On the morning of 7 October, Neama al-Barawi got up early to prepare her children for school and make bread. At 6.29am, the 36-year-old heard the howl of rockets being launched towards Israel from close to her home in Beit Lahia, one of the northernmost communities of Gaza.
Soon rumours began to spread that Hamas, the militant Islamist organisation that had ruled Gaza for almost all al-Barawi’s adult life, had broken through the perimeter fence built around the territory by Israel. Scared, she decided to keep her five children at home.
Next door, Youssef al-Barawi, her nephew, was getting ready for a day at Beit Lahia’s university, where he studied medicine, when he heard the rockets.
“That was the moment our whole life changed. Even now, we still do not know if we are dreaming or reality, because what is happening to us is beyond imagination,” the 22-year-old said last week.
A year later, more than 41,500 of those in Gaza who were alive on that warm, autumn morning are dead, according to the local health authorities. Most were civilians, and the total represents nearly one in every 55 prewar residents. More than three-quarters have been fully identified. Ten thousand may be buried in rubble, experts believe.
When Neama al-Barawi finished baking bread, she gathered her children around her and scrolled through news on her phone. An hour or so later, she heard whistles and cheers outside in the street as a car driven from Israel by militants drove past her home.
Only later she would learn what Hamas had wrought: the murder in Israel of 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in their homes or at a music festival, and the abduction of 250 more. But Neama was already certain that Israel’s retribution would be terrible, so she started gathering important documents and clothes. When, that evening, the house of the militant she had seen driving the Israeli car was destroyed in an airstrike, her fears for the future mounted.
A week later, the inhabitants of Beit Lahia were told to evacuate their homes. Israel’s military, in a bid to comply with international law, had decided to empty parts of Gaza in order to minimise civilian casualties as troops advanced into the territory after heavy bombardment. Neama headed south with her children but her husband, a 40-year-old farm worker, remained behind to look after his elderly parents who were too frail to move – a common problem many would face over coming months.
Youssef, the medical student, also stayed in Beit Lahia, believing that as a young medic he could be useful. He survived the first weeks of the war, and was very relieved when in late November there was a ceasefire, which lasted 10 days. At 6.20am on the first full day hostilities resumed, he left his grandfather’s house to get a better internet connection on a taller building nearby. Suddenly, there was an explosion, debris and smoke.
Shaken and bruised but with no serious injuries, Youssef waited a few minutes in case there was a second strike, then walked the few dozen metres back to his family’s home to find it no longer existed.
“I froze and could no longer feel anything, I just kept looking at the grey rubble, which an hour ago was a colourful house with all the colours and emotions of life. My family’s home was a grave,” he remembered.
Inside had been Youssef’s parents, brother, grandfather, uncle, aunt, eight nephews and nieces, a second uncle and his family, a third uncle and three wives. In all, more than 30 people died.
“I thought nothing and said nothing. I went and washed and prayed, but I still couldn’t say anything. The ambulances did not come, some people gathered around the house … We waited until the next morning and started digging out the bodies of my family, but it was difficult to recognise them,” Youssef said.
In Rafah, in the far south of Gaza, a cousin found Neama to pass on a garbled report that “something had happened” and “people from the al-Barawi family had been martyred”. Neama then spent a frantic hour trying to find out more, her legs giving way as she stumbled from tent to tent sobbing uncontrollably. After she found another cousin, Neama asked who was still alive, pleading with her relative to tell her the truth. “No one is left,” came the response.
A recent investigation by Associated Press identified at least 60 Palestinian families where at least 25 people were killed – sometimes four generations from the same bloodline – in bombings between October and December, the deadliest and most destructive period of the war.
Nearly a quarter of those families lost more than 50 family members. Some effectively disappeared, with almost no one left to document their losses, especially as documenting and sharing information became harder as the war went on and 80% of the population of Gaza was displaced.
Ramy Abdu, chair of the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which tracks casualties of the Gaza war, told the Guardian his team of more than 40 researchers in Gaza had identified 365 families that had lost 10 or more members from the beginning of the war until August, and 2,750 which had lost at least three.
“The bulk of the mass killing operations were in the first three months, but they continued, just at a slower pace,” Abdu said.
In May, more than 30 members of the Assalia family were killed in Jabaliya, a city in northern Gaza, in attacks shortly before an Israeli advance into the neighbourhood. Many of them women and children.
Ibrahim Assalia, who was evacuated to the UK earlier in the war, said he had lost many cousins.
“No one from my family who was killed was a member of Hamas. It could be Israel targeted a Hamas member who was passing by, or maybe tunnels. I really don’t know,” Assalia told the Guardian.
In August, 18 members of same family were killed when an Israeli strike hit a house and an adjacent warehouse sheltering displaced people at the entrance to the town of Zawaida.
Israel’s military has repeatedly said it only targets Hamas and accuses the militant group of deliberately endangering civilians by operating among the population and in tunnels below homes, schools and hospitals. Officials say that Israel acts in compliance with the laws of armed conflict and the army takes extensive measures to avert civilian casualties, including alerting people to military operations via phone calls and text messages.
Netanyahu told the US Congress earlier this year that the war in Gaza has one of the lowest ratios of combatants to noncombatant casualties in the history of urban warfare.
The claim is based on Israeli estimates – which lack detail, and have been contested – that as many as 17,000 Hamas combatants have been killed.
A year on, the surviving members of the Barawi family remember their lives before the war: their crowded but convivial homes, the vegetables and flowers planted in their gardens, the restaurants of Beit Lahia, trips to the beach, the big meals and religious festivals, celebrated with all of them often present.
“In the first week after the strike, all feelings inside me were dead and I had no will or motivation to do anything,” said Neama. “But I had to protect and support my children. I told them that their father was in heaven and that I would make everything right for them again.”
Now she fears further loss.
“What I worry about most now is that this war will continue for more time, and … I am afraid that I will lose one of my children or more of my family, or even be left alone. We cannot and will not forget, but we have to move forward.”
Youssef is trying to rebuild his life. The medical student is doing volunteer work in a hospital in Khan Younis, the southern Gaza City where he is now living.
“I am now living in suffering every second and minute of my life. I feel pain, injustice and fatigue,” he told the Guardian. “But I still thank God I am alive.”
