"I sent my family south," a friend texted to me yesterday morning, "but I stayed in Gaza City to say goodbye to its streets and to mourn it. I'm sitting alone in my father's house, thinking about the city's few landmarks that are still standing. I don't know what I'll do tomorrow. Will my longing for my family prevail, and I'll head south too? Or will I have the courage to stay until my blood, bones and flesh mix with the dust and ash of Gaza as it is erased from the world, stone by stone?"
As of last night, he was still in the house in Gaza City. In response to my written plea — saying I hoped to hear he had already joined his family — he replied that he would probably go south today or tomorrow.
Any moment could be the last.
Yesterday afternoon, the Zaqout family (originally from Ashdod/Isdud) announced that 23 of its members were killed in an early morning Israeli airstrike, along with 24 others from neighboring families who had remained in their homes or tents in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in the city's northwest. By the afternoon, not all the bodies had been recovered or even located.
The daughter of other friends, along with her children and her husband's family, left south yesterday from the half-destroyed house they had continued living in, even during the ground invasions of the last two years.
It took time: time to find a car, time to find money to pay the driver, time to decide what to take and what to leave behind. Time to convince the eldest son that he couldn't bring his toys and books.
By the afternoon, they were crawling south along the coastal road, packed into a car among thousands of other vehicles and carts. No one speaks aloud the fear that haunts every mile — that a bomb or missile might strike them on the road too.
After all, what the IDF euphemistically calls the "evacuation of civilians from Gaza City" is accompanied by a relentless barrage of airstrikes, shellings, and explosions.
Tellingly, at 6:36 P.M., yesterday, the Wattan news agency reported five people killed by a missile in a car that was transporting displaced people south, near al-Katiba Square in the western part of the city.
At 6:24 P.M., the same agency reported the bombing of the Al-Aybaki Mosque in the al-Tuffah neighborhood, in the city's east.
At 6:18 P.M., there were reports of explosions in buildings in the Shujaiyeh neighborhood, also in the east.
At 6:10 P.M., a report came in of helicopter attacks near the Ansar junction in the west — no further details were given on the type of munitions.
At 5:52 P.M., a missile fired from a drone struck the Hamama School, where displaced people were sheltering in Sheikh Radwan, in the city's north.
At 5:32 P.M., a video accompanied a written report on an intense bombing of residential buildings in the Shati refugee camp: gray concrete blocks can be seen, a piercing whistle cuts through the air, a flame erupts, then smoke rises. In the background, the voices of a man and several children are heard.
"Vibration. Not a voice at the beginning, but a shiver in the spine. And then the voice. Rocket hits the house I'm looking towards," wrote Anees Ghanima on Facebook over the weekend, describing another bombing.
These kinds of updates arrive every few minutes.
At 6:31 P.M., Wattan News Agency reported that, according to hospital sources, Israeli fire had killed 89 people since dawn — 79 of them in Gaza.
A young woman from the Samouni family — survivors of the 2009 shelling ordered by then-Givati Brigade Col. Ilan Malka — says the word "difficult" about twenty times during our phone call. This is the seventh or eighth time she has been displaced with her three children — ages five to nine months — her husband, and his family. Each time, she has said, "this time is the hardest."
Four days ago, they left on foot from the Shati refugee camp, where they had lived in a tent for months, in a camp with tents and shelters crowded tightly together. A car carried their belongings ahead to a location in Deir al-Balah and came back to collect them.
If she says this time is the hardest, she knows what she's saying.
Fragments from the 2009 bombing in the Zeitoun neighborhood are still lodged in her head. She still has headaches. She suffers from dizziness. Back then, on the soldiers' orders, she and about 100 members of her extended family were forced out of their homes and into an uninhabited building.
The next day, based on drone footage, Col. Malka decided that wooden planks — taken from the yard to make a fire for tea — were RPGs. Twenty-one were killed in the missile strike on the building. Dozens were injured.
Every person in Gaza today — whether displaced, injured, or burying their children; searching for a free patch of ground to pitch a tent — is a survivor of previous invasions, strikes and wars. Every person in Gaza has known every kind of fear. But back then, perhaps there were still words to describe it.
“Words are losing their meaning and can no longer convey what is happening,” wrote an acquaintance from Gaza City, Abed Alkarim Ashour, on his Facebook page.
He has been keeping a journal since the beginning of the war, writing little about himself, trying to describe the reality around him in restrained language.
“The images are not enough. The reports are limited. The news flashes tell only a small part of the truth. To really understand what is happening, you must be here — even just for a few hours. Hear the roar of the planes above your head. Tremble with each explosion and choke on the thick dust and smoke. Only then will you understand that the suffering is heavier than language can bear. Here in Gaza, even the silence screams.”
Two days ago, a boy and a girl were seen in the street below the window of Fedaa Zeyad who — according to her Facebook page — studied literature and literary criticism at Al-Azhar University. The children's parents had apparently asked them to watch their belongings, likely while they searched for a place on the street to stay.
I assume they were people who had fled their homes after receiving recorded phone calls from the army, instructing them to evacuate before their homes were bombed.
[This written testimony by Zeyad, as well as Anees Ghanima's testimony above, were translated to Hebrew by Tamar Goldschmidt and posted on her Facebook page — as she has done with many dozens of posts by Palestinian writers over the years.]
Here is how Zeyad recounted it [paraphrased from the original]:
“As she moved their belongings, the mother said: ‘Don’t worry, Fatima...’ And the father said: ‘Be good, Hussein, until I come back!’ I wanted to walk away from the window, but I was afraid they would be scared.
Whenever the girl became restless and tried to see if her parents were coming back, the boy said to her: ‘Come, they’re going to bomb soon.’
“Across the street, on the other sidewalk, another family had set up after hanging a fabric curtain over a car. A crying girl could be heard saying:
‘You forgot the shoes!’ The white ones were behind the bedroom door.’
“‘Go to sleep now, and I’ll get them for you tomorrow — if there’s no bombing,’ her mother promised.
“The plane appeared again above the city, growling its terror over the breaths of the two children, Fatima and Hussein.
“Fatima asked: 'Will it take a long time?' And Hussein replied: 'Look how nice the weather is!' — because a cool breeze had passed.
“Everyone relaxed — except for the plane, still growling terror beside the heads of the children, beside my head, beside the head of the girl waiting for tomorrow's bomb not to fall, so her shoes won't be lost — beside the head of the city that now lay closer to the ground.
“The plane devoured even the breeze that had briefly calmed Fatima's fear.
“This is the fate of many families who, after the evacuation order, went out seeking shelter. On the street.”
