by Mohamed Al zaqzooq

As I was still preparing for sleep and arranging the bedding, we all suddenly sprang up after a massive explosion rocked the area with the force of a bomb, causing asbestos panels to rise again from their places and fall back, leaving dust and cement residue over our heads. I ran towards the children who had once again entered a state of panic and fear. I grabbed Baraa’s hand and embraced him; his heart was pounding as if connected to an electric current, and his breaths were irregular. I feared his heart might stop due to fear. I held him close and ran with him to my aunt’s house nearby, followed by Ola with Jawad and Bassel, my sisters and their families. Everyone rushed towards the door. All of this happened in seconds, and we all entered a state of chaos. The children started crying, voices overlapped, and faces turned yellow from fear. We didn’t know what to do. Random movements ensued, and everyone began checking on their children. When we reached the door, we found a large crowd of people and civil defense personnel urging us to evacuate the house immediately and move away from the area.

I ran, carrying Baraa, into the street and reached the house of our neighbors, relatives who lived about a hundred and fifty meters away from our house. When I arrived, I discovered I was walking with one bare foot and one foot wearing a shoe. I looked back and didn’t find Ola and the three children. I tried to go back to check on them and see where they had gone, but civil defense personnel and the people gathered there prevented me from doing so.

I returned to my senses when those in the house had reached our cousins’ house about a hundred and fifty meters away. I discovered that Ola, with Jawad and Bassel, had reached the house before me, but I hadn’t noticed it. Darkness enveloped everything, and there were many people on the street. Our cousins’ house was already filled with all the relatives and neighbors. More than ten houses had evacuated and entered that house. I felt some relief knowing that Ola and the children were there, which made me regain some composure. I stood among the young men gathered at the door to know what was happening. We discovered that a reconnaissance aircraft had launched a missile directly at the house of one of our relatives, which was directly opposite our family’s house, where the grocery store I used to sit in every morning was. When the missile hit the house, no one inside knew that their house was targeted. They went out to see what happened, only to realize later that the missile had hit their house. They entered a state of indescribable fear, waiting to see what would happen next, as it was customary that targeting a house with a missile from a reconnaissance aircraft would be followed shortly by another attack with a missile from a fighter aircraft, turning it into rubble. An hour passed, during which we all waited for the bombing to happen again, but it didn’t. Our nerves began to calm down a little.

Our relatives’ house had filled with families from nearby houses. We all entered the house, bewildered and scared. Exhaustion started to overwhelm us. We divided ourselves into two groups: the children and women slept in one apartment, while the men gathered in another. There were more than twenty men. We tried to sleep but couldn’t. We all fell into a bout of silence, then started talking openly as if each of us began summoning memories of his home. One of the family members addressed my father, saying, “Thirty years of exhaustion, hardship, and work to build this house, the family’s dream. I can’t bear the thought of it collapsing. If I come out of this war without my house or my children harmed, I will sacrifice a sheep and distribute it for the sake of God.”

The situation that night was extremely dire, and terrifying news began to circulate. We followed them through the radio. That night, the aircraft bombed a café that housed displaced people in the center of Khan Yunis city, killing more than thirty martyrs at once. The sounds of explosions barely ceased for a few minutes before returning with more intensity and frequency. The situation continued like this until dawn approached. We tried to sleep after exhaustion, fear, and sadness overwhelmed us. We slept next to each other. I pretended to sleep while drowning in an endless whirlpool of thoughts. Who would believe where I sleep now? And next to whom? Relatives we used to meet at events for hours and then each returned to his home. Here we are now under one roof surrounded by fear, sharing our feeling of the unknown awaiting us and our homes and the future of our children.

Around six in the morning, my father woke up, then my brothers, and shortly after, all the sleeping relatives and neighbors woke up next to each other inside the small apartment. My father and brothers decided to return to check on the house after sunrise. I went out to the street, and the sight of a donkey lying on the ground covered in blood stunned me. It had died from a shrapnel injury during the bombing. A mix of fear and shock overwhelmed me when I saw the donkey in this state. The donkey belonged to one of the families who had taken refuge in the school next to our house. As I saw it covered in blood, the idea of imminent death became clearer and closer than ever. I thought to myself, if any of us had been walking in the street next to the donkey, they would have been hit by the shrapnel and faced the same fate.

It was a sad morning, sadder than the mornings of the wars that preceded it. We all felt overwhelmed as we returned home after a terrifying night, the idea that we might have entered a chapter even more terrifying than the chapters of war itself gripped us. We all equally felt the desire to leave the family home in Khan Yunis camp, but where to?