Flight from Gaza City: ‘I stare at the faces of my sons for hours as they cry at night under the bombs’

Read here about Fadi Abu Shammala’s experiences last weekend: Eyewitnesses are terrified, ‘but we already survived the first night’

Of course I took a few people with me in my car, but it was always a drop in the bucket. And while all those people fled, Israel did not stop bombing east of Khan Younis on Friday.

Missile attack

Israel calls for ‘evacuation’, but it is an expulsion. We fear they are planning ethnic cleansing. Residents from the north of the Gaza Strip end up in an already overpopulated part of Gaza, with nowhere to go. I am busy finding extra places to sleep for the displaced through family and acquaintances. But Khan Younis does not have the capacity to accommodate hundreds of thousands of additional displaced people.

The only border crossing that Israel does not control is Rafah, and that is now also closed. On Tuesday I had been lucky enough to receive permission to have my wife and children evacuated to Egypt via that route. But on Tuesday morning, as we waited for their names to be recorded, Israel launched an airstrike with a rocket a hundred meters from where we were sitting.

My sons started screaming and crying loudly, and in the chaos that ensued, Safa and I grabbed them so as not to lose them in the crowd. We hurried back to the car, and raced back to my parents in Khan Younis.

No mercy

Here in the south there is fear. Not only for the bombs, but also for the lack of water, food, fuel and electricity. Not a drop of water comes out of the tap and the lines at the bakery and the supermarket are tragically long. The shelves in the stores are becoming increasingly empty, and what is gone is gone. It is not supplemented with fresh food, because the border is closed. Israel’s message is very clear: no mercy.

The food stock that I built up with my brother is dwindling, because we distributed food to the displaced people from North Gaza on Friday. They seemed to need it even more than we did.

The power has also been cut off, but we are resourceful. We have learned this during all those previous wars and escalations of violence. There are solar panels on the roof of my parents’ apartment building, and we use that electricity to alternately charge our batteries. Up to about 30 percent, and then you no longer charge, because you are also giving some electricity to the neighbors. This way I still have some electricity and internet for a few hours a day. For the time being, because the Israeli minister of communications has vowed that he will also paralyze the internet from Saturday. If that happens, we will really become completely invisible to the rest of the world.

Baba, Dad, if Israel really has to bomb us, can they please use smaller, less loud bombs?

But we are here. The Israeli Defense Minister calls us ‘human animals’, but we are also citizens, just as much as the Israeli citizens who have been hit so hard. I fully realize that the pain of an Israeli father grieving for his child is exactly the same as that of a Palestinian who lost a child. Does Israel also realize that the Gaza Strip has 2.2 million inhabitants, and that we are also fathers, mothers, grandparents and children?