The Electronic Intifada 13 January 2025
Every single death in Gaza has torn apart the fabric of a family unit. A woman mourns after an Israeli attack on a UN school in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, that killed at least 20 people on 16 December 2024.
ActiveStillsIn times of war, stories emerge that blur the line between truth and exaggeration. Some accounts seem hard to believe, yet they turn out to be painfully real. Others become more distorted with each telling. Then there are those that are outright fabrications, filling the void left by uncertainty and fear.
It’s hard to know which stories to trust unless you hear them firsthand, like the harrowing tale from my cousin about her 6-year-old daughter, Aisha, who has lived through the brutal displacements in Gaza many times over. Her story, despite sounding almost unbelievable, is tragically true.
Three months into the war, in late December 2023, Aisha was forced to flee the Shujaiya neighborhood near Gaza City with her grandparents as the situation went from bad to worse. In the chaos of displacement, as bombs fell, the family was abruptly separated, splitting Aisha’s mother, father and younger siblings from Aisha and her grandparents. Nobody could be certain when they would see each other again.
Fleeing as bombs rained down across Gaza, Aisha and her grandparents found temporary refuge in a school in the southwestern part of Gaza City, only to be displaced again and again by Israel, pushing them further and further south, as days turned into weeks and weeks into months.
As Israel’s bombing campaign shifted from north to south, thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands more were displaced from their homes.
As Aisha and her grandparents sought shelter in the south weeks after the separation, an airstrike in the vicinity caused serious injury to Aisha’s grandfather. Given his age and frailty, the grandfather had to be evacuated to Egypt for urgent medical treatment with his wife and Aisha was not allowed to leave Gaza with them.
It was a hard decision for the family to make. But Aisha was then left in the care of relatives in the area, who volunteered to care for her and insisted that the grandparents evacuate from Gaza for immediate treatment.
Trauma
No matter how loving one’s grandparents may be, it is terrifying for a 6-year-old girl to lose contact with her parents. To experience the hardships of war firsthand and face the prospect of losing your grandparents while being starved and displaced compounds the trauma. In effect, Aisha endured Gaza’s own Via Dolorosa – a sorrowful path echoing the one believed to trace the steps of Jesus on his way to crucifixion – as she braved untold hardships entirely on her own.
Following months of desperate pleas, repeated follow-ups with and updates from international organizations, the Red Cross finally reunited Aisha with her mother. It was a joyful reunion. But something had irreparably changed.
The 6-year-old girl the parents lost months before came back a different person – older, quieter and unusually calm for her young age.
“Aisha is not the same since she came back to us,” her mother told me. “I can’t explain it but it feels like something is broken somewhere.”
Aisha’s story, once unimaginable, has now become heartbreakingly common across Gaza. The war has fractured Gaza’s social structure in profound ways.
I am one of those forcibly separated from their families by the war. And I personally know countless stories of others whose cherished family bonds were torn apart and destroyed by its devastation.
One woman and her elderly parents were allowed to evacuate to Egypt while her husband and children remained in the north. A young man stayed behind in Jabaliya in northern Gaza while his wife and kids sought refuge in the south.
Another family was separated during their expulsion from al-Shifa hospital. Israeli soldiers forced their two teenage sons to walk the long way to southern Gaza, while the parents and sisters remained in the north.
Fractured lives
These are not tall tales but real stories of real people with fractured lives.
Pregnant women have been displaced to the south while their husbands are imprisoned in Israel; mothers have been killed, leaving children behind who are now cared for by men, only for these men to be disappeared or buried in mass graves. There are thousands of such lopsided stories of elderly grandparents outliving their children and grandchildren, surviving under cruel and unbearable conditions.
Lost in Gaza’s massive casualty figures, in the large, wholesale number of traumatic deaths reported, is the reality that each individual fatality tears apart the very fabric of the lost person’s family. Every single death, when closely examined, reveals a profound impact on immediate and extended families, with ripples felt throughout society.
The American-made bombs not only annihilate buildings and other civilian infrastructure, they leave imprints like cluster submunitions in the hearts and minds of every Palestinian – young and old – across Gaza.
More than 2 million people are now internally displaced within Gaza, living in dire conditions that have strained even the strongest of social ties.
Gaza is now a place with a population of widows and orphans.
As of February last year, the UN children’s fund UNICEF estimated that more than 17,000 children in the Gaza Strip are either unaccompanied or have been separated from their parents.
Orphaned children face an uncertain future, growing up with tragic memories of the war that stole their families and left them with no one to care for them. Widows and widowers face unimaginable challenges, bearing the responsibility of raising entire families while every semblance of normal life has been stripped away.
A friend of mine told me how his wife, who fled to the south while pregnant, gave birth to their son in February 2024 last year. At the time of our conversation, the baby was 10 months old and my friend had yet to hold him even once, despite being only a few miles away. He had missed every moment of his son’s life so far.
The worst part of all is that none of us know when this pain will end – let alone if my friend will be able to meet his own child, assuming nothing happens to either of them.
Tragically, this encapsulates every familial bond in Gaza today.
Asem Alnabih is an engineer and PhD researcher currently based in Gaza City, north Gaza Strip. He serves as the spokesperson for Gaza Municipality and has written for many platforms in both Arabic and English.
