FWithin two years, the population of Gaza has passed one of the most devastating bombing and humanitarian catastrophes of our time.
The Israeli offensive and the siege of the enclave, launched in the bloody aftermath of the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, has killed more than 67,000 people, including 19,000 children.
A global hunger monitor supported by the United Nations has concluded that the bombing and the blockade have led the famine to spread over the strip.
Almost the entire population of 2.3 million people is forced to flee – often several times – and according to the UN, more than 90 percent of the houses in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed.
The situation is so dire that a UN investigation committee last month concluded that Israel has committed and still committed genocide in Gaza-an accusation that the Israeli government clamped.
On the two-year anniversary of the beginning of this unprecedented bloodshed, families in Gaza now describe a “Spring of Hoop” now that Hamas and Israel negotiators meet in Egypt to try to reach an agreement about a cease-fire and the release of hostages, without the support of the twenty-point peace plan of the American President plan.
Such as Basel Al-Saqa, 32 years old, father of two children, says The independent From his tent in southern Gaza: “A cease-fire means that the country that has burned can breathe again for so long.”
While the world hopes for a breakthrough, families describe their struggle of the past two years and their despair in search of an end to the nightmare.
Running a besieged hospital, rockets and disappearances
Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, director of the Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical complex in Gaza.
Dr. Abu Salmiya not only manages one of the most important hospitals in Gaza, who have repeatedly bombed, bombarded and robbed Israeli forces, but he says he has been arrested, held and abused for months. His staff members and colleagues such as Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, the celebrated head of orthopedics, died in Israeli detention in 2024, reportedly by torture.
But nevertheless, after he was released in Gaza last year, Dr. Salmiya remained at the helm of Al-Shifa and he rebuilt it from the axis in Gaza City, which has become the epicenter of Netanyahu’s widely convicted new offensive.
Israel has repeatedly denied that it focuses on the medical facilities in Gaza. But the Israeli attacks on the hospitals and doctors in Gaza are so acute according to the UN investigation committee completed at the end of 2024 That Israel committed war crimes and crime against humanity of extermination while “pursued a coordinated policy to destroy the health care system of Gaza”.
Al-Shifa became the target of severe attacks early in the war, after Israel Hamas accused of using it as an important military command and control center, despite the fact that little credible evidence was provided.
A raid was made, besieged and emptied at the end of 2023. Dr. Salmiya was arrested together with other doctors and held for seven months. When he was released, he spoke about torture and abuse behind bars.
“When we returned there was nothing recognizable. But we restored the Emergency Department and the Dialysis department and opened 300 beds, an intensive care department with 13 beds and an operating room,” he says.
Since then he describes the “transporting premature newborns” around the complex while it was bombed and while they were chased by quadcopters. Now he is worried about the future, since the violence has not been taken, despite conversations about a truce in Egypt.
“It was impossible for the past four days. We have not eaten, no drinks, no bread. We survived with a few dates, staff and patient,” he adds.
“After Israel recently invaded Gaza city, we were shocked. Now we are afraid that the occupation will come and the hospital will destroy again.”
Gave birth during famine and a bombing
Buthaina Al-Attar, 26, is the mother of four children, displaced from the north of Gaza.
Buthaina experienced the unimaginable horror of being pregnant during a famine proclaimed by the UN and gave birth in a hospital when that was bombed. The danger was so acute that the day after her emergency caesarean section the starving mother was sutured and forced to flee the hospital on foot, with only limited pain relief.
The United Nations have reported that as a result of the repeated full blockages of Gaza through the bombing of Israel, which led to widespread famine, a quarter of all pregnant women is acute, with the risk of miscarriages. Images of emaciated babies and children, where the bones cut through their skin are shared and shock the world.
Buthaina says she survived on a single plate of rice and pieces of pasta that she shared with her children, but hunger destroyed her health and hinded her baby’s growth. When he was born, he only weighed two kilos, less than half the average weight of a newborn baby in Great Britain.
“It was a moment full of fear, fear and concern,” she remembers, as she describes the birth under fire. When her baby was delivered through an emergency caesarean section to the Al-AWDA hospital in northern Gaza, an Israeli tank grenade met the Obstetrics and Gynecology department. Minutes later, a four -storey building next to the hospital was the target.
“Glass and debris of the explosion fell at the hospital,” she says. “At that time, the doctor told us that we had to leave because the situation was too dangerous. The ambulances were overwhelmed.”
Hardly recovered from a major operation, she had to leave on foot: “I walked like a toddler who took her first steps, with severe pain.”
Buthaina was on the road for days, looking for a tent or a hiding place. She had sustained a serious infection as a result of surgery and was malnourished. She could not breastfeed and had no access to baby food.
Twenty days after her son was born, her mother – who had helped with the children – returned to the north of Gaza to try to find food. She never came back. The family still does not know what happened; Whether she was taken or murdered.
Now Buthaina is desperately looking for a ceasefire: “We need a cease-fire as soon as possible. So that we can return to normal life and raise our children away from war, hunger and thirst.”
Reporting and living in a war zone
Fatima Abu Nadi, 35, is a journalist and works for the Kuwaitse Krant Al-Mujtama.
For almost two years, Fatima not only reported on the war in Gaza, but she also experienced it, suffering several losses, including the murder of her father.
According to Amnesty International, Israel strikes have killed more than 240 journalists and media workers Since Israel launched his heaviest bombing on Gaza in October 2023, after the fatal attacks of Hamas militants in southern Israel.
The global rights group added that no conflict in modern history killed a larger number of journalists, making Gaza the deadliest place on earth for reporters.
Fatima started the war when she worked for a French news agency, which dropped her abruptly and broke the communication while reporting about the increasing malnutrition in the Nasser hospital in Central Gaza in November 2023, in the midst of growing chaos and a developing famine.
Because she had no salary and no severance payment, she had difficulty maintaining fifteen family members. Basic supplies, such as baby diapers for her nephew, cost $ 100.
The job losses only came a month after her father was killed at an Israeli air raid in the northern Gaza Strip. Fatima and her family were driven to Rafah at the time. Her father had been left behind to protect their property.
She said that his body was so seriously mutilated by the strike that doctors protected the family against seeing the photos.
“He was part of my soul, and I lost it,” she says. “He supported me with my master, my education and at the start of my journalistic career.”
Despite the difficulties, she remains a journalist: she honors his last request to her, made during their last phone call days before his death, to continue her work and to help others.
But after she survived so many displacements, she recently collapsed one night. She cried uncontrolled until her mother found her and tried to calm her down.
“These moments exceed the capacity, energy and patience,” she says. “I stopped crying, but my heart still hurts.”
“Now we are busy with the second birthday of the war. Our greatest hope is that it will end,” she says.
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