“We survived by a miracle yesterday,” says Sahar Kalloub (24), as she describes seeing her neighbours being pulled from under rubble near their home in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip.
Kalloub’s house was partially damaged in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that was launched in the wake of the Hamas attack on October 7th, in which 1,400 people in Israel were killed. But the damage to her house is the least of her worries, Kalloub says, as she struggles to find words for the “massacre” happening around her for the past two weeks.
“The situation is getting worse. My youngest sister, Makak, has been crying night and day and is scared to death and has a fever. We had to evacuate our building in the blink of an eye, nothing with us, just bringing our own souls, running in the streets and heading to the unknown,” she tells The Irish Times.
Palestinian officials say more than 4,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel begin its air strikes.
There was “no safe place to go”, Kalloub says, and she and her two sisters were “left crying in pain” after arriving at a hospital that had reached “breaking point” and had no space for them.
After evacuating their home, Kalloub says, she and her family “got suffocated and had to breathe through a wet towel” as they noticed plumes of smoke descending.
“The current situation is really harsh and difficult to describe. It’s unbelievable. Whole houses are being flattened over the heads of people. We don’t have underground shelters, we don’t have any safe places. Every place is being targeted,” she says.“We have been suffering as Palestinians for 75 years now. I myself am six wars old.”
Omar Ghrieb, an Oxfam policy officer who has been living in Gaza for more than 25 years, described the situation as “dangerously escalating” in recent days. “It’s getting worse by the minute. We’re going through very continuous, very heavy bombardment,” he told The Irish Times.
“Everything happened all of a sudden, people didn’t have a chance to properly stock up on food. We’re having only three to four hours of electricity per day. You can’t really predict anything,” he added.
As confirmation was awaited that humanitarian aid, including water, food and medicine, would be allowed into Gaza through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, Ghrieb said.people in Gaza still “don’t know where to go, there are no safe zones and the borders are closed”.
Khloud Jwefil, another Oxfam staff member based in Gaza, said the situation was “too much to handle”.
In a video message shared with The Irish Times, Jwefil said she and her family had been left homeless by an Israeli air strike.
“We were running in the streets trying to find a safe place to shelter. I have lost my house, I have lost everything. All the time we are hearing heavy shelling, heavy bombing everywhere,” she said.
Samah Kassab (42) said she and her two teenage children had spent the initial days of the bombing campaign between homes in Gaza, after being warned the flat where they lived was not safe.
“I left my house since the escalation, we had to evacuate our area, we were very afraid, our children are very afraid,” she said. On October 12th, she said, she discovered the building where the family had lived had been destroyed.
“I was born in Gaza, I have been in Gaza 42 years. This is our land ... We are displaced now, homeless, where can we go?,” she asked. “My flat, my house, they destroyed everything.”
Kassab, who works for the charity Action Aid in Gaza, said she struggled to find the words to express how she felt about what was happening in the besieged enclave.
A single parent with a 15-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son, she said she had worked hard to “build this home for me and my children”.
As she spoke the sound of an explosion could be heard in the distance. “This is how we are living,” she said. “We cannot sleep in the night, and we cannot rest during the day ... I am thinking about my children, I am thinking of my relatives.
“We haven’t anything, we are not protected,” she said.
In the occupied West Bank, violence has surged since Israel began bombarding the Gaza Strip, with clashes between Israeli soldiers and settlers and Palestinians worsening.
More than 70 Palestinians have been killed in West Bank violence since October 7th, Palestinian human rights groups say, and hundreds have been arrested by Israeli officers, according to both Israeli and Palestinian accounts. Israeli forces raided and carried out a drone on a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank on Thursday, killing 13 people including five children, Palestinian officials said; the Israel military said one of its officers was killed.
In Jerusalem, Yehuda Shaul (40) said voices in Israeli society calling for restraint in its response to the attacks by Hamas were “marginalised”.
Shaul is a former staff sergeant in the Israel Defence Forces, who went on to co-found Breaking the Silence, an organisation made up of former Israeli soldiers who campaign against what they say are IDF military abuses.
He said the killing of more than 1,400 people in southern Israel by Hamas had left blood “boiling” among Israelis.
“Everyone knows someone or is related to someone who knows someone who was injured, murdered or kidnapped,” he said.
In response to such a striking act of violence it was tempting to respond with anger, hatred and “demand for revenge” . It was harder to “take a breath [and] fill your heart with compassion”, the campaigner said.
However, he said, some families of victims of the Hamas attack had come out to say “don’t flatten Gaza in the name of my grief”.
“If we go into Gaza and kill 30,000, 100,000, will that bring peace? No. Will that bring stability? No,” he said. Unless there was a political resolution the region would continue to be “doomed to violence”.
