I am not a number, I am a real story from Gaza. Remember it | Israel-Palestine conflict News

I’ve been thinking about writing a will.

I didn’t expect to feel death so close to me. I used to say death comes suddenly, we don’t feel it, but during this war, they made us feel everything … slowly.

We suffer before it happens, like expecting your house to be bombed.

It may still be standing since the start of the war, but that feeling of fear remains within you. This fear has worn my heart down, till I feel like it can’t handle anything more.

Since the beginning of the war, I’ve been struggling with the Israeli army being so close to us. I remember the moment tanks entered from the Netzarim area, and I sent a message to all my friends, shocked: “How did they enter Gaza? Am I dreaming?!”

I was waiting for them to withdraw from Gaza, for it to be free again, like we had always known it. Now they’re so close to where I am, in al-Fukhari, east of Khan Younis and north of Rafah. It’s the point where Khan Younis ends and Rafah begins.

They’re so close, forcing us to hear terrifying explosions every moment, making us endure those endless sounds.

This war is different, so different from what I’ve experienced before.

Remember my story

I don’t want to be a number.

That has been stuck in my head since I saw martyrs being referred to as “unknown persons” or placed in mass graves. Some of them are even body parts that couldn’t be identified.

Is it possible that all it would say on my shroud would be “a young woman in a black/blue blouse”?

Could I die as an “unknown person”, just a number?

I want everyone around me to remember my story. I am not a number.

I am the girl who studied for high school and university under exceptional circumstances when Gaza was under a very tight siege. I completed university and looked for work everywhere to help my father, who was exhausted by the siege and had lost his job several times.

I am the eldest daughter in my family, and I wanted to help my father and for us to have a good home to live in.

Wait… I don’t want to forget anything.

I am a refugee. My grandparents were refugees who were forced by the Israeli occupation to leave our occupied land in 1948.

They moved to the Gaza Strip and lived in the Khan Younis refugee camp, west of the city.

I was born in that camp, but the Israeli army didn’t let me continue my life there.

They demolished our house in 2000, and we were left without shelter for two years. We moved from one uninhabitable house to another, until UNRWA gave us another house in 2003 in al-Fukhari.

That wonderful area, with all the farmland, where we tried to build a life in the neighbourhood that was named “European Housing”, after the European Hospital located there.

The house was small, not enough for a family of five, with a father and a mother. It needed extra rooms, a living room, and the kitchen needed work.

We lived there for about 12 years anyway, and as soon as I could, I started working in about 2015 to help my father.

I helped him make the house comfortable to live in. Yes, we achieved that, but it was so hard. We finished building our home just three months before October 7, 2023.

Yes, nearly 10 years I spent rebuilding it piece by piece according to our financial ability, and we just managed to finish it right before the war.

When the war came, I was already exhausted, from the siege and the difficulty of life in Gaza. Then the war came to completely drain me, wear down my heart and make me lose my focus.

I wake up running

Since the beginning of the war, we’ve been fighting for something.

Fighting for survival, fighting not to die from hunger or thirst, fighting not to lose our minds from the horrors we witness and experience.

We try to survive by any means. We’ve gone through the displacement – in my life, I’ve lived in four houses, and every house ended up near bombardment by the Israeli army.

We don’t have a safe place to be. Before the ceasefire, we lived 500 days of sheer terror.

What I didn’t do during the war, unfortunately, was cry. I tried to stay strong and kept my sadness and anger inside, which exhausted my heart and weakened it even more.

I was positive and supportive of everyone around me. Yes, the people from the north will return. Yes, the army will withdraw from Netzarim. I wanted to give everyone strength, while inside me there was great weakness I didn’t want to show.

I felt that if it showed, I would perish in this terrifying war.

The ceasefire was my great hope for survival. I felt like I had made it. The war was over.

When people wondered: “Will the war return?” I confidently replied, “No, I don’t think it will. The war is over.”

The war did return, and closer than ever to me. I lived the continuous fear brought on by never-ending shelling. They used every kind of weapon against us – rockets, shells from planes and tanks. The tanks kept firing, surveillance drones kept flying; everything was terrifying.

I haven’t really slept for over a week. If I doze off, I’m woken up by the sound of explosions and wake up running. I don’t know where I am trying to go, but I run through the house.

In the constant panic, I put my hand on my heart, wondering if it would withstand much more.

That’s why I sent a message to all my friends, asking them to talk about my story so that I would not just be a number.

We are living through unbearable days as the Israeli army destroys the neighbourhood around me. There are many families still living here. They don’t want to leave because displacement is exhausting – physically, financially, and mentally.

The first displacement I remember was the one in 2000, when I was about eight years old.

Israeli army bulldozers came into the Khan Younis camp and destroyed my uncle’s house and my grandfather’s. Then, for some reason, they stopped at our house.

So we left. It was Ramadan, and my parents figured we could come back later. They found a dilapidated shell of a house for us to shelter in, temporarily, they thought.

I couldn’t bear the idea that we had lost our home, so I would run back to the house where all those beautiful memories with my grandparents were, and I would grab a few things to take back to my mother.

The Israeli army demolished our house the night before Eid, and me and my family went there on the first day of Eid al-Fitr. I remember celebrating Eid on the rubble, wearing my new Eid outfit.

The Israeli army doesn’t let us keep anything; it destroys everything, leaving us with nothing but sorrow in our hearts.

I don’t know what the future holds if the world doesn’t save us from this terrifying army.

I don’t know if my heart will withstand these endless sounds any more. Don’t ever forget me.

I’ve fought hard for my life. I’ve worked hard, as a journalist and a teacher for 10 years, dedicating myself.

I have students I love and colleagues with whom I have beautiful memories.

Life in Gaza has never been easy, but we love it, and we can’t love any other home.