- Hundreds of thousands of people have been migrating to the southernmost region of Gaza.
- One woman whose home was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes said she decided not to move.
This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Abeer Barakat, a woman living in the Gaza Strip, who told Insider "I'm not affiliated with any political party." Her home was destroyed by Israeli rocket fire, which Insider verified through photos. She decided to stay while thousands of others went south for safety.
The essay has been edited for length and clarity.
You can see a lot in the news, but when you're living that on the ground, it's much more difficult.
My house was severely affected by the airstrikes. At the beginning of this aggression, my whole neighborhood was targeted. I got out with my children by a miracle because one of the rockets just hit my daughter's room. They're all teenagers now. They have lived through the 2008, 2012, 2014, 2019, and 2021 aggressions. They know what to expect.
We evacuated quickly. We went downstairs and we tried to get out in the street but the bombing was in the street. So we just found shelter in a neighboring house behind ours. We spent the night there. It was really horrific. In the morning, I extracted the few things I could, like spare clothes for my children, and I went to a friend's house.
We don't have any running water. The water in the tanks is about to finish completely. It's really nasty, especially when you go to the toilet. For drinking water, thank God we had some bottles stacked. If these bottles are finished then that's it.
For food, whatever you had kept in your house, that's what you have. We don't have any shops open around our area. We have to move and find open supermarkets here and there.
But even going out in the street is dangerous because you never know when a bomb will target you.
For us, though, I think I can say, "Thank God my situation is far better than others."
I saw people near the hospitals putting blankets on the ground because the hospitals shouldn't be targeted by international law. People were actually taking refuge around the hospital, on the hospital walls, and sitting there waiting for their families. How can someone stay in the street for three or five days? This is inhumane. When I think of them, I wonder "How do they go to the toilet? How do they even sleep?"
'Palestine is a land of three religions'
Israel is targeting all aspects of Gazans' lives, one by one. And let me tell you one thing I have noticed while reading the news and the names of the victims. For the Western media, the victims are only numbers. You see the cumulative number every day, but for us, we read the names of these victims on a daily basis looking for our relatives and our friends. The targets right now are not Hamas leaders or Hamas officials. The targets now are doctors and physicians. We can see this trend from the names of the victims.
Zionists are trying to tell the world that they want to destroy Hamas. Let me tell you this as someone who is an insider in the country: Hamas is like a Jell-O. How are they going to destroy it? As long as there is occupation and violence, Hamas, and the idea of Hamas, will continue to exist.
They say "I want to destroy Hamas, I want to destroy the facilities of Hamas." Well, in the beginning of this aggression, they targeted ministries, they targeted the communication company — and many parts of Gaza are in total blackout. They have no internet, no telecommunication system. They didn't target the facilities of Hamas. They targeted all of the institutions that provide services to the people.
And during previous aggressions, they would warn families before they destroy a building — everybody in the world also said that this is inhumane — but we don't have this privilege now. Whenever you are sleeping in your home, you could have a bomb in your house and then you're gone. They are wiping out families off the civil registry and not leaving anybody. These people are not affiliated with Hamas.
We are living in the biggest open-air prison in the world. What we have here is the occupier pushing us out of our land and calling us terrorists and criminals.
It really hurts me a lot to see how Western media portrays us. They don't care about our blood. They don't care about our children. They only care when an Israeli is dead. When they are summarizing this whole issue of the attack of Hamas on the outskirt settlements of Gaza, they don't look at the bigger picture, which is the occupation since 1948. This attack from Hamas is not something that came out of that day. It is something that has been completed over the years. For 75 years, we have been subjected to all kinds of atrocities. It's not just about the attack. It's about the whole thing. It's a response.
We are momentarily asking to stop this genocide against us. That's the most important thing. But the demand for all of the Palestinians is to stop the occupation. It's just as simple as that.
Palestine is a land of three religions. It's a holy land for the Muslims, the Christians, and the Jews. It's not supposed to be only for Jewish people. It's a place where all religions can live in harmony.
'We're not leaving'
There are over 2 million Palestinians here in the Gaza Strip. They are trying to push us south to a very confined area.
We have heard about this land invasion from Israel, and this is not the first time it has happened, but we are not prepared. The only shelter we have is our houses. We don't have underground shelters.
We are not sleeping much. We are not prepared because we are living day by day.
My grandmother is from the generation of the Nakba and she migrated here in 1948 from Jaffa. My father was one year old when she migrated and she told me about the stories of their migration. She said, "We heard the news coming from villages around about the massacres."
They were very scared. She said they didn't leave the city of Jaffa until they heard bombs from the Israeli militias at that time. She said, "We ran for our lives and we thought we were going back once it calmed down." She lost one of her daughters on the road — my great aunt — she had four children at that time. And she said when they were running, people were on trucks. Israeli militants bombed these trucks with mortar bombs on the side of the roads so that people would be scared until they reached Gaza. My grandmother was lucky to already have a home and Gaza.
Until the time she died, she always told these stories and cried whenever she told them. One time, I visited Jaffa and went to the exact spot of her house. I found out that it is a restaurant.
When I saw these flyers and these warnings about evacuating and going south, I remembered my grandmother's stories and I said, "We are not repeating that mistake again. We're not leaving."