It's Ruba from Gaza

Today is the 29th of December and I’m going to speak about an experience I had at the hospital and some other experiences shared by people I met while there. A few days ago one of my friends told me that she was going to take a shower in the hospital. It sounded very weird to me and I said I’d join her. I was curious what it was like to take a shower at the hospital. We agreed to go there at 6.30 in the morning. Once there we headed to the kidney department which was in the basement. I thought we’d be the earliest to get there but it turned out that there was already a queue of about 12 women waiting for their turn to take a shower. There was a man waiting outside the bathroom who basically lives in the hospital because he gets dialysis every day. He goes to see his family just once a week. So everyone knows him and he had taken on the role of arranging the queue of women waiting for a shower. He was very supportive but he also complained that all the hot water had finished because som...

Today is the 24th of December and I want to write about the rising number of people attempting to leave the Gaza Strip. In every war there are so many civilians who get caught in the crossfire and people in Gaza are no exception. There are people who are trying to leave by any means possible and everyone is using whatever contacts they have - relatives, co-workers, previous colleagues, friends, anyone - in order to try and facilitate the process of them leaving Gaza for the time being. How can we blame them as more and more innocent civilians are losing their homes and their lives every day.  For me, I have brothers in Canada who I can go to and rely on. However, I still love my home and I like being in Gaza. It’s going to be a hard decision for me to leave because, like many others here, this is the place where I was born, where I’ve been working, where I made friends, where I went to school, where I’ve lived most of my life, and so I have loyalty to this place.  There are al...

Today is the 23rd of December and the war is still going on. I believe that the Security Council should be discussing how to ensure there is a ceasefire in Gaza. However, the news says that the Security Council has passed a resolution to increase ‘assistance’ (as you know, I don’t refer to it as humanitarian ‘assistance’ but humanitarian rights) to the people in Gaza and this is not acceptable. In my opinion, the UN as a body has started to lose its credibility. For us the UN is not an organization to rely on when it comes to humanitarian ‘assistance’ because it’s all in the hands of Israel. The next few days will show that.  Today I woke up again with mixed feelings. I realized that I haven’t had coffee for over a week and I’m fine with that - does this mean that I’ve stopped being addicted to coffee? I don’t know. When I look at the pictures of the singers from the 50s, 60s, 70s and 90s in my room, sometimes I find myself singing old songs that I learned a long time ago. Then sud...

Today is the 21st of December and this blog is going to be a hard one to read. I am warning you now that if you cannot listen to shocking, terrifying and disgusting details then this blog is not for you. Living through this war is like living through a horror movie and you will see why when you read these stories. Of course, nothing  is more dramatic and sad than being forced to flee your home, to move from one place to another and to end up being displaced. For me I came immediately to Rafah because I knew people here but that's not the case for everyone. There are people who left from Gaza City to Deir El Balah to a school, and then to Khan Younis and then to Rafah so they have had to flee 4 or 5 times. This war has made us be away from our homes for over two months now, forcing another family to host us, and there are others living in schools or in the streets or in tents. There’s nothing worse than not knowing where your relatives are or what they’re doing or even losing them -...

Today is the 18th of December and for almost 3 days we have been completely cut off from the outside world as we had no internet or phone connection. In today’s blog post I’ll be explaining what it means to be living through a war with no communication at all, including mobiles, telephones or the internet.  We have had zero contact with anyone for quite a few days. For us this meant that a massacre was going to happen and it turned out to be true. A few massacres happened and in all of them people died but for us the worst one of all was the killing of people in Kamal Adwan Hospital in the North. Tanks and tractors entered into the hospital courtyard and started running over and crushing  anything in their way. Many tents were knocked over with the people inside them and the tanks were just crushing them.  A lot of people were unable to escape and people who were still alive ended up being buried with those who were already dead in the sand together. This was a nightmare ...

Today is the 14th of December and the last couple of days have been exhausting. I had completely different plans for what I was going to speak about in my next diary entries but then all these things happened to me and my family and I wanted to share this information with you all. During times of war there are always people who abuse others, either because they are taking advantage or they are desperate - they could be thieves, they could be people who inflate the prices in the market or do other things which harm people.  People’s problems are more than tripled when things like this happen to them during war time. Yesterday I received confirmed information that the entire tower where I used to live was looted. 200 people entered the tower and stole everything. They had experience with opening multi-lock doors and anything that could be taken was stolen. I mean everything , including the sink, the light switches, the shelves, the electrical appliances - anything that you can think ...

Today is the 11th of December. We have been experiencing very difficult nights. The drones are above us all day and during the nights we hear explosions, airstrikes and bombardments so it’s difficult to sleep. I want to explain what it means to be hosted by a family and how this affects your life. There’s a big difference between Arabic culture and Western Culture. Over here, being hosted doesn’t mean that you feel like you’re at home. Being hosted means that the family ‘serves’ you what you need and as guests you remain in a couple of particular places within the house. This is to show that you’re being polite - you’re not just wondering around their house all the time.  So we remain in our two rooms (the room I share with my father during the day and I share the other room with our in laws during the night). If I need something I go to the kitchen and then go back to my room. Because we are confined to these spaces in the house, we don’t share a lot in the host family’s daily lif...

We have been having rough days, but before I talk about them I just want to address a comment I received about my blog. Someone in Gaza told me that it’s not a real reflection of how life is here and I want to make sure that I’m fully understood. The experiences I describe here are my own and I’m trying to find ways to preserve these memories for all the reasons I mentioned earlier. In case we have to flee, in case we get accused of abandoning our land and our country, just like what happened with our grandparents. I mean we have lived through this situation that has made me realize how hard it was for them - when they left they actually did something natural. We can’t even say that they ‘fled’ because they thought they were leaving for a couple of days and coming back, just like we thought too.  The diary entries here describe my life nowadays, and it’s changed dramatically since this war started. I am living with a host family and we supposedly have the ‘best’ situation amongst t...

Today we had a very sad ending to a long day because we learnt that the US vetoed the resolution at the UN Security Council calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Let’s go back and see what happened during the day. I woke up to the sound of loud and excited voices in the building and I wasn’t sure what was going on. It turned out that the host family were trying to make bread using a new method. We have what we call an Egyptian oven and it’s usually metallic used with gas. It’s made of two different layers – in the middle of the two layers there’s a fire that that goes below or above the food depending if you use the upper or lower layer – you can see it in the picture. This oven is not usually used for making bread but more for pastries, sweets and cookies,  however, because there are so many people staying in all three storeys of this building they decided to try it out and see if it could make some bread.          Instead of using gas they had to use a lot of ...

Last night was difficult but it was a little better than the two nights before because I actually got some decent sleep. I woke up feeling better and more positive. Maybe I managed to be positive because I don’t get to hear the news in detail. People who have televisions know a lot more than I do. I am not seeing the terrible pictures and videos that are coming out of this war.  Today I was just desperate to have a good normal day and so that’s what I tried to do. It’s funny - the room I’m staying in was the host family’s daughters’ room when they were younger. There are all these posters up of singers and actors from the 1990s. It’s kind of surreal to be surrounded by all these singers and actors when bombs are falling. There’s a picture up of Abdul Halim Hafez who has been my favourite singer since I was four but he passed away in the early 70s. There’s also picture of Leonardo diCaprio from the movie, ‘The Titanic’. I can't help but start thinking about the similarities between ...

Today is the 6th of December and it feels like a really difficult day even though we had a quiet night. I woke up with this urgent feeling that I want to go home, that I don’t care about anything, that I just want to be there again. This idea is not just dominating my mind but the minds of everyone around me. Even though we have had to accept whatever circumstances we have had to face until now, our standards are changing. Certain things are unacceptable. There’s only so long that you can live in a situation like this for.  I know that the parts of daily life I’m describing as a displaced person are nothing compared to the experiences of losing a family member, getting injured, losing a limb or losing your home. But the reality I’m describing is often overlooked as the impact of the conflict creeps into every aspect of life. For example, everyone has their own standards in their own house. They have their own routine that they’re not even aware of until they’re faced with a situati...

Today is December the 5th and we had another very difficult night. The past two nights have been extremely difficult. We could hear bombing throughout the night and nobody could sleep. The sound of bombing felt worse than usual last night. It was unbearable and we didn’t know if we would make it to the morning. Once we got up some of the people staying in our building said that they had received a text message telling them to leave Khan Younis if they are there as it’s not safe. It’s really becoming more and more mad here. Khan Younis is already in the south and so the only place they can flee to is Rafah. Gazans definitely do not want to flee to Egypt - we don’t know where we are going to end up but it’s becoming more and more difficult for people to live here.  For the past couple of days we have been talking a lot about safety. People have been saying that the tunnels underground will be filled with water which means the foundations of the buildings will no longer be stable. We ...

Today is the 3rd of December and I’m sipping my coffee while writing this diary. Last night was really difficult because there were drones flying over our heads the entire night. I really couldn’t sleep and I woke up this morning with an intense headache. Yesterday I woke up to the news that there will no longer be any humanitarian support coming into Gaza. But then the news changed to saying that humanitarian support will be decreased for Gaza, compared to what it’s been the last few days in the truce. This is going to have a huge impact on the people here.  The word humanitarian assistance is very irritating to me. It’s called humanitarian assistance but in reality it’s basic human rights. It should be called humanitarian rights provided to the Palestinian people. When you say humanitarian assistance it sounds like we are a needy people, which is not correct. We deserve to have our human rights fulfilled as every other human being in the world. The word assistance is dehumanizing...

I was really surprised to wake up yesterday and realize we are already in December. When we went to sleep on Thursday night, things felt semi-normal. We were talking a lot and we had some good news on that day. There are three children staying in this building whose mother had been in Jerusalem throughout the war on Gaza, and she was able to return back home yesterday. She had gone for medical treatment and was not allowed to return earlier. It was lovely to see how happy her children and husband were to have her back and they got all dressed up to receive her. She already had three sons and she returned with a new little baby. Both mother and baby are in good health. And so it felt like life was going on as semi-normal, except for the fact that we were waiting for news about whether the truce would go on. The markets here in Rafah are still in a terrible situation, as are all markets in the Gaza Strip. On Thursday the markets had some items but there were many essential things missing...