the Rafah Governorate.
I don’t know how taxis just suddenly disappeared from the city’s streets… We tried to request a private taxi from more than one taxi company, but all our attempts failed.
I don’t know how such long queues of citizens formed so quickly outside all the bakeries, food stores, and gas filling stations… The trip was long and arduous, filled with complicated questions from my children, and fraught with risk and fear.
We survived by the will of God – a missile fell from a reconnaissance drone on a house in Khan Younis the moment we were passing by on the side of that road.
I breathed a sigh of relief, recited the Shahada, and continued praying for the rest of the trip until we finally reached Rafah.
And then the picture started to become clearer, little by little…
Day 2 of the aggression on Gaza: Sunday October 8, 2023
It is difficult for any of us to describe how we feel after seeing the photos and videos we’ve received, be they those published by the resistance or those posted on social media by people who were able to cross beyond the border fence and reach settlements in the Gaza envelope.
The seventh of October was a historic day that men and women in Gaza had been waiting for for years to heal some of the bitterness in their hearts, even though they knew very well that they would pay the price for the crushing defeat that the enemy suffered against the resistance from the very first strike. Gazans knew they would pay for this with their lives and those of their children, their youth, their women, their homes, their every possession.
The men of the resistance made it to areas whose soil we long to walk on. They passed military barracks and soldiers loaded with more arms and equipment than they had. They made it there and left us with massive questions. The biggest: how did they cross through!?
The occupation received a severe blow it had not experienced in decades. And it decided to restore some prestige back to its soldiers, who had been completely embarrassed by the resistance, by declaring a military operation against Gaza… against all of Gaza.
So it was announced. The aggression on Gaza would follow.
The occupation did not take long to respond after that. It began, as usual, by bombing people’s homes, civil institution headquarters, and residential buildings across all governorates of the Gaza Strip.
The Palestine Tower is one of the oldest and most well-known towers in Gaza. It includes residential apartments as well as media and commercial offices. It was targeted by the occupation forces’ aircraft in the first days of the aggression.
The tower collapsed and with it the memories of generations of Palestinian men and women who lived unforgettable days within its walls.
Then the occupation missiles spread out and hit the Israeli power lines that supply the Gaza Strip with electricity, causing a disruption in these lines that meant that, at best, electricity reached our homes for less than four hours, while the power supply continued to be interrupted for more than 12 hours.
You can imagine what life is like in homes that house no less than 15 people these days, most of whom are children, with no access to electricity except for a very limited number of hours. On the first night of the aggression, the first massacre was in Rafah, against the Abu Qawta family whose house was destroyed by the occupation while all its occupants were still inside. They were not warned, they were not asked to evacuate before the house was bombed… and this story has been repeated again and again.
The family home that was targeted in Al-Shaboura camp is not far from my family’s home. The sound of the explosion was the first great terror that pierced into my children’s hearts after we arrived in Rafah.
24 martyrs died after the four-story house was bombed. 19 of them were from the Abu Qawta family. The others were neighbors of the family. This indicates the severity of the explosion—the losses even spread to neighbors living around the house itself.
This is how life ends in Gaza. A missile kills people, pulverizes stone, wreaks unbelievable havoc on the earth…
Messages from life under bombardment: Wednesday October 18… but I’m no longer counting the days
Yesterday, I woke up suddenly at 4:30 AM with my entire family, the young and the old. We were woken by the sound of a violent explosion nearby.
For 12 days, Israeli raids have not stopped all throughout the governorates of the Gaza Strip. We fall asleep during the hours of cautious calm only to be jolted awake by the intensity of the bombing, the house shaking.
The sound of bombing still terrifies us. One does not get used to the scenes of the aggression no matter how many days it’s been. With every raid, our hearts start racing and we keep muttering prayers and calling on God until our fear dissipates and we feel some reassurance.
My siblings quickly left the house when the bombing started, and when they returned they were stupefied by the horror of what they’d seen: a five-story house reduced to ruins in the blink of an eye. Not to mention the damage made to neighboring homes…
The limbs and remains of the martyred hang from whatever is left of the walls of the surrounding houses.
Great efforts and intense suffering while searching for the martyred and those still missing under the rubble considering day had not yet come and everything was still enveloped in darkness. The rescue mission is difficult and complicated.
Medical teams were able to recover 28 martyrs and a large number of injured. In the targeted house were several families who’d been displaced from their homes to the south of the Gaza Strip after the occupation army threatened them to leave Gaza City and the northern part of the Strip.
They left their homes fearing for their lives, thinking that they were heading somewhere safe, only to become martyrs in those “safe” homes in the south.
Truth be told there is not one safe place in the Gaza Strip. Aircraft drop bombs everywhere. No considerations, no calculations.
Only a few hours had passed after this massacre when our bodies felt the shock of yet another nearby raid that targeted another house… another massacre against more civilians…
This is Rafah, the Rafah I left my home in the north of the Strip for, back at the beginning of the aggression, thinking I could stay here because it would be less dangerous than other areas. All day yesterday my heart was pounding. I couldn’t shake off the intense fear. Death is close to us here. It may come at any time.
This is not the reality in Rafah alone. Similar crimes were committed in Khan Younis, where the homes of multiple citizens were targeted in multiple areas, resulting in a large number of martyrs and many wounded.
Yesterday was the day of massacres par excellence. The occupation concluded its brutality with the most violent and cruel massacre yet, in the courtyard of the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City.
Nearly 3,000 people, the families living around and close to the hospital were staying in its courtyard and corridors, mistaking it to be a safe haven after they’d been displaced from their homes in targeted areas… only to be surprised by the occupation’s missiles in the evening as their children played in the hospital garden, as women laid out sleeping arrangements on the ground beside the elderly.
More than 500 martyred, according to the Ministry of Health. Most of those killed in the massacre children and women.
All of them now corpses, body parts, the supposed international protection a hospital should have offering them no such thing. The hospital is a medical institution that provides health services. It is affiliated with the Christian community in Gaza City. It includes a church where Christians go to pray. It should have been protected by international humanitarian law… but no. Not in Gaza.
The hospital walls burned, the bodies of the martyred burned, and with them our hearts burned. In anger, suffering, helplessness…
Messages from life under bombardment: Saturday October 21… here we are, entering the third week of hell
Here we go, about to enter a third week of life under Israeli bombardment and raids raining down on every corner. We are at the mercy of planes that tirelessly circle the skies of the five governorates of the Gaza Strip. Here we are, in the presence of the specter of death that follows us everywhere and never gets tired of attacking us.
More than 4,000 martyred people so far. More than 12,000 wounded.
Every morning, my 4.5-year-old son Ibrahim wakes up and asks me as soon as he opens his eyes, “Is the bombing over, Mama?” I can’t but tell him, “God willing, it will be over, Mama.” While I know very well that there are no signs on the horizon that this bombing is going to end.
No news broadcasts or political analyses hint at the possibility of calm returning anytime soon. They all talk about a long and continuous aggression… The enemy truly does not allow me to be an honest mother to my children and has taken this away from me for a long time. Because very soon an explosion nearby completely negates all my words and with it all the empty reassurances I give my children. And with every explosion the color drains from Ibrahim’s face, his little features look confused, the sentences stumble out of his mouth, tears well in his innocent eyes. I am overtaken by helplessness every time this scenario reoccurs.
My eldest child, Rayyan, is seven years old. He is impatiently awaiting the day we will return to our home. He keeps asking me, “When will we go back home, Mama?” And I tell him, “When the bombing stops.” My answer is then followed by a sigh and a sincere supplication: “God, may the war end today!”
I do not know how the aggression on Gaza has turned me into a deceitful mother who misleads her children when answering their innocent questions. Perhaps I, like many mothers around me, have become a lying mother: how can we mothers face the terror of our little ones, little ones like my daughter Raml who is not yet three years old…
She runs to me in fear the moment the explosions ring out around us. I hold her and find myself forced to turn the facts around and ask her, “Whoooo popped the balloon this time, Mama?” And the fear on her face turns to a smile and she answers, “Not me!”
Our children in this war are our weak point as mothers. They are the reason we are afraid, what we will survive for if we do, the source of our helplessness too. What if we could put them back in our wombs as we wait for the war to end so they don’t have to feel any fear and so they aren't harmed by any missile explosions?
What if I told you that I pray to God every night that if He wills for me to be martyred, that I be accompanied by my four children, for us to stay together, for Him to ascend us quickly, without suffocating under the rubble… to die during the day, not in the darkness of night?
Messages from life under bombardment: Sunday October 22… another day, another massacre
There is no safe place anywhere in all of Gaza. The nonstop and indiscriminate Israeli shelling proves it to us every day. For the 16th consecutive day, Israeli raids have targeted the homes of civilians in the north and south of the Strip, despite the occupation’s claims that the areas south of the Gaza Valley would be safe compared to those in the north. In reality, though, we’ve seen how families who were displaced from their homes in the north were bombed while they were sitting in the houses of their relatives and acquaintances in the south!
Dozens of martyrs die in each raid, and many wounded are sent to hospitals. This scene keeps being repeated around the clock because the Israeli occupation bombs homes with residents still inside without any prior warning.
A large number of the targeted homes consist of multiple floors and house entire families. There are not many apartments for rent in the southern governorates, which means that the people who have been displaced there do not have the luxury of choice in these critical times. So they stay with the people who open their homes to them, even if the host house is small and can barely accommodate its residents on normal days.
In the city of Rafah today, planes bombed the Abu Younis family house in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood, in the west of the city. Everyone in the house was martyred. A number of neighbors too. This is in addition to the widespread destruction and severe damage done to the residential area there.
A friend of mine whose family lives in that area tells me that it was by the grace of God that she didn’t lose any family members. They were getting ready to eat lunch when the Israeli raid took them by surprise. Their reality changed in the blink of an eye and with no warning. Her family lost half of their home in the violent shelling.
In the early Sunday morning hours, the al-Zatma family home in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood was also targeted by occupation warplanes. It is this house from which nurse Ibtissam al-Zatma (pictured below) left to her work at the Emirati Hospital in the city, only to be shocked by the news that her family’s home had been bombed. She started to receive the incoming bodies of her son Imad and those of his wife and five children, the body of her daughter Hanan and those of her husband and children…
This is life in Gaza. It is full of death but also a determination to continue working despite the fear and anxiety and the occupation’s insistence on attacking the people of Gaza and targeting innocent and unsuspecting people.
Messages from life under bombardment: Monday October 23… when will we be able to enjoy a glass of clean water?
When will all of this end, when will we return to some semblance of calm? When will the war, the death, the raids stop? When will the Israeli jets leave the skies of our city and their terrifying roar finally be silenced? When will we have a chance to check on our loved ones and cry for those who have left, knowing that we will never know the names of every last one of them?
In Gaza, we have been subjected to bombing for the past 17 days without being able to quickly find out where the bombing has occurred, or who the victims were. We cannot access this information quickly due to the lack of electricity, the long hours of internet outages, and the weakness of the communications network. Sometimes all we can do is guess where the raid has hit, so we send short messages via mobile phone to a friend there to check on them and confirm the targeted location.
When will we be able to lay down to get some sleep without having the sound of an explosion distress us and terrorize our children? When will my family and I return to our neighborhood, keeping in mind that we do not know the level of destruction it has suffered seeing as it is in a border area in the northern Gaza Strip, where there is no media coverage to relay the horror of destruction of the Israeli raids?
A fire is burning in my heart that no one knows about. I do not know the fate of my home, and I cannot reach it…
When will we have electricity in our homes again? We have not had power since the beginning of the aggression, after the only power station in the Strip stopped working because the occupation decided to stop allowing the entry of fuel necessary for its operation…
When will we have a cup of clean water to drink? And when will regular water flow through the pipes of our homes so that we can live our human lives like normal?
You cannot imagine what it’s like now that homes in Gaza have not had access to the salt water needed for daily and personal use for more than five days. The occupation decided to punish the men and women of Gaza by preventing water from entering the Strip.
When will we be able to get a loaf of bread for ourselves and our children without having to wait in long queues before sunrise?
For 17 days we have been screaming out these questions, fueled by all the rage in our hearts, and have not received any answers to dress our wounds or calm our hearts and minds. When will we rest, even if only for a short while?
Messages from life under bombardment: Tuesday October 24… ultimately, we are human beings, we get frustrated too!
Every morning, we wake up not fully believing that we are among those still alive, those who still have enough life left in them to witness more of the occupation’s oppression and bombing.
For 18 days we have been saying “Last night was the worst,” then “Last night was the cruelest." Some mornings, we say the night before was the most terrifying, as the occupation continues to prove to us its ability to make every day the worst day of our lives. It is making us live through days, through heartbreaking and painful details we never imagined we would live through.
We know that we have to be patient and steadfast, and we have been, since day one. We know that the path to victory, to freedom and independence is difficult and filled with blood and great loss, but in the end we are only human, we are vulnerable to frustration, sadness, and depression.
So I admit that I am writing today with pain and fear in my heart, a pain and fear that are more than I can endure.
Last night, I received the news that our young colleague, journalist Muhammad Labad (27 years old) was martyred in an Israeli raid near where he was. He was sitting with his grandfather outside their house in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza City.
Muhammad was a polite young man. We knew him to be hardworking, helpful, a dreamer. He was waiting to start a new phase of his life with his fiancée, but the occupation’s warplanes did not allow him to achieve what he aspired to.
With the death of Muhammad Labad, the number of journalists who have died since the start of the aggression on Gaza has risen to 20.
The day began with another tragedy. Our friend Salma Mkheimer was martyred. Salma was killed with her son Ali who had not yet turned one year old, and a large number of her family members. They were killed by a raid that hit their house in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood in Rafah at dawn. Salma had bid farewell to her husband in Jordan a short time ago and returned to Gaza with her child to visit her family… it’s like she traveled to her destiny, her share of martyrdom.
Civil defense crews said they recovered 18 bodies from the rubble of the Mkheimer family home.
The bombing of civilians’ homes in all governorates across the Gaza Strip has not stopped all day. It has brought the death toll up, at the moment this is being written, to 5,791 martyrs: 2,360 children, 1,292 women and girls, and 295 elderly, according to the Ministry of Health. This is in addition to 1,550 martyrs still missing under the rubble and 16,297 injured men and women.