‘This would become hell’: 8 people on the impact of the war in Gaza

I lost my parents. But I still believe in peace

The last time I spoke to my father was on the phone on Oct. 7 at 7:45 a.m.

My dad told me that he and my mom were in the safe room at their home in Netiv HaAsara, Israel. They could hear the shooting and sirens.

“I love you, and we shall talk soon,” I told them. Five minutes later, when I called, there was no answer.

I was born in Kibbutz Nir-Am, which was founded by my grandparents. My father, Yakobi Inon, was born in the kibbutz. He and my mother, Bilha, raised my three sisters, my brother and me. At 14, we moved to the nearby community of Netiv HaAsara, where my parents built their house less than a quarter-mile from Gaza’s border. Their 11 grandchildren spent many weekends and summer days in the house we called “heaven.”

None of us could imagine that this would become hell.

We feared the worst that morning. We could not contact any neighbors. In the afternoon, we received a call from a security officer who told us that my parents’ house burned to the ground. In addition to my parents, 18 more members of the community died in Hamas’s attack.

My 78-year-old father was an admirable farmer. Yearly crop losses due to drought, floods and weather were devastating, but he always decided to sow again, saying that the next year would be better. My talented mother, who was 76, was a mandala painter. In a mandala she gave me a few years back, she painted: “We can fulfill all our dreams if we have the courage to chase them.”

The biggest impact of Oct. 7 on my life was understanding that I was fooled to believe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be manageable. Those who believe that bombs will bring quiet, walls will defend and war will bring security are naive followers of false leaders. The voice of peace is the voice of reason.

In the past 12 months, I have been inspired by so many people from all over the world. Israeli and Palestinian peace activists are working on the ground. We are much more determined than before — but we need an international coalition, one that ends the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and negotiates peace between both sides.

There is no better time to sow hope and reconciliation than now, in October, in the same season my father used to sow wheat for so many years. This time, it’s my turn to make next year a better one.

Maoz Inon is an Israeli peace entrepreneur who founded several peace-focused tourism initiatives.

A miracle of life among death and destruction

On Oct. 7 last year, I learned I was pregnant with a baby — a life-changing event on its own. The day also marked the onset of Israel’s relentless bombing of my home, Gaza, and the beginning of a year of fear, when my family was forced to flee our home and move again and again to seek safety.

It was the most difficult time of my life. But I tried to calm myself for the sake of my unborn child.

Over the next four months, my family and I evacuated from one area to another, narrowly escaping death many times. (My aunt and cousins were not so lucky.) I was exhausted, and my pregnancy was risky, but I did everything I could to keep my baby safe. The day I found out I was pregnant with a baby girl, after having given birth to three boys, was one of the happiest of my life. I promised myself I would be strong for my daughter.

Many months in, we were displaced again, to a tent in central Gaza’s town of Deir al-Balah. The heat, the dust and the insects became a daily fixture. But the hardships didn’t end there. Every evacuation cost us no less than $300 — equivalent to an entire month’s expenses. My due date was fast approaching, but we didn’t have money for hospital fees, transportation or even food.

How would I deliver a baby in a tent? Israel’s bombing continued, and shells flew overhead, without a quiet moment to contemplate or grieve. Many nights passed without sleep.

Then, one day, my baby stopped moving. Terrified, I finally managed to make my way to the hospital through a series of small miracles. The doctor told me my baby’s condition was unstable, and I needed to deliver immediately. The first day passed, and then the second. My baby girl, Wateen, finally arrived. It was as if the whole world lit up for a brief moment despite the shroud of darkness that surrounded us.

I left the hospital and returned to my tent. The terror began anew. I was scared for this fragile life I brought into this harsh and indifferent world. No food to nourish myself with, no clean air to breathe, no running water to wash myself with postpartum. I couldn’t even buy her essential items such as diapers or clothes. But we have persevered. I pray that this nightmare ends so that my husband, my children and I can live the peaceful, safe and dignified lives that we deserve, just like the rest of the world.

Amany Al-Haddad is a mother of four from Gaza City.

Staying silent while militants are at your door

The bullet holes in my living room window help tell the story.

I took a photo of the damage in November, when I returned for the first time since the Oct. 7 massacre to my home in Nahal Oz, a small Israeli community less than a mile from the Israel-Gaza border.

Nahal Oz is a kibbutz — a collective agricultural community — and it was founded in 1953 alongside one of Israel’s most dangerous borders.

On the evening of Oct. 7, our community was supposed to celebrate its 70th anniversary. The day turned into one of horror and grief, as more than 100 armed Hamas terrorists stormed the kibbutz, murdering 15 of our friends and neighbors and kidnapping seven, among them an 84-year-old woman and an 8-year-old girl.

For long hours on that day, my wife and I barricaded ourselves inside our home with our two daughters, who were 3 and 2 years old. The house was locked, and the window blinds were rolled down. There was no electricity, which meant that inside the small room where we hid, there was total darkness. We heard the terrorists firing into our living room and trying to break through the door. We had to stay silent — and to keep our girls calm — so the armed men surrounding our home wouldn’t hear us. I don’t know how we managed to do it.

We left the kibbutz late at night on a bus that carried out dozens of our friends and neighbors. Since then, we have been living as refugees in our own country. We hope to return home, but we don’t know when that will be possible.

My window looks the same as it did when I took this picture. The process of healing, fixing and rebuilding our homes and our lives has been slowed by the fact that a year later, the war still rages.

In many ways, we are still living on Oct. 7, even though the calendar insists on showing us a different date. Two of our neighbors, Omri Miran and Tsachi Idan, both of them fathers of young children, are still in the hands of the enemy — held somewhere in the tunnels of Gaza. We fight for their release — protesting in favor of a deal that would end the war and bring them back to us alive.

Only when that deal happens will we finally be able to change the date on the calendar and start focusing on the future.

Amir Tibon, a diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz, is the author of “The Gates of Gaza: The Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands.”

My job is to heal

I’ll never forget the 9-year-old girl in her torn, patchy dress. She was seemingly unaffected by the January rain in Gaza, though I shivered in my winter coat. I asked where her family was.

“All of them died,” she replied in an emotionless voice. Her hollow stare pulled me back for a moment to Israel’s 2008 assault on Gaza, when I was her age — frozen in shock and horror, seeing bodies split in half, organs scattered.

Growing up surrounded by injuries and death, I decided at a young age to dedicate my life to healing. I had been planning to pursue a master’s degree in immunology in Manchester, England, but when Israel’s attacks on Gaza began, the border closed, shattering my dreams. As schools overflowed with displaced civilians, and my family and I were repeatedly displaced, I began working in shelters and hospitals, treating outbreaks of communicable diseases.

Overcrowding, lack of sanitation and blocked access to basic health care make Gaza a breeding ground for organisms resistant to multiple drugs. I’ve lost track of how many patients died from these lethal infections.

Cancer patients in Gaza not only suffer from the disease, they also must endure the anguish of waiting on the medical evacuation list. Hani, a slender old man with a white beard covering his rugged face, had lung cancer. He came daily to our clinic as he waited to be evacuated for weeks that turned into to months. By the time Hani’s name appeared on the list, it was too late. Days after he left Gaza, he died.

The term “first-responder” has new meaning as we rush to respond to attacks in which we’ve narrowly averted death. My daily journey to the emergency room is fraught with danger — tanks, armed drones looming. I take routes to avoid being targeted, dodging homes reduced to rubble.

On Sept. 9, I escaped an airstrike in Mawasi camp by seconds. I’ll never forget the child who sold sweets in Mawasi, wearing a blue UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, shirt. I found him missing a leg and hand, bleeding out, too shocked to cry. I used his shirt as a tourniquet. His eyes haunt me. Though he survived, will he ever recover from this trauma?

Struggle isn’t incidental to our lives as Palestinians — it’s a theme. Gaza has been incrementally suffocated by Israel. Yet I cannot let the weight of suffering crush me.

Majed Jaber is a doctor who has been volunteering in the emergency and intensive care units at Emirati Hospital and European Gaza Hospital and many shelters since Oct. 7 last year.

The longest four minutes of my life

Like so many young people, getting my college degree was one of my life goals. Now, I’m happy if I can find a pillow and a quiet space to think for a few minutes a day.

As a 21-year-old computer engineering student from Gaza City, I should be starting the new academic year. Instead, I’m living in a tent with my family, while studying online for a few hours each day at a nearby “internet point.”

Israel bombed my university and my home, destroying basic comforts along with our dreams and futures. Over the past year, I’ve experienced things I never imagined: cousins showing up at my doorstep with missing limbs, a pervasive sense of hunger and helplessness, and deprivation of sanity and purpose.

My parents were university lecturers who instilled in me a profound connection to our land. My grandmother, a Nakba survivor who was displaced from her village of Hamama in what is now “the Gaza Envelope,” endured the dispossession of her world twice in her lifetime, first in 1948 and then again last year. In the end, she died of heartbreak after learning that both her sons were killed within weeks of each other in separate Israeli drone strikes. One was a journalist, and the other was on his way to a mosque.

I experienced the longest four minutes of my life on Nov. 2, when my family evacuated to central Gaza — our eighth forced displacement — along the deadly coastal road. Etched in my memory are the charred remains of a family on a donkey cart, white flags scattered by their sides, along with the bombed ambulance and paramedics that attempted to rescue them.

Throughout it all, my siblings and I have tried to stay strong for our mother, who has been struggling emotionally. We learned to suppress our feelings to avoid adding to her burden. To this end, I created a small place of solace called the “venting corner,” where everyone in our encampment was invited to retreat and cry, without questions or judgment.

At some point, we came to terms with death. However, I find hope in the resolve and creativity of the young people around me, who constitute the majority of Gaza’s population and are testaments to our collective strength and tenacity.

We’ve learned to deal with the unexpected and to always make something out of nothing. Despite being deprived of our freedoms for decades, our people have accomplished so much with so little. Gaza is our home, and it is everything to us.

Shaimaa Ahmed is a computer engineering student from Gaza City.

I just want to open a window

It took an act of war for me to get to know my neighbors.

My husband, two teenage children, our two pets and I lived in the pastoral town of Shlomi, bordering Lebanon in Israel’s north. We lived a normal life and mainly kept to ourselves. It was Shabbat morning on Oct. 7 when I first sensed something was wrong. I woke up early and saw a live broadcast of the attacks as they unfolded. On Oct. 8, the day after Hamas’s massacres in the south of Israel, Hezbollah began firing rockets from the north. Although we were far from Gaza, the threat was imminent — we have known for years that Hezbollah’s Radwan force dug tunnels into Shlomi from Lebanon. With the army in disarray, what would stop us from becoming the next Beeri, the kibbutz where dozens were killed by Hamas militants?

For 10 days, we lived in terror. Every siren triggered my panic attacks, a lingering wound of the 2006 Lebanon War and earlier intifadas. Finally, on Oct. 17, we were evacuated to Jerusalem, to what can be generously called a hotel (more accurately a hostel). One room was provided to house all four of us and our dog and cat. For two months, until we got an adjoining room, there was no privacy, no space.

The hotel food is repetitive and bland, nothing like my home-cooked flavors. We don’t have a microwave, just an electric kettle. We packed clothes for five days, thinking we would be back home soon. Instead, we’ve been stuck for a year, making do with the bare minimum. My children have transferred schools four times since we arrived.

We got by with the support of fellow residents of Shlomi, who were crammed into the hotel with us. When someone from Shlomi was sick, everyone would organize to help care for them. We got to meet our neighbors. Being private people, it took being displaced by missile fire to interact with our neighbors from our own block.

Before the war, I worked as a veterinary nurse in our neighboring town of Nahariya, but it became unviable. That’s when I started doing nails. I’d always done my own, and the hotel let me set up a little corner in the lobby where I could take a few customers. I invested in courses and threw myself into them. Over time, I started studying medical pedicures, and I have landed some clients in Jerusalem. Shlomi is now a ghost town, with constant ambient booms from incoming rockets. I miss home — the green hills, the fresh Galilee air, the simple joy of opening a window and seeing nature. I miss normal life.

Inbar Ben Harush is a wife and mother of two from Shlomi, Israel.

A family of refugees for the first time

There was a tremor in my cousin Hamudeh’s voice when he called in the middle of October last year, trying to describe what had just happened: His niece Nadia, her husband and two children who had fled Gaza City for the supposed safe zone of Deir al-Balah had been killed when Israel bombed the house in which they were sheltering.

We had lost relatives — all civilians — in previous Israeli campaigns. Yet something in my cousin’s grief foreshadowed a far deeper fear than death of family members: annihilation.

Gaza is our home, a place of permanence. Over the decades, the Al-Rayyis family suffered from the violence of occupation — the arrests, the injuries, the killings. What we had been spared, however, was displacement. Unlike 80 percent of people living in Gaza, we weren’t refugees — or weren’t until last October. Though the family struggled for freedom and security, they didn’t endure the trauma of longing, as most others in Gaza, to return home.

Gaza is where we can trace our ancestors by name back to the 16th century. It is where we had our homes, where we conducted trade. My grandmother imported fabric from Italy that was sold throughout the south of Palestine. Gaza is where our lands grew grapes, melons and oranges for export.

There was always a dichotomy between the Rayyis’s family experience and that of my Armenian mother and her family. In 1948, they were expelled from their Jerusalem home at gunpoint by Israeli soldiers, an event all the more striking since her parents were survivors of the Ottomans’ mass killings of Armenians in 1915. Palestine became their refuge, until it was not.

My cousin’s niece was the first in the family to be killed; since Oct. 7, there have been more than 20 others. Ten were killed by an Israeli bomb in just one day, including Maisara, a young doctor who had recently studied in England, and his sister Areeb, a dentist. One year ago, a dozen first cousins and their families lived in Gaza City. Now, one remains. Others are scattered in the Gaza Strip; a handful have managed to leave entirely, paying exorbitant fees for exit visas.

One cannot begrudge anyone’s desire to leave for safety. I fear, though, that their departure marks a rupture not only from the place we have called home for generations, but also from the practical ones: physical records, now reportedly destroyed, that chronicled birth, death, inheritance and land deeds — all symbols of civilized existence. Yet, to be a Palestinian is to be an optimist. The Nakba generation carries keys, literally, to the homes they will eventually return to.

Jamal Awni Rayyis is a writer based in Baltimore.

One image that defined the horror of Oct. 7

A few weeks ago, as I tucked my 8-year-old into bed, she asked me a very innocent question. “Mommy, when will Naama be rescued? Is someone going to save the hostages?”

As a parent, we are there to reassure our children. But to my daughter’s most simple of questions, I had no answer.

For one year of unbearable anguish, I still have no answers.

On Oct. 7, I found myself awake at 4:30 a.m. The sun had not yet risen on our side of the world, but Israel was facing an incomprehensible attack. As I turned on my phone and realized what was happening, my heart sank. Through the pain and grief, I was also consumed with another thought: How could I help?

At 7:30 p.m. that same Saturday, I watched the Israeli news feed and wrote down names of relatives and victims, whom I messaged on social media platforms. I offered to reach out to global media.

Hours that turned into days were filled with endless stories, conversations, text messages, images and videos. From translating to English and coordinating interviews with media teams in the United States, I found myself becoming a source of help. Hundreds of people including children had been taken captive by Hamas, but one video haunted me.

The image of then-19-year-old Naama Levy being pulled out of a jeep in Gaza, bloody and alone, will define the horror of Oct. 7 for me. Each time I have seen that video of Naama and the fear in her eyes, I am paralyzed. Watching this beautiful, innocent girl in her pajamas shattered me. What if this were my daughter?

After speaking with Ayelet Levy Shachar, Naama’s mother, for the first time, I knew she would take the most special place in my heart. As I walked into meetings with U.N. representatives with Ayelet or entered Congress with her aunt Efrat Moshkoviz this past July, Naama was the driving force. The same Naama who participated in the “Hands of Peace” delegation, which brings together young Americans, Israelis and Palestinians and nurtures young leaders to promote mutual understanding. The girl who became the most recognized victim in the world after Hamas’s attack that day. The girl who embodied everything that was good in the world and yet incomparable evil took her hostage.

For everything Naama is and for all she believes in, I cannot stop fighting for her to come home.

Michelle Rojas-Tal is an American Israeli based near D.C., where she resides with her husband and three children.