As I began to write this, here in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, Israeli missiles were striking nearby. Once you get over the initial shock of the loud explosions, the shaking of the house and your knees, the first instinct is to immediately rush to calm the children whose cries somehow seem louder and more painful than the strikes themselves.
Throughout Israel’s invasion, people in northern Gaza have been told to move to the “safety” of the south. But our day-to-day lives here are testament to the fact that in Gaza, nowhere is safe. As missiles fall, our house is filled with relatives, including lots of children – some of whom lost their homes nearby to Israeli airstrikes, others who have fled the bombardment in northern Gaza for the “safety” of the south. It was here in the south that I lost my closest relatives on my father’s side. Three brothers and their wives and children were struck by Israeli missiles, and their entire building was reduced to rubble. Only a few of them survived, mainly those who had gone out to buy supplies. They had no warning whatsoever, and no leaflets had been dropped in the area telling people to evacuate.
It has been a few weeks since they were killed; girls younger than me, with dreams bigger than this tiny strip we were born in. My father is still struggling to get over that. I don’t know if the rest of us have. We are still somehow dreaming of a lasting ceasefire. My cousins dream of returning to their homes. The children dream of going back to their bedrooms and their toys.
And yet, when we look around and listen to the news – which I admit is not very often, considering communication and internet access is scarce, and it is always a mission to go hunting for a solar-powered place to charge our phones and power banks – it seems very likely we may lose this last remaining house too, or be driven out yet again, if we survive at all. The “pause” in hostilities is only agreed to last for four days. The intensifying bombardment and shelling in the south in the preceding days gave us a dreadful sense that, after the “pause”, it will be our turn for a larger-scale campaign and invasion in Khan Younis.
Israeli officials are already considering expanding their ground invasion into Khan Younis. That prospect is too great for us to imagine. Almost a million people have already had to leave northern Gaza for the south. We are running out of food. Taps are decorative at this point, as is the fridge. There is never any running water or electricity. All the canned food and pasta we had has run out. Flour is the main thing we have left. We are having to pluck fruit off the trees in the garden and bake bread on wood fires, or use our neighbour’s clay oven. We still make dangerous trips to buy supplies, but it is so hard to find anything in the shops.
The streets of Khan Younis are packed. Displaced people, if they are not staying with relatives or hosts, are sleeping in schools, in tents and in the streets. The nights are very cold, even for us with roofs over our heads. All of our windows are either already broken or are left open to avoid glass shattering from the impact of nearby bombing. We don’t have enough blankets, and several dozen of us got the flu. Winter is really setting in and those in tents are most affected by the rain.
If we are forced to leave Khan Younis too, where are we supposed to go? We hate to think that Israel really wants to drive us out of Gaza altogether and into Sinai, but at this point it is a genuine concern. We are already hearing statements about turning Khan Younis “into a soccer field” and driving people out as the “solution” for Gaza. The world watched as Israeli missiles destroyed our homes, our mosques and churches, our hospitals. They watched as entire families were wiped out and, according to an update from Unicef’s executive director three days ago, more than 5,300 children were killed. Our greatest fear is that they will continue to watch as those who survive the carpet bombing are driven out of their homeland altogether.
Rozan lives in Khan Younis in Gaza