For us in Gaza City, enduring daily struggles like staying safe, fighting hunger and protecting ourselves from the bitter cold is a war in itself as the Israeli assault on Gaza continues for 120 days.
Hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes when all they had was. Then there was the loss of a simple place to shelter as Israel bombed them all: hospitals, schools, clinics and any open space where civilians gathered.
The entire population of Gaza has been displaced. The entire population.
What does “house” mean?
After our home was bombed, I was no longer just witness to the thousands of people fleeing their homes to find safety wherever they could.
We went to the United Nations shelter in northern Gaza, my family and I gathering everything that could help us survive and become displaced like our compatriots.
There are around 600,000 people in northern Gaza who are struggling with losses from deprivation, famine and disease because they do not want to leave their land.
It breaks my heart, but I have to admit that we have lost the sense of what “home” means.
Just finding the bare minimum of space and shelter from the elements we need to rest has become a journey of sorrow and pain, our miserable daily routine of looking around us to see where we can possibly sleep.
My family – father, mother, sister, wife and two-year-old son – and I seek relative refuge in the parking lot of a destroyed building.
We dread looking at the weather forecast in these winter conditions. All day, we search for the weather forecast, out of breath, worried about the expected rain that night.
On rainy nights, I take off my coat and wrap it around my baby, making it both a blanket and protection from the cold, with the hope and prayer that it will be enough for her small body.
Survival rations
Beyond housing, there is the struggle for food. I don’t remember the last real meal my son had.
Since wheat was nowhere to be found, we used food grade barley and corn to turn it into flour for bread. Even these alternatives are rare, but they are our only way to get through the day.
It’s also not like there’s the space and safety to grow your own food, what with the bombs and intentional choking of supplies, even water. Aid entering this besieged enclave is very limited and cannot cover our basic daily needs.
So we have had to try to survive the last four months, without income or means of subsistence, while the prices of basic necessities skyrocket, if we can even find them.
As a result, famine is more than widespread in northern Gaza. Babies, children, adults and the elderly all suffer from lack of food.
An ounce of coffee used to cost 10 shekels (about $2.75) and now costs 120 shekels ($33); a liter of drinking water that cost one shekel (less than $0.30) now costs 15 shekels ($4).
If you get food, you still have to cook it, and without cooking gas, people comb the ruins for anything they can burn to make a cooking fire, leaving themselves open to bombing at any time. .
So when we spend every hour of the day searching for food or finding a way to prepare it, we can’t always worry about our safety.
Unrecorded deaths
Medical services in northern Gaza have been virtually non-functional since the start of the ground invasion, and there is now little more than first aid services for the injured or those in need of intensive medical care.
Israel has arrested and killed hundreds of medical personnel, bombed hundreds of medical facilities of varying sizes, and knocked out or exhausted their capacity by cutting off fuel and water.
For the little that remains functional, how could the wounded get there when at least 122 ambulances were targeted and bombed? Then comes the danger of the streets: airstrikes, soldiers kidnapping or shooting Palestinians to death, and mountains of rubble across Gaza.
Even basic medicines like antibiotics and painkillers are in short supply for the thousands of people injured by Israeli attacks, and they are contracting infections and respiratory illnesses as a result.
People need to understand that the number of Palestinians killed in this aggression is much higher than reported. Palestinians dying from kidney failure, cancer, disease, lack of prenatal care – all of this goes unrecorded.
People could have been helped if there had been enough equipment and medicine. People can be saved, but there seems to be little intention to save them.
I report via my phone when managing battery and access to internet or phone service – a more difficult endeavor than ever in northern Gaza.
Banks, post offices, transport and telecommunications are not working.
The list is endless. How can I grasp or explain to the world, to those who even read our words, that what is endured is not only painful but avoidable?
Our calls for support are not abstract words of diplomatic solidarity, but urgent action that helps us feel human in the eyes of the world.
With every hour that passes, fewer and fewer Palestinians in Gaza can appeal to the world. Every day brings its share of deaths, and the rest of us stay, trying to fight death.
In conclusion
I’m not writing about the struggle we experience to create grief. If grief had moved people, we would not be where we are today.
I describe our struggle because, at this point, we have either already been killed or we are slowly being killed.
We appeal to those who are healthy, to those who have a bed to sleep in, to those whose voices can be heard outside this slaughterhouse.
I write to equip you with the knowledge of what humanity undergoes. We, the Palestinians in Gaza, are starving and sleeping in the streets, without any protection from airstrikes.
We are being stripped of our humanity by a military that continues to inflict some of the most painful and inhumane practices of warfare we know today.
It is time for the world to challenge abuse, to take into account human life, to keep it simple and basic, like the needs we need to maintain our breathing.
