Tuesday 17 October
8am I hear sounds outside of the living room we are sleeping in. I can tell that someone is teaching the kids.
When the grandmother comes to see if we slept well, she tells us she dedicates an hour a day to teaching her grandchildren. “It doesn’t matter what I teach them as long as they are learning something new. We shouldn’t lose hope, and these kids are the future.” The oldest grandchild, Radwa, joins. I ask what she learned today. “I’m learning the multiplications table. The table of eight is the most difficult one.”
Ahmad, the middle brother, comes to say hi. It’s clear he hasn’t slept well. We know that he and his older brother take shifts during the night. “We need to ensure that if something bad happens, one of us is awake and capable of saving the children at least,” he says.
In general, I’m a positive person but, during these times, Ahmad’s optimism annoys me. If his predictions had been true, the escalation would have been over days ago. Every day, he comes and says it will end soon. We all give him a look of disbelief. We disagree with him because the reality around us shows no signs of solutions. The situation is vague, scary and nothing is guaranteed.
10am “We’re about to run out of cooking gas,” the grandmother announces. Her son searches for available gas tubes but can’t find any. The family is worried – they need to cook, to boil water to prepare the children’s milk, and sometimes boil water to clean themselves.
I tell them we have an extra gas canister at my home, in Gaza City. But who will go and get it? I call every person and taxi driver I know. No one is available … until the janitor of our building tells me that his family fled to the same area we fled to. He offers to bring the gas tube with him on his way to visit them, and I offer to pay for the taxi.
I understand that taxi drivers are jeopardising their lives, but the price the driver asked is insane! It’s eight times the regular price of a private taxi (not a public transportation). I start screaming over the phone, then I manage to lower the price to four times the regular one. I tell myself this is the only option. We need the gas.
12pm The grandmother comes to ask us what to prepare for lunch. The family feels guilty that since we fled to their home, days ago, we’ve barely eaten. In Gaza, even in the darkest of times, if you visit someone’s home, they have to feed you and be good hosts. She gives us two options.
I look at her, smile and tell her: “Both are fine. Anyways, what we don’t eat today, we will eat tomorrow. It is not as if we are leaving anytime soon. This dangerous situation is not coming to an end.”
2pm We organise our bags for the 10th time. Every now and then we get things out to use or wear and it becomes difficult to put them back in an organised way. We always ensure which bags are the top priority and which ones to leave behind if we have to.
My sister gives me her wallet to put in one of the bags, then asks me to give it back to her. She takes her passport and says: “Let me keep my passport with me. You never know, it might be needed to identify me in case something bad happens.”
4pm I remember the driver who brought us from Gaza when we fled for the third time. I appreciate how calm he was on seeing how terrified, angry and lost my sister and I were. While driving, he received a call and started discussing what seemed like an important topic. Usually, I would have asked a driver to pull the car over until he finished the call or to let me out. But in that case, I did nothing.
When he finished, he told me that he’s responsible for driving two daughters of a divorced couple. The couple don’t communicate at all, and the driver is the mediator between them, even if the issue isn’t related to the girls’ commute. The woman decided to flee but the man did not, and he had the children. She called the driver to convince her husband to take the girls to her. The driver told her that he can’t interfere in such a critical matter. He said that he felt sorry for the mother and her suffering. I felt sorry for the girls.
6pm A friend of mine, who fled with his family from Gaza City, tells me about his neighbour who stayed, and is now hosting about 17 cats. Four of them are house pets whose owners left them with the man, and the others are street cats that, after the destruction, found no food – and no one to feed them. Once the man fed one stray cat, the rest of her “friends” joined – and now he is responsible for all of them. My friend is worried since this man is now thinking about fleeing. I hope the situation gets better and he doesn’t leave. For him and his family, and also for the cats.
8pm I’m trying to sleep. For some reason, I think of that famous interview question: where do you see yourself in five years? Right now, all I’m thinking about is what will happen to me within the next five minutes. I’ve no clear mind to think of anything – but one thing I am sure of is that, if we make it alive out of here, we are never going to be the same again.
9.20pm It was a rumour.
After four o’clock you see no one on the streets. Everyone stays in their homes for safety. Unable to sleep, I lie on the couch trying to think of things to calm me down when I suddenly hear a lot of noises outside. I go to the other room to ask the family what is happening. Once I open the door, I hear someone say: “Everyone is evacuating.”
I don’t even ask the reason, I tell my sister, who is on the phone, people are evacuating. Both of us panic, we can barely put the cats in the carriers and take the top-priority bags. In her fear, my sister throws her mobile on the floor, takes the cats and we go downstairs.
On our way down, the children are crying, everyone is telling them that it’s OK and nothing is going to happen. But we are terrified. Once we reach the street, we see an enormous numbers of people. It’s complete darkness, which makes the situation more terrifying. My sister looks at me and says: “Where shall we go? There is no place left?”
Suddenly, we hear a young man, in his 20s, screaming and asking people to go back to their homes. We go to him and find out that it is a rumour, no one has been asked to evacuate, but one family decided to evacuate at night because “someone said something to someone”. When people saw them leaving, everyone around them started to leave. It was the snowball effect.
We are terrified to go back; we stay for 10 minutes until we see other people going back and decide to do the same. We go upstairs, Fadel is screaming: “As if we have enough energy to deal with rumours. My children are terrified, all the children were terrified.”
Ahmad follows and tells us that the neighbour’s son ran down the stairs so fast that he fell and broke his hand.
We have evacuated several times, and have thought about every scenario, to be ready, but it seems our bodies are not capable of dealing with this mental stress any more. My sister is unable to stand up and I am shaking. The children are crying and the men are screaming in anger. After half an hour, the grandmother comes with cups of tea with sage to calm everyone down.
11.30pm My sister and I are left alone in the room. She looks at me and asks: “This time it was a rumour, what about next time? We have fled three times, every place is dangerous, death is all around us, nothing positive is happening. There are no places left to flee to. If it weren’t a rumour and we were forced to evacuate …”
She pauses for a while, but I know the scary question she is about to ask: “Where to?”
