A Fateful Year: How It Feels to Lose Gaza

Although I grew up in Gaza and lived through many Israeli escalations — with some members of my family killed because of the occupation and siege — I never imagined an attack on the scale of October 7 could happen. 

I thought something similar to the Great March of Return in 2018 would reoccur in Gaza, a protest Israel also crushed, killing hundreds of Palestinians and injuring more than 36,000 others. The Great March of Return started when Palestinian refugees gathered at the Gaza border and demanded their return by erecting tents there.

When I read the news, I could not believe my eyes. An attack at such scale had never happened before. 

It took me a few days to accept that an attack of this magnitude had taken place. I was deeply concerned in my heart. My first comment to my friends when I learned of the attack was that Israel would level Gaza to the ground.

This assessment was based on my experiences in Gaza and the brutality of the Israeli war machine toward Palestinians. I was so worried about my family and friends. Knowing Gaza would never be the same again occupied my mind.

Gaza has been destroyed and rebuilt many times, but to see an entire area of 2.3 million people destroyed, its people dehumanized and then starved to death, was something I was never prepared for.

In one year, Israel has destroyed some 85% of Gaza’s homes, almost all of Gaza’s hospitals and displaced some 1.9 million Palestinians. All the universities in Gaza have been deliberately destroyed by the Israeli army, and most of the schools, now converted into shelters, have either been destroyed or damaged.

I watched, feeling helpless, my own family be displaced. I read the names of my childhood friends, schoolmates and neighbors on the news being killed. Death became so normalized that Palestinians began to feel numb about the news of their loved ones being killed or stuck under the rubble.

I saw a total of 30 members of my extended family killed. My friend Hassan Al-Najjar, who attended the same primary school, was also killed along with his family in an Israeli air strike. Mahmoud Shukur, the younger brother of my friend Ayman, who was killed by the Israeli army in 2014, was pulled from under the rubble of their house. His cousin was killed, his mother injured. Mahmoud himself was disabled and could not walk after being injured at a construction site in 2019.

I read the news that my neighbor Samer Abu Yousef had been killed by an Israeli shell north of Al-Nuseirat refugee camp, which is now a buffer zone after Israel built the Netzarim Corridor to divide Gaza into north and south and prevent displaced Palestinians from returning to their destroyed homes in the north.

In November, my friend Raed Qaddoura, who had a graduate degree in political science from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, was killed along with 53 members of his family. Raed’s four children were killed in the air strike, including his two-week-old twins, whose mother gave birth to them after a caesarean section without anesthesia at the Kamal Edwan Hospital in northern Gaza.

Refaat Alareer, Gaza’s well-known storyteller and teacher, wrote to me to say that he was ​“shocked” that Raed had been killed along with his family. A few weeks later, on December 6, Refaat was killed in another Israeli air strike in Gaza. His writings and poetry, especially his poem ​“If I Must Die,” became an inspiration for so many people.

“If I Must Die” went viral, as it served his last words to the world that waited for his updates. It spoke to all people of the need to uplift Palestinian voices and to tell their stories.

Now, I try to preserve the legacy of Refaat, my mentor and close friend. I edited a book that collects his writings titled If I Must Die: Poetry & Prose which will be released on December 6.

To honor Refaat’s legacy too, the American Friends Service Committee where I work, and the Hashim Sani Center for Palestine Studies at the Universiti Malaya in Malaysia collaborated to publish 27 stories of displaced people in Gaza.

I feel Refaat watching us and reading these stories, feeling proud that his legacy of storytelling continues by his students.

One of the special things about Refaat is that he continued to look after his students and their families if the students left Gaza. I was one of these students. 

When my father fell ill, Refaat put me in touch with a doctor who diagnosed my father’s exact condition. Due to the lack of medicine in Gaza, and despite my attempts to send medicine, my father died of a stroke on May 21. He is one of thousands of Palestinian elders who lost their lives in the war. 

I tried to evacuate my father from Gaza, but the Turkish consulate in Jerusalem told us his name was not approved for travel. My father loved Gaza, and three months before he died, told me he wanted to ​“die in Gaza.” It was hard for my father to leave Gaza, a place he lived in for 67 years and start a new life elsewhere. My father didn’t want to live as a stranger in a land foreign to him and he wanted to end his life where it started, in Gaza.

Now, a year after October 7, 2023, my thoughts are divided between my own family in Turkey, my family in Gaza, and my mother and brother who were evacuated from Gaza and now live in Turkey. 

I have to care for my family here, take my brother and mother to their medical appointments, and make sure they feel fine and settled.

Palestinians in Gaza have always said Gaza will not leave us even if we leave it. 

The survivor guilt haunts Gazans wherever they go, we simply can’t forget about Gaza because we know the amount of injustice taking place there — and this feels exactly true, a year after Israel began its genocide in Gaza — trying to erase us.