But normal is a distant memory now. As I’m writing this, I can hear the whine of an Israeli drone hovering over my neighborhood in central Gaza. We lost two relatives earlier this month: teenage boys sheltering in the basement of a UN school. All of our old open markets and food shops are gone. And the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, set up by Israel and America to distribute food aid, has quickly become a death trap.

Our days now begin with the only food we’ve got: lentil soup. We’ve had no bread for six days, and no meat for five months. At some point most mornings, one of us will head out to investigate what food we can buy, searching not for what we want, but just whatever is available.

In place of the old food shops, a handful of makeshift street stalls have cropped up, run by people we don’t know who control the prices, and who have raised them to extortionate levels. But these can disappear at any moment — because of bombing, or because there’s nothing left to sell. Before the war, one kilo of onions was less than £3. Now it costs £50. A kilo of sugar is £100.

Despite the prices at these stalls, I, like many others, have stopped going to aid centers and won’t let my family go either. My nearest Foundation distribution center is four kilometers away at Netzarim. Getting there means walking through unsafe, open areas; we have heard about many who went there and never came back. Others did return, but with life-changing wounds. The safety of my sons, nephews, and other relatives is more important than food, and I will not gamble their lives for help we might not even receive. That’s why we rely on the stalls.

On a good day, if our trip to the stalls hasn’t been in vain, we will have one more meal: soup again, with maybe a few vegetables.

Not everyone can afford the stalls though. My neighbor Ahed lost his job at a sweet shop, so now he’s completely dependent on humanitarian aid. As the head of a family with five children, including twins who were born during the war, he is at the mercy of aid centers for his children’s basic needs, like infant formula, which is not available from the market stalls.

The first time Ahed went to the distribution center, he managed to get a box of supplies and made it home safely. But on the second occasion, he was stabbed and robbed by another Palestinian civilian. Security in Gaza is now non-existent and there are no police, so such events are commonplace. The third time, he was hit in the eye by an Israeli tear gas canister, which caused permanent damage to his vision. After these injuries, he stopped going to the aid centers out of fear for his life. Even though he urgently needs help, he now has to scramble to find other ways to get what his children need. In practice, this means asking the families of his wife and brother to share what little they have. They do their best, but there is never enough.

After the hunt for food comes the day’s second major task: waiting in a queue for hours on end to fill a few bottles from relief trucks or wells. It’s over 30°C every single day at this time of year, and the humidity is always high. Much of our water and sewage network has been destroyed, many municipal workers have been killed, and there is very little fuel for generators and pumping stations. All of this means that, if we’re lucky, we’ll get running water for a few precious hours every 10 days or two weeks at my still-standing, though badly damaged, house in central Gaza. When the water finally does come, it’s brackish and unpurified. We store it in barrels and ration every drop.

Hygiene has become non-existent. There is not enough water for bathing or washing clothes. Without water, it is impossible to use soap or shampoo, so allergies, rashes and skin diseases have become widespread.

I feel listless, dehydrated, and my voice is cracked and dry when I speak. We have no way to make the heat more bearable. Fans, air conditioning and refrigerators are useless, because there is usually no electricity — and this is especially tough for children and the elderly.

Many Gazans blame Hamas for our ongoing ordeal, not just Israel and the US. When food aid trucks have managed to enter Gaza, members of Hamas have taken the food and distributed it only to their own people, leaving everyone else to go hungry. They believe Hamas could have agreed to a new ceasefire weeks ago, and that they are blocking it for no good reason, imposing unnecessary conditions for the further release of hostages that they know Israel will not accept.

Support for Hamas in Gaza has collapsed, in my estimation, to 25% or less — a core vote consisting of fighters, their families, and those who work for government ministries. Hamas has made it seem that they do not care about human suffering, and this has eroded their popularity.

Despite the killing of some who protested in public against Hamas earlier this year, many Gazans now feel they have nothing to lose by openly speaking out against them. It will be when the war ends, many fear, that Hamas will exact its revenge, if they’re still in power.

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Gaza's children have no future

By Hasan Jber

But it’s difficult to envision the future. Even if, thanks to the international pressure, we are at last inching towards another ceasefire of a few weeks, it is not nearly enough. Welcome as a ceasefire would be, we need a much longer truce designed to produce a lasting peace. But I don’t believe the plans advanced by President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have any chance of success, because they rely on the expulsion or voluntary departure of most or all of Gaza’s population via Egypt.

When the war does end, some of us will want to leave Gaza permanently for a new life outside, especially the young. Yet most do not want to abandon this land, but rebuild it. In any case, Egypt will not accept large numbers of Palestinian refugees. Like European countries, they fear a huge influx of migrants would cause internal problems. As for us Palestinians, we fear forced displacement more than anything else, and any plan that involves it will prolong, not end the violence.

Netanyahu’s plan to move hundreds of thousands of people into a small supposedly humanitarian enclave near Rafah, a scheme which even the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has described as a concentration camp, would also only lead to more killing and destruction. Besides, though Israel may be talking about this, I do not believe they will take this step, because the international pressure and the scheme’s opponents in Israel would simply be too strong.

Somehow, we have to work towards the creation of a professional, non-extremist government in Gaza, and a better future here and in the West Bank. I am certain this is what the majority of Gazans want: Palestinians and Israelis to co-exist and cooperate, away from the extremists on both sides who benefit from the war. Unfortunately, there is as yet no sign as to how this might be achieved.

Meanwhile, through this terrible summer, the people of Gaza wait — and make sure to sit away from the walls. In the past few weeks, my house has been hit by live rounds five times: all of the windows are gone. We spend our days calculating how much soup we can eat for breakfast, and how much water we can afford to drink.

But this year, like last year, there are no decorations, and almost nothing to buy in the shops. Meat is difficult to find and extremely expensive. After more than 14 months of this seemingly endless war, there is very little to celebrate: for Muslims and Christians alike. I am Muslim, but we are all “people of the book” — and relations between our communities have always been characterised by warmth and respect. And now, especially, we are united, by hunger and hardship and death, without a future whatever our faiths.

A few years ago, a farmer’s spade struck something hard as he tilled his land west of the Nuseirat refugee camp. It was the start of an amazing discovery: beneath the sand lay the monastery of St Hilarion, which dates back to 340 AD and has become a major archaeological site. Hilarion was born and spent much of his life in what is now the Gaza Strip. He began the process of converting its inhabitants from paganism, the dawn of a local Christian community that remains among the oldest on earth.

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Gaza's children have no future

By Hasan Jber

In 1967, when Israel occupied Gaza at the end of the Six Day War, there were still some 7,000 Christians here. Their numbers have since fallen to barely 1,000, and now represent a blend of Catholics and Orthodox. Some have emigrated to the West, others to the West Bank or other Arab countries. But small as the community has become, it continues to enjoy an outsized cultural presence. Christians have tended to be better educated than the Palestinian average, partly because of excellent religious schools.

When Hamas overthrew the Palestinian Authority in 2007, there were fears that the relationship between Muslims and Christians would deteriorate, and that they might be persecuted. Fortunately, these worries proved baseless. Hamas understood that Christians shared the same challenges as their Muslim peers, united by the same enemy.

Nowhere was this clearer than at Christmas. Whether Catholic or Orthodox, each Gazan Christian treated the birth of Christ as a great celebration. Many times, I saw Muslims joining in, dressed in their smartest clothes, inside churches brilliantly lit by candles. All the while, choirs sang “Silent Night” between readings from the Gospels. Just as in the West, meanwhile, children’s events and parties would feature appearances from Father Christmas, with Santa’s usual red suit and white beard.

When Hamas launched the October 7 attacks, none of Gaza’s Christians took part. Yet the subsequent experiences of Emad Sayegh would surely be familiar to any Gazan. A week after the assault, Israel told the 61-year-old businessman that he had to leave his home. The area, he was told, was about to be targeted by airstrikes. “There were 11 of us,” Sayegh remembers, “so we hurried to the St Porphyrios church in the Old City. We were afraid, but we found a lot of people there — about 400, most of them Christians, but also 19 Muslim families.”

They may have been among friends, but the situation was desperate. Without enough beds, people slept wherever they could: in rooms, alcoves in the walls and corridors. “I spent four nights trying to sleep upright in a chair,” Sayegh says, “so I was exhausted.” Food was in short supply too. Each day, families had to share a single loaf of bread, alongside a small portion of cooked food. And though water was available from a nearby well, it could only be pumped with a generator — a machine that required expensive fuel to run.

Worse was to follow. On 19 October, 12 days into the war, the church was hit. “The Israelis killed 18 people and injured dozens,” Sayegh says. “We were afraid the killing would continue.”

A few days later, the Israelis told everyone still taking refuge at St Porphyrios to evacuate and move south, where they would have to live in tents. Sayegh says at first they refused, but then a tank shell struck the wall of the church, wrecking a room where four of his sons had been sitting two minutes earlier. At the same time, Sayegh discovered that his nearby metalwork factory had also been destroyed. Like others sheltering in the church, he finally decided to leave.

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My year of horror in Gaza

By Hasan Jber

Also staying at St Porphyrios was a man called George, who asked me not to publish his surname. “The bombing was violent and intense, like an earthquake,” he says. For the moment, he and his family are back there, trying to survive inside its Latin Patriarchate school. That isn’t easy: there are no bedrooms, bathrooms or blankets.

“In earlier years,” he says, “we used to light the church candles and hold prayers on Christmas Eve, visit family and friends and go out to celebrate. Now sadness dominates the atmosphere inside the church, as it does outside. There is no room for joy.”

Other Christian sites have also been destroyed. They include both the ancient Caeserea market, and the Orthodox cultural centre, site of all those workshops and lectures. “Christmas will be just another sad day,” says Elias el-Jelda, who used to help run the centre as a member of the Arab Orthodox church council. “I believe Christ is grieving with us.”

Muslims like me feel much the same. Earlier this month, my brother’s house was badly damaged when the Israelis bombed a nearby mosque — the fifth time it’s been struck since the war began. My brother’s daughters were also injured, and earlier this year his son was killed in Rafah.

Like Gaza’s Christians, none of us has ever belonged to a militant faction. None of us are combatants. For many years, my brother happily commuted from Gaza to Israel, where he worked in construction. But then Hamas took over, and Israel built the separation barrier. Since then, he has been unemployed.

Elias el-Jelda tells me that, this Christmas, he and other Christians will concentrate on personal prayers, “asking God to stop our suffering, and to bring peace and justice to Gaza and the world.” I will offer the same prayers.

I still live in Gaza, and I still see children playing after more than a year of war, usually in the large open areas that have been flattened by Israeli airstrikes, among the ruins of destroyed buildings.

But their game has been updated. Now, the children of Gaza call it “Hamas fighters and Jews” — and they’ve added other new elements too. They pretend they’re being chased by Israeli drones, whispering to each other, “there’s a drone coming! We must hide!” Sometimes, they pretend to blow up Israeli tanks with mines and IEDs. They play for hours, because they have no other entertainment, and nowhere else to go. But the chant when a fighter “dies” is the same as it always was, though there are far more real martyrs now than when I was a kid. Many of them are children too.

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My year of horror in Gaza

By Hasan Jber

Thousands of children under the age of 18 have been killed since Hamas attacked Israel last year. Many more have been injured and maimed and thousands are thought to be uncounted.

Every aspect of the lives of those who have survived has been upended. The schools and kindergartens have been closed since October 7, and untold thousands have lost their homes.

Palestinian society has always been characterised by close family relationships, and young children find it very hard to accept that a brother or sister is dead. I hear them all the time. Adults will tell them they’re in paradise, but they don’t really know what that means. “He went shopping, but soon he will come back,” they say instead. “She went for a picnic and had to stay away a few nights, but I’m sure she’ll be home quite soon.” 

I spoke to the mother of Abdeltaffah Montasir, who lost his father at the age of four. “He was no fighter,” she told me. “But like so many of us, he was killed. All the time the boy is asking about his father, demanding to know when he will return. He says he thinks he will be back when the war ends, and then asks me when that will be. How can I answer that? I have to deal with his grief, and I am grieving too.”

Some children try to compensate for the lack of anything resembling a normal, routine life. They badger their parents for school bags and uniforms, so that when the war ends, they’ll be ready to go back to class, and they want to be like other children when they do. It’s as if they think that by asking for something that will only have meaning when the war finally ends, they will bring that day closer.

“The children of the Gaza Strip naturally suffer from the effects of the trauma they have experienced, such as fear, introversion and loss,” explains Ola Kamal, a local child psychologist. “They relive violent events in their thoughts and in their play. Many suffer from nightmares and insomnia.

They suffer from an absence of positive emotions. Some act out their trauma with hyperactive excitement and tantrums, others display severe and persistent fear and sadness. Sometimes they deny what happened to them or their family, or try to avoid the places or people associated with a violent event.

“This war,” Ola says, “is creating a deeply troubled and hopeless generation.”

Palestinians have always placed a high value on education, and we are proud of our low illiteracy rate. Bothina Abdel Fattah, a mother of six aged 42, who lives in Deir Al Balah, tells me she fears that having gone without schooling for over a year, her kids have already forgotten much of what they knew. “Their level of achievement and knowledge have gone down significantly,” she says. “Yet most of the schools are not just closed, their buildings have been badly damaged or totally destroyed. When will they be able to start learning again? The longer this goes on, the more they will forget.”

“Because of the war, everything we valued has collapsed,” says Iyad Abdul Hakeem, for many years a teacher. “Instead of going to school, our students are in the streets or standing in lines for water, bread and other kinds of food. If the war were to stop tomorrow, it would take an enormous effort to make up for what has been lost.”

The schools may be closed, but there are voluntary initiatives trying to fill the gap. One is based in a small park in Al Bourej, where displaced people who lost their homes now live in tents.

Run by a teacher, Sabreen Fetiha, it provides basic tuition under canvas or in the open air in literacy and maths for over 200 children who would normally be in the first four grades of primary school. “We are trying to reconnect students to the educational process and compensate for part of their educational loss,” Fetiha explains, “and we hope this will prepare them to return to ordinary, full-time education when the war finally stops.” 

Fetiha has managed to recruit three colleagues, who each have different specialist subjects, while stationery and other equipment has been donated by residents of the Bourej camp.

But welcome as the voluntary school is, it can feel dangerous to gather in the park. People are afraid that it could become a target. 

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There is no solution to the Gaza War

By Rajan Menon

And still the war grinds on. There was hope for months it would finish on the anniversary of October 7, and then, for a short time, after Yahya Sinwar was killed. But things keep changing. People were astonished that Sinwar died the way he did. They thought he was spending all his time in the tunnels, yet there he was, fighting on the frontline. Now he is widely seen as a hero, as a symbol of resistance, and even intellectuals who never supported Hamas are comparing him to Che Guevara, saying he’ll be seen as a symbol of revolution and resistance for years to come — for Palestinians and others too.

So Sinwar’s death has made Hamas more determined, not less. They’ll fight on to the end, and like Sinwar they don’t care if they die, because they believe that then they’ll begin their new, pleasant, trouble-free life in paradise.

And so, with neither side letting up, the war will last for many more months unless the international community somehow finds a way to stop it. The children playing fighters and Jews have told me they don’t ever want to become fighters for real, but if the war does not end, my fear is that they will.

Immediately, I felt afraid. This was the first time that a Palestinian force had invaded our neighbour to kidnap and kill, and I expected Israel would respond very strongly. Ever since, I have known I could die at any time: walking on the street, sitting in my house, visiting my relatives. You can be talking to someone in the morning, and then you hear in the evening they are dead. Every day we pay the price for October 7, and this has a terrible psychological impact.

At first, many people here were happy about the attack: because of Israel’s siege of Gaza and its control of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, as well as previous conflicts. However, many have changed their minds. Even those who once voted for Hamas have turned against them, because they blame them for the disaster we have experienced.

I believe Hamas thought the war would end after one or two months, and that after that, the international community would intervene and stop it: they never imagined it would still be going on after a year. At the same time, Israel has not won the war. It has not destroyed Hamas or killed all its members. Its fighters are still here, refusing to run up the white flag, still making statements saying they intend to resist. 

Hamas members aren’t seen very much in the streets, because there they risk being spotted from the air and targeted. But they appear, sometimes at night, and then they disappear: some are living in the tunnels, some in houses, others in tents. They come out to beat people they say are thieves with sticks and iron bars, and they punish their enemies, sometimes by killing them. They are still killing Israelis.

They conceal every piece of information. They never confirm the names of those who have been martyred, and they don’t say whether any of their leaders have been killed. 

As for myself, I was a Leftist before I became a journalist. I have never supported Hamas, nor any kind of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. I have said all my life we should go for coexistence: I believe this land can absorb all its people, and that we can live with each other, side by side. Unfortunately, believing we need peace does not make it happen.

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By Aris Roussinos

Two days after the attack began, my wife, our three children and I left our house because the neighbourhood was being shelled. We went to stay with one of my brothers, but after another two days it became too dangerous there, so at 2am one morning we took shelter in a UN school. It was extremely overcrowded and random shells were falling into the yard. When it got light we moved again, to a relative’s house in the Nuseirat refugee camp, where we stayed for 47 days, until the truce began in November and we returned home.

After the ceasefire, the war restarted even more violently than before. We always monitor the website of Israel’s civilian coordinators, and on 23 December, they issued a map of the areas they said people had to leave. Our house was on it, and we were told we had to evacuate immediately. We stayed four days with some relatives before the Israelis issued a revised map, forcing us to flee yet again.

This time, along with countless thousands of other displaced persons, we went to Rafah, in the south. It’s not very far, but the journey took four hours, and all that time we were scared of possible airstrikes. My brother and I rented two small rooms for ourselves and our families — 12 people in all, with no bathroom or kitchen. Rafah was supposed to be safe, but the area we were in was bombed several times. The weather was wet and cold and the roof dilapidated. It did not block the rain, and the walls were cracked and damp. But we had no choice, and it was better than living in tents. We found wood to make a fire and that became our kitchen.

We had been there nearly two months when we heard the Israelis were withdrawing from Al-Bureij, so we felt safe enough to go home. But it wasn’t long before the Israelis again declared it a “red zone” — so once more we fled, this time back to Nuseirat. There we heard violent explosions nearby and Israeli tanks on the move. We were very afraid, but there was nothing we could do. Everywhere had become unsafe. It seemed as if we were fleeing from one death to another. In July, we returned to our house one final time and stayed there. Somewhat miraculously, it had not been damaged. I would guess that by now, fewer than 30% of Gaza’s buildings remain standing.

The life we lead now is inhuman. I suppose we are lucky: in some areas, there is only running water for a short time every 10 days, whereas we usually get it one day in three. But we have to delay everything until it comes. Having enough water to be able to wash or take a shower is bliss. There are things you don’t realise how much you need until they are unavailable: like shampoo. We have no electricity, so after dark we depend on battery lights, and to charge our phones I have to pay a neighbour who has a solar panel. It is very hard to get gas in order to cook.

Hamas may not have been eliminated, but it is dangerous for their police to be on the streets, so there is anarchy. The distribution of most kinds of food is controlled by criminal gangs. They have guns, and steal imported food from those who receive it, mostly from charitable donors in places such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Because there are no police to stop them, they hijack trucks and steal their contents, and two or three days later it appears in the markets at inflated prices. The price of many items, such as vegetables and eggs, has roughly tripled.

Meanwhile, there are no working banks or ATMs. I am still a journalist, working for a newspaper based in the West Bank, although I cannot travel anywhere to report. I am still receiving a salary, but the only way I can get cash is from money changers, profiteers who take more than 20% as their commission.

Yet set beside the fate of others, these are merely inconveniences. We lost my nephew, Muntezar, in Rafah: when we left he stayed on because of his job with the electricity company, which had promised him an increased salary if he remained. He wasn’t a fighter but an ordinary worker who had two little boys. I was close to him, and he had no interest in politics, but his house was hit and he was killed, alongside two of his wife’s brothers. My wife’s sister was killed with four of her children and her grandson, in a strike on an apartment building that killed more than 30 people in Nuseirat near the beginning of the war.

One of my wife’s brothers perished from an airstrike along with his two sons; another with his wife, two sons and three grandsons. You expect you may lose someone all the time: any time your phone rings you rush to answer it, in case it is someone telling you another relative has been killed.

One afternoon three weeks ago, there was an airstrike on the building opposite our house, which is just eight metres away. We were sitting in our downstairs living room when there was an enormous blast. All our windows were destroyed, and we were covered in smoke, broken glass, and thick, black dust. I couldn’t see, I could only hear, and my family were screaming and crying. At last, some neighbours came and took us outside and we sat in the open air in order to breathe.

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By Rajan Menon

We’ve been trying to fix the damage ever since, but we have no glass to replace the windows. We don’t know what will happen during the winter, when the nights begin to get cold. We had to throw away lots of food because it had been polluted by dust and chemicals from the rockets.

Like most people in Gaza, we long for the war to stop, and try to return to normality. But no one seems to be applying any pressure to make this happen. Israel doesn’t want to finish this war, because that would mean its Prime Minister would have to go to court to face charges of corruption, and his government would collapse. The fanatical Right-wing politicians in his cabinet would also lose power. 

But Hamas will not surrender. Their religion means they believe that if they are killed, they will go to paradise, and all the time they say they will not stop. They are waiting, hoping that something will change. For a long time they waited for Hezbollah to enter the war, and now they have; they were waiting for Nasrallah, though now he is dead. They are waiting for help from Iran and from Yemen, though no one has any idea what will happen when it comes. 

All I know is that while Hamas waits, we continue to pay the price.