My brother’s family was under the rubble for 5 hours

This dispatch was sent by Mondoweiss Gaza Correspondent Tareq Hajjaj via voice notes on October 29.

The streets are filled with gaunt faces, fearful and trembling. The bread lines seem to be most squalid in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, as everyone queues with the worry of being bombed while waiting for bread. Israel has done this several times already, targeting bakeries right after receiving flour shipments from UNRWA.

Temperatures are unusually hot. I don’t think it’s a fluke in the weather — it’s because of the excess concentration of explosives, fire, and gunpowder that has burned through the Strip. Rockets and airstrikes don’t stop. Every hour, every minute, missiles rip through Gaza’s now disfigured urban landscape.

All those who have stayed in Gaza’s northern half — Gaza City, Beit Hanoun, Jabaliya, and Beit Lahiya — are now being bombed. They are being targeted because they have the audacity to remain in their homes. By targeting these families, Israel is sending a message to all those who have not evacuated northern Gaza to flee or suffer the same fate.

This is what happened to my older brother and his family. Two days ago, an Israeli missile struck their house. There were 24 people in the home, most of them women and children. 

My brother Hani, 51, was under the rubble for over five hours. Thankfully, the children and the young were not at home. When the ambulance arrived five hours later, the paramedics decided that they wouldn’t be able to pull people out from under the rubble. But my brother’s sons forced the paramedics to keep searching for traces of him. This is what saved his life and the lives of those who were with him.

When they were pulled out, they were severely wounded. My brother lost his eye. His foot and shoulder were shattered. The body of one of his sons was completely burned. Everyone else who had been in the house when it was brought down on their heads was also critically injured.

Those arriving at al-Shifa’ Hospital in Gaza City, including my brother, were left in the hospital corridors for a day or more without being examined by any medical personnel, who have been inundated with hundreds of new injuries that continue to flood the hospital without pause. 

As my brother waited for a day and a half to be seen by medical personnel, his sons arrived from the Zaytoun neighborhood by foot, having embarked on the trek to the Shifa’ Hospital in the middle of the night. When they arrived, they searched every part of the hospital to find a bed, a blanket, or anything to put under him. They weren’t successful. He remained sprawled on the floor in that state until he was eventually examined and then transferred from Shifa’ in Gaza City to the European Hospital in Khan Younis.

My brother says that a medical team examined him and noticed his severe injuries. A wound in his head was given 17 stitches without anesthesia. My brother was screaming the entire time, begging the doctor to spare him from this torment. But there was nothing they could do.

My brother now says, “I wish I had died so that I wouldn’t be in all this pain.”

Hospital staff dealt with the shortage by placing a temporary splint on his foot and shoulder, but they were unable to deliver the subsequent required treatment, which was to add metal implants to his foot. They waited for his turn to enter the operating room the entire night, which was backed up with patients. When the staff examined his eye, they told him that he would first need to finish treating his bones in order to be able to walk to another part of the hospital to get a diagnosis. Eventually, it became clear that he would not regain his eyesight.

I was only able to reach the European Hospital today. I had no idea that the area had become so dangerous. The road leading to it was completely desolate. When I reached the hospital, there was a large number of refugees, and hospital conditions were catastrophic beyond description. The hospital is continuing to receive large numbers of the injured from al-Shifa’ in Gaza and Al-Quds in Tal al-Hawa. Most of them are patients with broken bones.

Within the hospital compound, something akin to a makeshift economy is already taking shape, with barbers and food stalls setting up in the courtyards and people selling various scavenged items to the incoming refugees. But what is most melancholy to see is the people who come looking for missing loved ones, thinking they may have been transferred from al-Shifa or other hospitals in the north. People all over are asking about their parents, their siblings, and even their children, all of them unaware of their whereabouts due to Israel’s severance of all telecommunications in Gaza for the past two days. During that period, ambulances would transport patients to hospitals without any way of calling and informing their relatives. When the telecommunication lines came back on, people would find out that their loved ones had been targeted in Israeli airstrikes without any way of knowing whether they were injured, dead, or still under the rubble. 

The level of deprivation and human need is nothing like I’ve ever seen before. No one had expected or prepared for this level of devastation in Gaza, as people have been wont to do in previous wars where gradual escalations gave indications of the destruction to come. There were no precursors this time, so most people were unable to stock up on essential supplies. Even those who did in the first few days of the war have now abandoned them in northern Gaza and fled to the south.

One of the strangest things I have noticed in recent hours is the interception of local radio channels by the Israeli army — with the loss of telecommunications and the internet, radios have become the only means of communication and knowing what is happening in different areas of Gaza. The army has been using these local radio waves to broadcast messages ordering people to evacuate parts of the al-Nuseirat area — that is, south of the Gaza valley, the so-called “safe zone” to which the army had ordered civilians to flee. Now, it was telling them to flee again and leave certain areas like the Buraq area and other parts of Nuseirat refugee camp, telling them that remaining in place would put their lives at risk.

These army broadcasts are a means of psychological warfare meant to precipitate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and they are being backed up by actions. They are eerily similar to the Zionist radio broadcasts of 1948, which terrorized the Palestinian population into flight for fear of being massacred like the residents of Deir Yasin, Tantura, and countless other Palestinian villages.

History repeats itself, and now it seems that old plans from previous years proposing the establishment of a separate Palestinian state in parts of Gaza and the Sinai desert are now being gradually realized. It has started with the evacuation orders in Nusierat, and soon, the Israeli army might do the same with nearby Deir al-Balah, then Khan Younis, and then Rafah. They will slowly push people further south until they are all clamoring at the Rafah crossing with Egypt and forced through under fire.