The rocket hit in the early hours of Monday morning, not far from where Jamileh Tawfiq had been sheltering with her family – as well as about 25,000 other people – at a UN compound in the city of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.
The impact saw a plume of smoke rise into the air; news soon came that two families had been killed.
For Tawfiq, a 26-year-old freelance journalist reporting for the television station Al Jazeera, and now one of the few voices still coming out of Gaza, the attack was one of dozens she has witnessed – and reported on – since Israel started bombing the coastal enclave two weeks ago. Nearly 4,000 people have been killed here so far, and another 13,000 injured, according to the health ministry in Gaza.
The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate says 17 media workers have been killed in Gaza since the airstrikes began, with 20 more injured. The Committee to Protect Journalists says 21 have died in total as of Friday morning, with three Israeli reporters dead and a Reuters journalist killed in southern Lebanon.
There is no way out of Gaza, no open border – not for Tawfiq, not for journalists, not for anyone.
“The explosions are relentless,” she says, explaining that she was trying to continue her work as a television news anchor but limited internet and frequent attacks made her work difficult.
“No one knows what is going to happen next. It feels as if they are trying to control our fates; they even made us leave our homes, not knowing if we can ever return. We’re trying to stay alive, but we don’t have hope any more.
“We are destroyed from the inside, and even if this ends, I don’t think life will ever be normal again. That’s one of the reasons I want to keep reporting – I want people to understand.”
Israel’s bombing campaign is a response to a Hamas attack on 7 October that killed at least 1,400 people and injured 3,800 in Israel, while at least 200 people were kidnapped, authorities say. The Israeli air force said it had since dropped thousands of bombs targeting Hamas.
Even for those living under rocket fire, the decision to evacuate to southern Gaza has not been easy. For Tawfiq, leaving the family home in central Gaza to move south – alongside her parents, brother, sister-in-law and nieces – was fraught.
Tawfiq’s father – Tawfiq Wasfi, 69, a retired Palestinian journalist – had initially refused to leave, saying he would rather die in the house he had built with his own hands 27 years ago. To him – as well as to his daughter – it had not just been a house, but a place full of love and memories; a lifetime lived.
But when the Israeli air force dropped leaflets warning citizens in central Gaza to move south, the family reluctantly – and fearfully – packed up the car. Passports, papers, food, a few clothes and a several green leaves from the courtyard’s tree as a memory of home.
“We took Al-Rasheed Street south,” says Tawfiq, referring to the once lively thoroughfare that is part of Gaza’s seaside corniche, where families would gather to eat while children played on the beach, making sandcastles and dipping their feet into the Mediterranean.
At weekends, tens of thousands of people would flock here: a rare place of relaxation in the narrow enclave that has, since 2007, been under a strict Israeli blockade.
“The sea gave us hope. It was one of the few places people could enjoy life and family time – now our corniche is gone,” says Tawfiq. “When the road was bombed, it sent a clear message: ‘we have destroyed your only escape, your only hope’.”
The UN compound where Tawfiq is now staying is overcrowded and dirty; there are too few bathrooms – “and too many people to accommodate”, she says. The smell is unbearable and diseases are spreading.
Families are sleeping outside and have used their clothes to build makeshift tents. Tawfiq, like many others, sleeps in the family car. Food is rationed and water difficult to find.
“People walk for kilometres to find water; I don’t even know where they are getting it from, but we all know it is soon running out,” says Tawfiq . Every day, information about airstrikes and new names flood in: lists of relatives, friends, neighbours – injured, missing, killed.
The road back into Gaza City – including Al-Rasheed Street – has been described as the “red death”, Tawfiq says. It is littered with rubble; corpses are trapped under the remains of buildings.
“There are bombs wherever you’re going; the whole area is being destroyed. Nowhere is safe. Life and death, it’s all the same now – nothing is certain.”
Since the start of the war, she has barely slept.
“I’m trying to hold up, as a journalist and a human – a sister, a daughter, a friend. I’ve had several breakdowns and I’ve been crying a lot. I want to be there for my family, especially my parents, and I want to keep sharing what is happening in Gaza,” she says.
“That’s why I pull it together and try to be strong. I go live on camera and tell the world about my home. There is no alternative.”
