Asmaa Elkhaldi was waking up early to pray. It was a Saturday. Light spilled through the windows of her apartment in Gaza’s north.
Then came the sounds of rockets and everything was on fire. Elkhaldi and her husband fled, taking only a laptop and key documents.
Later “the whole building was flattened to the earth without any notification”, she says from south-western Sydney where she now lives. “Some of our neighbours were killed.”
Elkhaldi has been in Australia since November.
“I still feel it very vividly,” she says this week, almost a year after fleeing her homeland. “My body has this kind of trauma and I feel there is going to be a bombardment any time.”
Being in Sydney, she says, is at times “more painful than being in Gaza”. There, at least, “watching the genocide with your family or friends … you know they’re safe”.
“When you are in another country, another continent, your mind can trick you, your worries can exaggerate or can drive you crazy.”
The international court of justice has said it’s “plausible” Israel had committed breaches of the genocide convention. The Israeli government maintains its military operations are a legitimate response to the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023 and has dismissed allegations it is committing genocide as “false” and “outrageous”.
Militants killed about 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians, on 7 October. Of the 250 abducted that day by Hamas, half were released during a short-lived ceasefire in November and half of the remainder are thought to be dead.
More than 41,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel’s military offensive began, according to local health authorities, most of them civilians. The UN says almost 2 million Palestinians have been displaced.
‘I feel I left them all behind’
Elkhaldi first moved to Sydney in April 2023 on a scholarship to study a master’s in public policy at the University of Sydney.
She visited Gaza in August last year and planned to return to Sydney in early 2024 – “but the war happened”.
She and her husband fled to Rafah one week later. Separately, her family left their home in Gaza’s north six weeks after that.
“Thank God they were able to make it,” Elkhaldi says. “They were running in the streets [with] gunshots over their heads.”
In November, she was “among the luckiest” to be evacuated by Australia’s foreign affairs department. But her husband’s name was not on the list.
“The moment I set my feet out of the Rafah crossing, I started to tear my heart out,” Elkhaldi says.
“I feel that I left them all behind and I rescued myself. I feel so much guilt, so much shame, and I kept crying until I arrived at the hotel in Cairo airport.”
‘I lost my appetite for life’
Elkhaldi, who is on a student visa, has now returned to her studies. And her husband has arrived in Sydney.
She cleans the house, prepares lunch, studies. Al Jazeera is always on the television and she stays up late at night to check in with her family.
“We are safe but our families are back in Gaza. We don’t have relief.”
Her mother and two siblings evacuated to Turkey but her father remains stuck in Gaza with her aunts, uncles, cousins and in-laws.
“Sometimes the connection is very poor and I can’t get a hold of him,” Elkhaldi says of her father.
“I fear that he’s, God forbid, in danger. We can’t be settled, we can’t be sound and living normally. We can’t just be blind and living our lives.”
Elkhaldi says what’s most painful is missing something “that doesn’t exist any more”.
“I have a lot of flashbacks at very random times,” she says. “There’s an emptiness inside you and it cannot be filled. I don’t feel the energy to socialise or even be in the streets and see people living normally while my people are not. Some days I don’t have the energy even to stand up from bed. I feel I lost my appetite for life.”
For Nesma Khalil Al-Khazendar, who was an architectural engineer in Gaza, fleeing was confusing and scary.
“None of us understood what it was, what had happened to us, or what would happen next,” she says.
She fled with her husband and two daughters, aged three and five, from their home in Gaza City to relatives’ homes, a shelter in Khan Younis and then to Rafah. They evacuated to Cairo a week before the border crossing closed.
“My home was burned and then bombed and both my parents’ and my in-laws’ homes were destroyed,” Khalil Al-Khazendar says from Sydney where she is now living on a bridging visa.
“Each day was worse than the last and every day we faced the possibility of losing our lives.”
Khalil Al-Khazendar and her family arrived in Australia in June 2024.
She is learning English and running Palestinian Hands, a business selling dukkah. Keeping busy helps her mental health, she says. One day, she hopes to again work as an architectural engineer.
“I am grateful to Australia for opening its doors to us and embracing us in these difficult circumstances,” Khalil Al-Khazendar says.
“However, my feelings are very painful, as I watch my country and my family going through their worst times from here.”
After a year of war, Khalil Al-Khazendar says she “just wants to return home and find safety today, not tomorrow”.
“I want to regain that sense of security that is impossible … when you are away from your homeland, your house, your family, your friends and your work.”
‘Everyone here is doing what they can’
The mental toll of watching the war falls on the shoulders of Palestinians who have recently arrived in Australia and the diaspora community.
Ramia Sultan, a Palestinian Australian lawyer and community leader in Sydney, struggles to find the words to describe how her community has coped over the past 12 months.
Much of the diaspora are first and second generation migrants with children born in Australia but an intimate connection with Palestine.
They have only been able to watch as Israel has continued to bombard Gaza.
“Drained, guilty, frustrated, angry … the despair is so much deeper,” she says.
“We get messages and calls daily, sometimes hourly, of relatives and family friends desperate for help. Everyone here is doing what they can, amid difficult restrictions, but it has taken its toll.”
Guilt, Sultan says, is the defining emotion. “From the moment we open our eyes to the moment we fall asleep, we are gripped by this notion of ‘why us?’ Why can I wake up in a comfortable and safe environment while my loved ones can’t? The guilt is eating the community alive.”
‘Traumatising on so many levels’
The Palestinian diaspora in Australia often bypasses mainstream news for updates, Sultan says.
Instead, they are watching raw video from Gaza – sent directly or shared on WhatsApp groups. They are seeing the death and destruction as it happens.
The author and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah says Palestinians in Australia are seeing loved ones “dehumanised”, which has mobilised the community.
“We have come to a realisation that the dehumanisation of Palestinians has been complete,” she says.
Anger at the Australian government’s response to the conflict has fuelled weekly protests in Sydney and Melbourne.
Defying attempts to shut them down, the ongoing protests have allowed communities to vent their frustrations and show solidarity, Abdel-Fattah says.
But people are traumatised from watching the war so closely – often out of a sense of obligation.
“It has been completely and utterly traumatising to see the normalisation of this spectacle of horror and slaughter,” Abdel-Fattah says.
“This has been traumatising on so many levels, it has changed how people relate at work, in their social circles and in their communities.
“We are seeing babies buried during our lunch break, and then are expected to carry on with our workday as if this is all normal – or it’s not happening. And we just keep asking ourselves: ‘Why isn’t the world stopping after seeing this?’”
‘They can build their tents upon the rubble of their houses’
Elkhaldi says the past year is reminiscent of 1948, “when all the lands were stolen and people were not able to go back to their homes”.
Palestinians call that flight, expulsion and dispossession their catastrophe – the Nakba.
Elkhaldi says this war, however, has been worse. “The amount of destruction, the kind of weapons and the size of bombs – the intensity.”
She hopes to return to Gaza one day but fears living in the north will not be possible.
“I hope my doubts are wrong because … 1.5 million people living in a very tiny area of the south is not humane. These people need to go back to their homes even if they are destroyed.
“They can build their tents upon the rubble of their houses but at least they [would get] back to the land.”
Khalil Al-Khazendar says: “All my hope is that I can return to my homeland when it is safe and rebuilt … even if it means returning to no home, no family and no friends.”
