How did we not notice it's already a new year?

I have no idea how this past year has already ended. How did Christmas time pass and the new year start without me even realizing? This was always my favorite time of year. Every year I celebrated Christmas and this year I didn’t even know it was Christmas. I used to celebrate it with my family and we’d also celebrate the new year together. Sometimes when my father was very busy at his shop I’d celebrate it with neighbors and friends from my building. It was always a very beautiful time of year. 

So again, I don’t know how it came and went without me even noticing. All we have been thinking about is finding our relatives who were missing. We finally got the good news that my 90-year-old aunt was found. She’s my aunt from my father’s side like I wrote before - she lost two grandchildren - one was her son’s child and the other was her daughter’s.  We finally found out where she was after calling everyone we possibly could. There was hardly any communication at the time but eventually my father received a message on his mobile saying that she had tried to call but the phone was off. As soon as that message came through, he called her back immediately. 

To my surprise, this was the first time I saw my father who is 80 years old crying like a baby, and she was crying like a baby too on the other side of the line. She kept telling him “I was trying to find you,” and he kept on telling her that he was trying to find her too. She was actually staying with her daughter who had lost one of her children. When we found her, it was an incredible moment of relief and happiness for us, but then we found that she was starving to death. It’s not that she doesn’t have money to buy food - she doesn’t have access to places to buy things from. So they don’t have any supplies at home, not even flour. She said “If we die now then it’s because we don’t have access to food.” 

This is a problem being faced by many people in north Gaza. The problem is not money; the problem is accessibility. The same applies to one of my aunts on my mother’s side; there are five people at home and they are starving. They have the money but they don’t have access to food. They are afraid of going out to seek basic food items because they could be shot by a sniper or killed by strikes so they prefer to stay at home. This aunt had to leave her house at one point because there were intense airstrikes in her area. She left her house and broke into a relative’s empty house who fled to the southern part in order to stay there for a couple of days. But then the explosions were even stronger in that place and so she decided to go back home. This all happened in Gaza city in the northern part of Gaza.

For us here who have access to food, most of the time it’s canned food and I feel that it’s toxic. I feel it in my body and I see it in my face - my face is so dull, my skin is sagging, I don’t feel as active as I used to be, wrinkles have started to crawl all over my face. It’s because of this type of food and because of the environment in which they are using cooking oil rather than normal fuel for cars so it’s also becoming extremely bad for everyone.

It’s also stressful not knowing what’s going to happen in the future. I know I want to leave for a while and perhaps then I’ll be able to decide. I don’t feel that I’m well prepared to make a life decision like this. I know I’ll leave when I can and then I will make the decision after all of this is behind me. While I’m here the war is constantly in the background, and you can hear it when I send these voice messages to my friend who is helping me to put this blog together. There is the constant sound of drones. We try to go to sleep early but then we end up staying up late even if there aren’t explosions in the vicinity because of the never-ending sound of drones. It never feels safe. 

The war is exacerbating certain situations here. Domestic violence is increasing as people are fighting over simple things. There are kind families who are still receiving families like us. Whoever can leave Gaza City now is leaving - I know there are people who are choosing to stay but whoever can leave Gaza City or the northern part of Gaza still come to the South whenever it’s possible to come. We will see what the future holds for us. For the time being I started to feel that it’s repetitive - people are dying, we forgot about electricity, the water problem continues. Everything is the same, day in and day out. The hardest part is when you hear about someone being killed because we have lost our family members and friends in the war and everyone is affected by this. 

Everyone is affected by this war in one way or another. Everyone has lost someone or some people have also lost parts of their bodies. We don’t know what’s going to happen, we just know the situation continues to be horrible. Every evening we still all gather together and we share stories. We hear about people dying every day. They are seen as numbers but behind each number is the story of someone who was loved by their family, who has done lots of things for their community, who has children who need for them to still be alive, who still has not completed their duties in this world - they still have things to do but they were killed anyway.