His mother, who lost her leg at the beginning of the genocidal war against Gaza, screamed like a slaughtered bird from the horror of the heavy shelling on western Gaza City.
Kinan al-Najjar, a 36-year-old man, didn’t know how to calm his wounded mother and his shaken family except with a few flimsy words. It was a “Hollywood night” — no one slept a wink.
It was 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, July 7, and no one knew what was happening.
“An hour of shelling was followed by an hour of calm, tempting me to lie in my bed and take a nap,” Kinan said. “No one knew what the next hours would bring.”
Awakening
At 4:00 am, his wife, Huda, woke him up in a panic.
“Wake up, people are running around! The people in the street are like torrents, running to nowhere!”
Huda described the scene. “The streets were filled with people like demonstrators returning from a soccer final, carrying their luggage on their backs. The screams of children and women filled the horizon, and frightened heartbeats could be heard over the chaos.”
Kinan jumped out of the house, wandering and trying to stop someone to understand what was going on. “I was between a dream and an awakening,” he said.
“Run quickly, the tanks are behind us!” everyone Kinan passed by told him. Most of Kinan’s neighbors left that night.
It seemed the Israeli soldiers had decided to turn fear into the oxygen that Gaza breathed that night.
A snowstorm
Huda explained that four families remained in their building, resisting the idea of displacement. They made their chests into iron plates to endure the sounds of bombs approaching them little by little.
Kinan and Huda’s 10-year-old daughter, Nour, sat motionless in a corner of the house. They tried to calm her down, telling her everything would be okay. Their eyes betrayed them in front of their daughter and their three youngest children.
“I’m very scared,” Nour told them. “The shelling is loud, and the neighbors are running away now.”
Kinan’s mother was crying, but there was no time to dry her tears.
“I’m more confused than she is. Everyone around me is shaking like they’re in a snowstorm. But we’re in the hottest month of July,” Kinan said.
Kinan and his family were in the center of the storm, so they had to leave immediately.
Dangerous plan
It was 1:00 p.m. on Monday. Kinan and Huda had prepared for displacement, packing their belongings, but there was no way out. The sound of bullets knocked on their door like hail in January. Their friends called, begging them not to leave the house, saying they would fall dead beside the bodies in the streets.
At the same time, other warnings came that Israeli soldiers were raiding houses and executing civilians.
All the neighbors in their building gathered in the basement to decide what to do. The shelling grew louder around them.
It seemed this moment was different from every other time throughout the past year of war. If they stayed, they’d be killed, and if they went out, they’d be killed too.
A crazy idea popped into Kinan’s head, but nothing could be crazier than what they were living through. He took a hammer and turned to demolish an eastern wall to escape.
The demolition point was exposed to planes, and they would kill him if they saw him. But that was okay — if the plan succeeded, 25 others, including women, children, and the elderly, would survive. The risk was worth it.
During that time, suddenly, a light appeared through the wall. It was a hope of survival.
Now came the second stage of the dangerous plan: getting the children, women, and the elderly, including Kinan’s mother in her wheelchair, out through the small hole.
Nour hid her tears to protect her parents’ hearts. She had always been smart and had always loved them.
Waves crashing
Kinan said they succeeded in jumping to the first neighbor’s house, then from there to the next house, and then to a side street away from the snipers’ eyes. “Everyone walked while looking back at the house because no one knew if we’d ever return,” Kinan said.
Huda recalled looking into the children’s eyes to understand their feelings as they left their lives behind, ran through the walls under shelling, and passed bloodied bodies in the street. “Their eyes were overflowing with tears and fear,” Huda described.
In the al-Zaitoun neighborhood to the east, everyone dispersed in different directions. Kinan and Huda’s family headed north with tens of thousands of displaced people. It was like the season of migration to the north that Tayeb Salih wrote about.
Huda described the people as intermingling like waves crashing against each other, confused and afraid, all asking: “Where do we go?”
Kinan’s family arrived in northern Gaza City, but the people there were also leaving, so they went back to the al-Rimal neighborhood, even though it was in the danger zone.
They stayed for a while, then fled for the third time to the al-Daraj neighborhood in eastern Gaza City. After two nights there, they fled for the fourth time to the Old City, further east, in a futile search for safety.
More and more
On July 12, on the 280th day of the war against Gaza, the Civil Defense had announced that it had recovered more than 60 bodies, mauled by stray dogs, lying in the streets.
Kinan walked that day, passing bodies in the streets: the bodies of a young man and his sister from the Safadi family in front of their house, the bodies of the Badriyeh family, and not far from them, the bodies of the Zaidiyeh family, all killed by snipers while trying to escape.
“A few meters later, people gathered at the door of Abu Meddin’s house, where they found the dead body of its guard, Fayez al-Sharif, executed by soldiers,” Kinan said. “He joined the owners of the house, who were also killed during displacement in the invasion of the area on February 2, 2024”.
In the house right next door, an ambulance crew recovered the bodies of three elderly sisters from the al-Ghalayini family.
“On top of that, dozens of homes were burning,” he continued. “The Tanira family, the Shorafa family, the Aqili family, the al-Qassas family, the Abu Shaaban family, the Daghmash family, and more besides.”
The cycle
This is what Kinan witnessed with his own eyes, but there are many more he didn’t see, and more that ambulance crews couldn’t reach due to the tanks.
After a week of displacement and uncertainty, Kinan and Huda’s family returned home, hoping to sleep one night without the nightmares of displacement.
This was four months ago. Now, what happened to Kinan and Huda is happening in northern Gaza, and the Civil Defense has said that close to 100,000 people have this time fled south to Gaza City. The cycle of displacement continues, accompanied by the same cycle of killing.
The people of north Gaza are reporting the same stories that the people of Gaza City and Khan Younis and Rafah and Deir al-Balah have been telling. People gunned down by snipers and quadcopter drones as they attempt to flee. People rounded up and forced into ditches. People lined up and executed by soldiers. People separated from their loved ones as women are torn away from their children and men are led away, blindfolded and bound, to an unknown fate.
And people escaping through the walls in Gaza, hoping to survive.
Sami A. Akkeila
Sami A. Akkeila is a journalist based in Gaza.
