‘Time for us to leave’: Gaza reporter, again, joins thousands fleeing

Sunday night, my head heavy with congestion, I tried to sleep through a deepening chill.

I ached for a comforting hot tea. With no fuel, electricity, or hot water in my family home, I shook the thought from my mind and tried to go back to sleep.

Then the airstrikes began. I guessed it was in Maghazi camp, 2 miles away. The pitch-black night sky lit up in fiery hues of crimson and tangerine.

The next morning, as part of my daily routine to gather firewood to bake bread, I went to collect grass from our backyard when my brother stopped me at the door. He warned me of Israeli drones buzzing overhead.

With intensified bombing nearing our home in Deir al-Balah and Israeli snipers moving in a few hundred yards away, it became clear Monday that we, like thousands of other families, needed to evacuate to Rafah.

With the encroaching fighting this week, one of the last bubbles of relative calm in central Gaza was shattered, sparking yet another exodus of thousands of Palestinians to the crowded southern border town. The United Nations estimates that nearly 2 million of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are internally displaced.

We are now among them.

As of late last week, my brother Mohammed could not reach the hospital for his twice-weekly kidney dialysis without passing snipers.

On Monday, when my brother and nephew went to shop for a bag of sugar, a can of beans, and cheese, they had to pass Israeli sniper posts. I tried calling them when they ran late but could not get through. We feared the worst for hours before they returned.

That was when my father decided. “I think it is time for us to leave,” he said.

Over the past few days, I witnessed evacuees dismantle their tents at Deir al-Balah’s Al-Aqsa Hospital and relocate southward yet again in an effort to avoid encroaching gun battles and missiles.

We had already evacuated once to Rafah in October, but returned home during the November cease-fire because conditions in the south were cramped and supplies scarce. This had been our home since 2014, when our family house in Gaza City was destroyed by a missile in a previous Israel-Hamas war.

With fighting closing in on us, we needed again to find a way out.

The few trucks available for transportation – if you can convince drivers to cross areas cut off by snipers and tanks, and if you can locate fuel yourself – charge $500 for what in normal times is a 20-minute, 15-mile ride.

But these are not normal times.

Going by foot or donkey like thousands of other evacuees was not an option; my nieces and nephews are infants, and my brother cannot travel long distances along missile-cratered roads on a donkey cart due to his health.

Just days earlier, I had reported on evacuees from nearby Bureij and Maghazi camps desperately trying to flag down cars to head south. Now it was our turn to scramble for transport.

We called Abu Khalil, a driver who recently evacuated his own family from Maghazi to Rafah, but was still risking his life ferrying people for badly needed cash. He agreed to take us.

We hurriedly grabbed our emergency bags, a recently purchased sack of flour, mattresses, blankets, a fuel cylinder, personal documents, and a supply of olive oil.

When Abu Khalil arrived at 12:30 p.m., we crammed into the open bed of his truck and sat alongside our belongings, exposed to the elements – and potential gunfire or shrapnel.

As we were about to leave, my father refused to come, insisting on staying in the house. With time running short before sunset, we reluctantly drove off without him.

With the sharp winter wind whipping at our faces, my sister-in-law covered her children’s faces with a headscarf while my mother sobbed.  

The truck zigzagged through side streets for two hours to avoid Israeli tanks on the main road south. Abu Khalil stopped every few minutes to ask passersby if they knew if the road ahead was clear.

We all have friends who have lost relatives, killed along the so-called safe corridor. We quietly prayed we would not get hit by an airstrike or drive in front of gunfire.

Streets were filled with people and donkey carts, carrying mattresses and the rare bag of food, all heading south, slowing our journey.

We tensed up when we reached Miraj, near the very location where fellow journalists Hamzeh Dahdouh and Mustafa Thuraya were killed in an Israeli airstrike one day earlier. Fearful of what lay ahead, Abu Khalil slowed to a crawl.

During the ride, under buzzing Israeli drones, my brother and I debated what we should call this war; we have lived through so many.

“This is not a war,” Mohammed finally concluded. I believe he is right. We have experienced wars, but we have never lived through “this” – displacement, expulsion, fear, poverty, hunger, and humiliation.

This “war” is our terror, our vulnerability, our hunger, our thirst.

Sitting in the back of the truck, as we passed demolished homes and rubble, I could not help but think about the lives lost, the people buried underneath.

One former colleague lost 47 members of his family in a single Israeli missile strike. I cannot fathom the idea. I do not even know how to offer him my condolences.

Finally, we arrived in Rafah at my sister’s apartment.

Since we were last here, the population has ballooned. The streets, the markets, every square foot of open space is crammed with people bustling to and fro. When you walk in Rafah, your shoulders are always touching the shoulders of another person; a man, a woman, it is too crowded to even tell.

Life in Rafah may be relatively less dangerous, but it is more difficult.

Mohammed had connections at the hospital by our home, but not here. A dialysis session scheduled for 11 p.m. last night at the Abu Yousef Al Najjar hospital was pushed back until 3 a.m. this morning.

Food is scarcer. On Tuesday, I scoured supermarkets and UNRWA schools for milk but returned empty-handed.

As we made our trip south, I was aware that people around the world were starting New Year’s resolutions.

This year I have no resolution: not to get in shape, start a business, end a bad habit, or start a good one. I have a wish, our wish for 2024: for this war to end.

Senior correspondent Taylor Luck contributed to this report from Amman, Jordan.