A real life Horror Movie

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 - your sons, daughters, parents and family members. We feel like we have been taken 50 years back in time, just like Netanyahu said he would do to us. 

It has been heartbreaking over the last couple of days trying to look for my aunt from my mother’s side and my aunt from my father’s side. We still can’t find them, we don’t know where they are and we don’t know what they are doing. Nothing makes your heart feel like it’s bleeding tears more than watching children crying, wanting milk or food, and knowing that this cannot be provided because people do not have money or products are not available in the market or even both.

Yesterday we heard terrifying news about our relatives so maybe this is the first real story of terror that I’m telling in this blog. One of our distant relatives (my cousin's brother in law) was with his family at home when Israeli soldiers entered their building. They separated the men from the women and they took the men in the street. The soldiers were singing loudly and dancing and they asked my relative and all the men to take off all their clothes while the women and children in the house were forced to watch what was happening. Then they actually shot the men dead on the ground and they died naked in the cold. Then several women and children were shot as well. There was one child who was breastfeeding and they were calling for help and support from everywhere. We don’t know what’s happening now with them. We aren’t able to get through to them. I first learnt about this on the news but I did not relate this to my family. Then my relative in Egypt shared the news via a family WhatsApp group.

The stories we hear on a daily basis are horrific. We heard about somebody who was asked to enter a house that was knocked down to check if there was anyone left alive there or not. When he came out of the destroyed house he was pale and in shock. He described how he had seen a woman standing in the middle of the rubble with her eyes wide open staring at him and holding a knife. Of course no one believed it and they wanted to know what was going on. When they entered the rubble they found that there was a woman who had been killed and yes, she was holding a knife. Her arm with the hand holding the knife was at 90 degrees and in her other hand there was a potato, which means she was about to start cooking her food. She ended up in a standing position after the explosion because her body was leaning against a rock. 

It is horrific hearing about people in Gaza City including my own family members  who have been without any food for days now. We don’t know what’s happening with them. What we know for sure is that when one of the families was losing hope of finding anything to drink or eat they took out the water that was still in the bottom of the automatic laundry machine, which is usually disgusting unhealthy water that could have been there for days and months without having anyone checking on it. They drank from that water. That was the only means to keep them alive. 

It is also terrifying hearing about a doctor mentioned in the news who had no choice except to operate on his own daughter - I don’t know how old she was but she died while she was in pain and being operated on by him. She died because of the pain, not because he made a mistake, but because there was no anesthesia. 

At the very beginning of the war I found myself in a horrific situation. It was the 3rd or 4th day of the war when I was going to feed my pets back in my home in Gaza City. As I mentioned in earlier blogs, I was separated from them for a while because there was no space in my sister’s house for them. So I was risking my own life going to see them. When I was about to leave to go there, my relatives warned me that the Israelis had thrown phosphoric bombs in the area. I told them I’m going anyway because now the effect of them would have worn off. I didn’t see any while on my way there but when I left the house at exactly the moment when I closed the door and was turning my back to go in the direction of my car, a phosphoric bomb was thrown at a maximum of 50 meters away from me.  It took me a few seconds to register what was happening. You know when you look at it, it looks deceptively beautiful. After about 2-3 seconds I realized it was a phosphoric bomb so I had to run to my car and then I had to drive in the opposite direction of the wind because the wind was blowing the fumes of the phosphoric bomb towards the other direction. So I wasn’t directly hurt but then I was in a stressful competition with the wind in order to just protect myself from that bomb.

If you want a combination of action, drama and a horror movie then it would be the story of someone who was in one of the schools called Majda Waseela school. The Israelis broke into the school and they held some of the men there. They took one man and told him “You know you must wear make up tonight.” They forced him to wear makeup and they said it was because he was going to be a bride. When he asked about the reason,  they told him it was because he was going to die that night. They made him wear explosives around his waist and then they put a camera on his head and together with a 15-year-old boy they took him somewhere where there are tunnels and they asked him to go into the tunnels. They put a rope around him and told him that once they pulled on the rope he could come back out. So he was forced to walk through the tunnel with the camera on his head, the explosives around his waist and a rope that was being held onto by the Israelis. With the camera on his head the Israelis could see the environment of the tunnels. Eventually they pulled the rope and asked him to go out. Then they took the explosives off from his waist and they said “Ok now you are fine, you’re not going to be a bride tonight but you will one day.” Then they took the 15-year-old boy somewhere and we don’t know what happened to him.

There is another story I heard from Hiba Akkila, a reporter with Al Jazeera. She said that amongst the cases she had seen was one of a 9-year-old boy who was carrying a bag that she thought was his school bag. He said ‘Yes, this used to be my schoolbag but I took everything out of it because I’m here collecting my brother’s body parts. I managed to find all of them and they're all in the bag.” He was happy that he actually managed to find all his brother’s body parts and collect them so that he could bury his whole body.  The correspondent was actually crying while talking about it. 

There are so many other stories that we hear but those are the ones that I noted for now.