The bombardment of Gaza City has been growing louder and more deadly for weeks, but in the early hours of Tuesday it felt like an earthquake that would never stop.
“Even when the bombings are not right next to us, we can clearly hear them, and the ground shakes beneath us with the intensity of the explosions,” said Fatima al-Zahra Sahweil, 40.
Sahweil, a media researcher, said the dead and wounded from the night’s barrage had been taken to al-Shifa medical complex, where she heard the situation was “catastrophic”.
She had lost track of the latest news, however, as she tried to make the near-impossible decision of what to do to best protect her four children.
The Rashid coast road, the Israeli-designated “escape” route to the south, was jammed with the exhausted and desperate. Anyway, the cost of a ride was too high.
“On top of that, I don’t own a tent to give us shelter, and they are too expensive to buy. I would not be able to take all of the belongings and supplies I have already bought several times before,” Sahweil said. “Then there is the suffering we would face in searching for water and the lack of empty spaces to stay in. So if I leave, I would simply be going into the unknown.”
Like more than 90% of people in Gaza, the family has been displaced by the war. An overwhelming majority have been forced to move numerous times. Sahweil and her family have already been displaced 19 times.
Now, with the launch of a ground offensive, the Israeli army is calling on the estimated 1 million people sheltering in Gaza City to move south once more. But Sahweil and her family, and many others, have been to the south before and are aware it is no haven from violence.
“It didn’t feel like life at all,” she said of her time in southern Gaza earlier in the war. “Living in a tent with insects, rats, sand, the heat of summer, the cold of winter, and the rain, it was an unbearable period.
“There is not a single day without bombings and deaths in the south, even in the so-called humanitarian zones that the army declared. So, would I just be running from death to death? What difference would that make?”
It is impossible to calculate the odds of survival with so many facts unknown. Her instinct is to stay put.
“Human nature seeks stability, where you can lean against a solid wall and feel at home,” she said. “A piece of fabric is not a house: it does not give you safety, nor the feeling of a home.”
Yousef al-Mashharawi, a 32-year-old photographer and film-maker with two daughters and a son, is facing the same predicament. Sheltering with family in the Nasser district of Gaza City, the risks of remaining are clearly rising steeply, but it is impossible to tell at what point staying became more dangerous than venturing into the unknown.
“The fighter jets and helicopters do not stop firing. Last night was terrifying,” Mashharawi said. “The bombing has not stopped for the past six days. Every 45 minutes to an hour, there is a strike very close by, from helicopters or fighter jets or sometimes from artillery.”
“I haven’t exactly ‘decided’ to stay, but the truth is, I have nowhere else to go,” he said. The family was displaced to southern Gaza earlier in the war and he has no wish to go back.
“The army claimed it was a ‘humanitarian zone’, but that was completely false. It was the opposite. There were always strikes happening there, and they are still happening,” he said.
“Displacement also takes a psychological toll. No one likes to be displaced. I believe there is no truly safe area in the strip, whether in the north or the south, so we prefer to stay in the north. Death only comes once.”
