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As the conflict in Gaza enters its fourth month, Crisis Group’s Gaza-based researcher Azmi Keshawi, working with colleague Claudia Gazzini, tells the story of his family’s daily struggle to survive this devastating war.
“We are still alive”, Azmi said in a voice message, after enduring the terrors of another night of bombardment in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military has been pounding Gaza relentlessly since 7 October, the day Hamas carried out its lethal attacks in southern Israel. Azmi and his family are among the almost two million Palestinians driven from their homes by the bombing and shelling to crowd into smaller and smaller parts of this 365 sq km strip along the Mediterranean. Since the hostilities began, Azmi has been sending frequent messages to his Crisis Group colleagues updating them on the situation on the ground. Many of these have started with the sentence above. But as the war has ground on, and conditions in the coastal enclave grown ever more dire, more and more of them have led with another: “This was the worst night ever”.
Voice messages are usually the only way for Azmi to share with the outside world what he’s going through. Israel cut off its electricity supply to Gaza before launching its offensive, and Gaza’s own generators have precious little fuel, so people have trouble keeping their mobile phones charged. Combined with the gradual destruction of phone repeaters and the increasingly frequent communications blackouts, the power shortage has made regular calls from Gaza increasingly difficult. Often, when the bombing is close, it’s too dangerous for Azmi to venture into the street to get an internet connection, and just as often, he’s too busy trying to find food, water or shelter for himself and his family to think about communicating with anyone else. But from his voice messages, it is possible to piece together a rough picture of his ordeal and what’s been happening around him. Taken together, his recordings offer a glimpse of how Palestinians in Gaza have managed to survive amid Israel’s assault. In Azmi’s telling, it mostly comes down to luck.
A War Like No Other Azmi’s full name is Azmi Keshawi. He has been Crisis Group’s Gaza-based researcher for some twelve years. He is hardly new to war, having reported for us on conflicts between Israel and Hamas militants in the strip in 2012, 2014, 2019 and 2021. Before joining Crisis Group, he witnessed the first and second intifadas (1987-1993 and 2000-2005, respectively) and the many incursions Israel carried out prior to withdrawing soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005 and the following year. (Although Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, it has retained full control of its borders, airspace and territorial waters, which is why the UN continues to consider Israel the occupying power in the strip.) Azmi also survived the first Israel-Hamas war, which occurred in 2008-2009, about two years after the Islamist movement took over Gaza. Together, these conflicts killed around 4,000 Palestinians in the strip. Many residential and office buildings were destroyed. Today’s war, however, is on a completely different scale.
The war began on 7 October, when Hamas and other Palestinian militants broke through Israel’s barriers around Gaza and attacked nearby Israeli towns, killing more than 1,100 people and taking some 240 Israelis and foreign workers hostage.
Azmi awoke at 6:30am on 7 October to the roar of a rocket barrage being launched from Gaza into Israel. “It was an unusual number, and the sound scared me”, he said. He anticipated that morning that a new war was around the corner. Later that day, when details of Hamas’s attack inside Israel emerged, he was sure the Israeli reaction would be ferocious. “I started thinking about how hard it would be on us, how much we were going to suffer”, he recounted in early December. “But nobody thought it would be as horrifying as this”.
Since 7 October, the Israeli military has retaliated with over 29,000 air and missile strikes ... and killed more than 23,000 Palestinians. Israel has also imposed a siege on Gaza that included cutting off not just electricity but also water, as well as severely restricting deliveries of fuel and food, which UN agencies say is starting to cause starvation. Hamas militants in Gaza have continued to fire rockets into southern and central Israel, though less frequently as the war has proceeded. Over 100,000 Israelis from the communities surrounding Gaza have been internally displaced since 7 October, evacuated under fire, some after over 24 hours in hiding. Many of the homes and infrastructure in the south were damaged or destroyed.
Many parts of Gaza may never recover. In the war’s first few days, Israeli airstrikes destroyed Azmi’s father-in-law’s house north of Gaza City, close to the Israeli border. All of Azmi’s in-laws and their children then moved into his apartment, a comfortable flat on the top floor of a high-rise building in the Rimal neighbourhood of Gaza City. From there, he and his family could hear the bombing all around. “It was scary”, he told us, “but as long as you heard the sound of the strikes you knew that you were still alive”. One night, pieces of shrapnel tore into their living room. The airstrikes of that first week also flattened a 40 sq m cottage Azmi had built for his grandchildren on a parcel of land dotted with olive and citrus trees. “Now it is just a patch of yellow sand”.
Those Who Moved South On 13 October, the Israeli military started notifying the approximately 1.1 million residents of northern Gaza, including Gaza City, to head south of Wadi Gaza in the centre of the strip, saying, “This evacuation is for your own safety”. Guessing that a ground invasion was in the offing, Azmi resolved to leave the same day, though the decision was agonisingly difficult. He and his family have many happy memories of that home, among them his daughter’s wedding celebration and his two sons’ graduation from university. It was the house to which he thought he would one day retire. “Knowing that you are going with only your clothes, leaving everything else behind, was a very sad moment for us”, he said. Azmi later discovered that an Israeli tank had fired shells into the building’s façade, leaving gaping holes just below his apartment. The building has suffered structural damage, which likely means that he and his family will be unable to return. Another flat Azmi owns in Gaza City, where one of his sons was supposed to move after getting married, is in a similar state.
The day Azmi left his home, he filled his own and his wife Jojo’s cars with essential goods. They drove south to Khan Younis with their sons Muhammed and Yousef, both in their twenties, and their daughter Maria, who is fifteen. In Khan Younis, Gaza’s second largest city, they found shelter in the house of a friend who was already hosting four other families. Jojo and Maria slept inside with the host family’s women, while the men had separate lodgings that comprised an indoor and an outdoor area. The weather was still warm, so Azmi and Yousef opted to sleep on the terrace. Afraid of the sound of airstrikes, Mohammed stayed inside with other male guests. Azmi’s elder daughter Abeer, her husband Motasem and their two children Omar and Judy, respectively 2½ and 1½, joined the family in Khan Younis. After a few days, Motasem moved in with relatives in Nuseirat, a refugee camp in central Gaza, leaving Abeer and the two toddlers with Azmi. Other members of Azmi’s extended family stayed in Gaza City, while still others moved elsewhere in the strip in search of relative safety.