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Atef Abu Saif is the author of six novels and since 2019 has been minister of culture for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

Abu Saif was visiting family in Gaza, where he grew up, when bombs began to fall Oct. 7 — in retaliation for Hamas’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/27/hamas-attack-israel-october-7-hostages/" target=_blank>surprise attack</a> earlier that day that killed 1,400 Israelis. He began sending voice notes to friends abroad, describing the fraying texture of everyday life, creating a diary of life under siege.

The following excerpts, which have been edited for length, clarity and style, track roughly three weeks, from Oct. 7 to 26, a time when about 7,000 Gazans were killed.

I never could have imagined that the war would begin while I was swimming. I had risen around 5:30 a.m. Today is going to be a good day, I’d thought. I’d have a swim, then take a shower in my flat in Saftawi, near Jabalya, the refugee camp where I was born and spent most of my life.

At the beach, tiny fishing boats  headed toward shore after a night at sea. There were four of us: my brother Mohammed, my 15-year-old son, Yasser, my brother-in-law Ismael and me. I was visiting from the West Bank and planned to be around for only a few days. Yasser had asked to accompany me: He missed his grandparents.

We drove to the northern end of the beach, parked on the main road, then walked down onto the shell-flecked sand. As usual, Israeli warships squatted on the horizon.

The sea was so inviting. Ismael and I stripped down to our shorts. Yasser took photos; Mohammed chain-smoked, the way he always does in the morning.

Suddenly, explosions sounded in all directions, the rockets tracing lines  across the sky. It’s a training maneuver, I thought, and carried on swimming. It might last an hour or two, I told myself.

I swam back to shore, calling on Ismael to come with me. He shrugged as we made our way out of the water. I shouted to him that it didn’t seem to be stopping. Suddenly, everyone on the beach began to run. “We have to get out of here!” Mohammed shouted. Explosions rang louder and louder. Ismael and I ran barefoot, carrying our clothes and shoes close to our chests. Everyone around us was doing the same.

Loay Ayyoub

Mohammed Abed

AFP Contributor#AFP

When we reached the car, I hit the accelerator before the others had even closed their doors. I drove like mad, as people leaped in front of our car, hoping to get a lift. We stopped and let five men pile into the back. We sped off again, honking to clear the way. I turned to Mohammed: “Where is Ismael? Did we leave him to the rockets?”

Mohammed laughed. “No, we left him to the sharks.” He had told Ismael to go on: His house wasn’t far from the beach. Mohammed’s shark joke didn’t make me feel any better.

For hours, no one knew what was going on. Then the news trickled in. A friend, a young poet and musician named Omar Abu Shawish, had been swimming, just like us, in the sea in front of Nuseirat Camp when he and a friend were hit by a shell from a passing warship. They were reportedly the first two Gazan victims.

There were 13 of us in the Roots Hotel: 10 guests and three attendants. Breakfast was served on tables in the corridor between the lift and the staircase. Whenever bombing starts — and there’s bombing virtually every month in Gaza — you must move to the middle of the building, usually a corridor or a stairwell, because it’s farthest from flying window glass, the most fortified part of a building. During the 2008-2009 war, my wife, Hanna; the kids; and I spent 22 nights sleeping in the corridor at home. This is surely what kept us alive.

Through the curtains, I glimpsed the bright blue sea below the small cliff on which our hotel perched. Fishing boats idled in the harbor, rocking in time with the swaying curtains. Farther off, three warships hovered. As I ate, I thought about the soldiers inside watching us. With their infrared lenses and satellite photography, could they count the loafs of bread in my basket, or the number of falafel balls on my plate?

Yasser — who, at 15, has witnessed only two wars — is still scarred by memories of the 2014 war. He was 7 at the time and remembers it vividly. His sister Jaffa, who was only 2, claims she remembers it, but when she describes it, I suspect she’s describing videos she has seen. She has a kind of nostalgia for it. Memories of war can be strangely positive, because to have them at all means you must have survived.

Survival was the topic of conversation today. The hotel’s other guests — all from the West Bank — had decided to leave through the Rafah Crossing Point into Egypt. They held passports, and many had diplomatic clearances. Before breakfast was finished, arrangements had been made with the Egyptian side. My name and Yasser’s were included, and we packed our things. Then, as Mohammed headed to the car, I announced that I’d be staying. This might not prove to be the wisest decision I’ve ever made, but it felt like the right one. I couldn’t flee out of fear, abandoning my father, brothers and sisters Eisha and Asma. I was only 2 months old when my first war broke out, in 1973, and I’ve been living through wars ever since. Just as life is a pause between two deaths, Palestine, as a place and as an idea, is a timeout in the middle of many wars.

I told Yasser to leave with the others, but he wanted to stay by my side. I was torn — the idea of leaving him on his own at the Rafah crossing, which is always bombed by Israel at the start of these wars, and not being with him as he crossed Northern Sinai, which is its own war zone these days, terrified me. In the end, I did what he asked.

On our way to drop off Yasser at his grandparents’ place, I asked Mohammed to stop by the patch of land I own so I could water the trees. It’s a small plot that I intend to build a house on one day. “Are you joking?” Mohammed screamed. “It’s far too dangerous.”

“Leaving the trees without water is dangerous, too,” I replied. “If the war goes on for long, they’ll die.”

Mohammed laughed. “They’ll die anyway if there’s an invasion. The tanks will bulldoze them as they always do.” I insisted nevertheless.

Mohammed and I dropped Yasser off with his grandparents, who live near one of the schools run by the United Nations. Afterwards I met up with Ali, my friend Hisham’s son, who told me they’d had to leave their homes in Beit Hanoun. Many families are sheltering in Jabalya’s U.N. schools. The street in front of one of the schools was heaving with people: confused children, angry men, tired women. All of them seemed lost. Farmers herded their animals along the school walls. A single teacher stood in the middle, desperately trying to create order out of the chaos.

The city has become a wasteland of rubble and debris. Beautiful buildings fall like columns of smoke. I often think about the time I was shot as a kid, during the first intifada, and how my mother told me I actually died for a few minutes before being brought back to life. Maybe I can do the same this time, I think.

Today is Monday, which means the weekly West Bank government cabinet meeting was at 10 a.m. I attended on my phone via Zoom but couldn’t fully concentrate as news alerts kept popping up. The screech of missiles from the gunships was deafening.

The alerts informed me that an airstrike had killed 50 in Al Tirrans. I apologized to the other ministers and headed back to the camp. Al Tirrans is the heart of Jabalya. All the transport links to nearby towns and villages converge at that point: taxis and minibuses to Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, the Bedouin Village and elsewhere in the north of the Strip.

On our way to Al Tirrans, Yasser and I passed by families wandering in a daze. They seemed to be carrying all their worldly possessions — mattresses, bags of clothes, food and drink.

When we arrived at the site of the attack, I was horrified to see the entire place flattened. The supermarket, the bureau de change, the falafel shop, the fruit stalls, the perfume parlor, the sweets shop, the toy shop — all burned.

Blood was everywhere, along with bits of kids’ toys, cans from the supermarket, smashed fruit, broken bicycles and shattered perfume bottles. The place looked like a charcoal drawing of a town scorched by a dragon.

I asked Yasser to stay in his grandparents’ house. The Palestinian logic is that in wartime, we should all sleep in different places, so that if part of the family is killed, another part lives. The U.N. schools are getting more crowded with displaced families. The hope is that the U.N. flag will save them, though in previous wars, that hasn’t been the case.

I went to the Press House, where journalists were frantically downloading images and writing reports for their agencies. I was sitting with Bilal, the Press House manager, when an explosion shook the building. Windows shattered, and the ceiling collapsed onto us in chunks. We ran toward the central hall. One of the journalists was bleeding, having been hit by flying glass. After 20 minutes, we ventured out to inspect the damage. I noticed that Ramadan decorations were still hanging in the street.

Back in the hotel, I felt exhausted and unable to concentrate. I had pain in my wrists. Bilal told me it was from overusing my phone. I spend hours clutching it, desperate for news.

I see death approaching, hear its steps growing louder. Just be done with it, I think. It’s the 11th day of the conflict, but all the days have merged into one: the same bombardment, the same fear, the same smell. On the news, I read the names of the dead on the ticker at the bottom of the screen. I wait for my name to appear.

In the morning, my phone rang. It was Rulla, a relative in the West Bank, telling me she had heard there’d been an airstrike in Talat Howa, a neighborhood on the south side of Gaza City where my cousin Hatem lives. Hatem is married to Huda, my wife’s only sister. He lives in a four-story building that also houses his mother and brothers and their families.

I called around, but no one’s phone was working. I walked to al-Shifa Hospital to read the names: Lists of the dead are pinned up daily outside a makeshift morgue. I could barely approach the building: Thousands of Gazans had made the hospital their home; its gardens, its hallways, every empty space or spare corner had a family in it. I gave up and headed toward Hatem’s.

Thirty minutes later, I was on his street. Rulla had been right. Huda and Hatem’s building had been hit only an hour earlier. The bodies of their daughter and grandchild had already been retrieved; the only known survivor was Wissam, one of their other daughters, who had been taken to the ICU. Wissam had gone straight into surgery, where both of her legs and her right hand had been amputated. Her graduation ceremony from art college had taken place only the day before. She has to spend the rest of her life without legs, with one hand. “What about the others?” I asked someone.

“We can’t find them,” came the reply.

Amid the rubble, we shouted: “Hello? Can anyone hear us?” We called out the names of those still missing, hoping some might still be alive. By the end of the day, we’d managed to find five bodies, including that of a 3-month-old. We went to the cemetery to bury them.

In the evening, I went to see Wissam in the hospital; she was barely awake. After half an hour, she asked me: “Khalo [Uncle], I’m dreaming, right?”

After 10 minutes of silence, she said, “Don’t lie to me, Khalo. In my dream, I don’t have legs. It’s true, isn’t it? I have no legs?”

Abed Khaled

I had to leave. For a long 10 minutes, I cried and cried. Overwhelmed by the horrors of the past few days, I walked out of the hospital and found myself wandering the streets. I thought idly, we could turn this city into a film set for war movies. Second World War films and end-of-the-world movies. We could hire it out to the best Hollywood directors. Doomsday on demand.

Who could have the courage to tell Hanna, so far away in Ramallah, that her only sister had been killed? That her family had been killed? I phoned my colleague Manar and asked her to go to our house with a couple of friends and try to delay the news from getting to her. “Lie to her,” I told Manar. “Say the building was attacked by F-16s but the neighbors think Huda and Hatem were out at the time. Any lie that could help.”

In the morning, I rejoined the search for bodies. The building was, as T.S. Eliot would say, “a heap of broken images.” We searchers picked through the ruins under the cricket-like hum of drones we couldn’t see in the sky.

This is my second night in Jabalya Camp, where I should’ve been from the beginning, where my family — father, sisters, brothers — have gathered. There’s no internet. No social media. We’re back in the radio age. Explosions continue, each one feeling closer than the last, each one inspiring me to reach for my own body to see whether I’ve been hit.

Why do I even want to survive? What is survival good for, if I live only to spend another day fearing my death?

It’s been a dark and terrible night. Hundreds were killed at al-Ahli Hospital last night. They’d sought life and a future in the sanctity of this hospital, thinking, mistakenly, that it would be safe.

The hospital was built by the British, or I should say the Church of England, about 150 years ago. We used to call it the English hospital. It was here that I was saved by an English surgeon after being shot as a teenager in the first intifada, a bullet lodged in my liver.

I could barely sleep, thinking of the children who had been sleeping on the grass in the gardens of the hospital in front of the church, lying under the darkening sky, protected by only a few scattered clouds, awaiting the morning sun they would never wake up to. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine not waking up myself.

A friend texted: “What’s happening in Gaza?”

I replied: “The proper question is not what is happening, but what has been happening for more than 75 years.”

We live in a war film, and the producer doesn’t want it to end. The studio keeps feeding the script with new scenes, keeps adding millions of dollars to the budget. It’s going be a blockbuster, as long as they never stop filming.

I headed to the Press House to charge my phone and watch the news. Last night, this whole neighborhood was hit and everything shattered — windows, floors, ceilings, shelves, doors. The only things that didn’t fall were the photos of Gaza City that hung around the internal courtyard. If Yasser and my brother Ahmed and I had spent the night there, as we did during the first week, we wouldn’t have survived. Nobody knows what is safe and what is dangerous. You have to roll the dice.

News came that the Israelis wanted to evacuate more than 60 percent of the Strip’s inhabitants, presumably so they could flatten Gaza City. Helicopters dropped leaflets everywhere. In Arabic, they announced that anyone who remained north of the Wadi waterway would be considered a partner to terrorism — meaning the Israelis can shoot on sight. I will not obey their orders. I’ve spent this whole time in northern Gaza City and Rimal, two of the hardest-hit areas. Sometimes all you have are the choices you make.

Hanna pleaded with me by text to relocate to Rafah, so Yasser and I could be close to the crossing. “I don’t trust the Israeli army,” I replied. “So why should I obey them?”

Yesterday, my friend Mohammed’s brother was killed with his family in Nuseirat Camp, having moved south from Gaza City as the Israelis ordered. Others who obeyed didn’t get even that far. Dozens were killed yesterday in a cluster of missile strikes on the Salah al-Din Road, the main artery heading southward.

Like the sound of a drone outside, or the persistent buzz of a mosquito indoors, danger is everywhere. No place is safe in the Gaza Strip.

Today is the 16th day of the conflict. I’m still alive. Gaza is no longer Gaza. When I woke this morning and looked down from my window into Jabalya Camp, I saw dozens of young men removing the rubble from buildings hit by missiles, desperately trying to recover the corpses crushed beneath. For eight days now, we haven’t been able to retrieve the bodies of my wife’s sister, her husband and their son. Hanna phones every morning asking for news.

Each day requires a survival strategy. Of course, getting bread is the most important task. Families send one of their kids to queue in front of the bakery before sunrise. They have to wait for as long as five hours before they return with their precious cargo.

Last night, I didn’t get any bread at all. I had assumed that Faraj, our neighbor in Jabalya with whom we share every burden and every grief, was getting it, while he assumed I was. I bought falafel, and when I met him in front of the house, we were embarrassed that all we had to eat were falafel balls. Yousif, a friend from the neighborhood, overheard us and phoned his wife. Minutes later, she appeared with nine small rolls for us.

Dawood Nemer

After bread, the second thing you have to think about is clean water. Forget chilled water. Just clean enough to drink. In the Press House, where I've spent much of the past 10 days, we’ve had no water at all.

As electricity is off most of the time,  even if you do have water, you can’t pump it to the tanks on top of the buildings. And not everyone can afford to buy bottles of water. In the first few days of the war, the price of a small bottle rose to 10 shekels, about $2.50. I need water for Wissam, who is lying in the hospital, burning up. It’s as if she still feels the heat of the explosion.

The third thing you want is batteries. The last time Jabalya Camp had electricity was 13 days ago. Having been subject to daily, rolling blackouts for more than a decade (eight hours on, eight off), most people have learned to adapt. The luckiest have backup generators, but most rely on batteries similar to those used in cars. These provide low lighting at night and some internet access, though they can’t power anything like a cooker, fridge or kettle. Charging one battery can take up to five hours.

This morning, the bakery queues were longer than usual. In front of Shanti Bakery on Wihda Street and Family Bakery between Wihda and Nasser streets, they were more than 500 meters long. According to the head of the Bakeries’ Association, seven bakeries have been hit by Israeli missiles. Two nights ago, the one near my sister Asma’s house was destroyed, along with the lives of most of those queuing outside.

It’s not just bakeries that are being hit but also other places where people gather. Last night, they hit the souk in Nuseirat Camp, along with two of the camp’s best-known restaurants: Jenin and Aqil. I’d grabbed a sandwich from Aqil on the fifth day of the war. The people who had been queuing there yesterday are now dead.

During the long nights without electricity or internet, I feel disconnected from the world. I hear explosions and screaming without knowing where they’re coming from. Sometimes, Faraj, Mohammed and I get drawn into guessing where each explosion is and how close it might be. Most of us in Gaza are intimate with this game.

The only solution is to have a radio set. My dad has three, probably all heirlooms. After much discussion, he agreed to let me use one. We spend our nights fighting for a clear signal.

Last night was the most violent so far. Some 600 people were killed in attacks on the Strip. Around 11 p.m., I experienced the usual sequence: the screech of a rocket, a flash in the darkness, the sound of an explosion. I was lying on a mattress in the middle of the flat and had almost dozed off when a dark and noxious cloud began filling the street below. I began to cough. The smell was that of ash and burning metal. I counted 12 ambulances heading toward the end of the street.

I miss real food. Most days, I eat falafel for breakfast and falafel for dinner. Two days ago, I was lucky enough to get some chicken and quickly fried three pieces for Mohammed, Yasser and me. A feast! Every time I eat, I feel that it’s the most delicious meal I’ve ever had. Deep down, I think I’m telling myself this because it might be my last.

This morning, I was surprised to see the barbershop open. My attempts to enter failed as scores of young men queued outside. Instead, I suggested that my brother Ibrahim cut my hair using his little electric razor. My since-deceased brother Naeem was very good at cutting hair. During the first intifada’s curfews, which lasted as long as 40 days, Naeem would cut hair for the men in the neighborhood.

Yahya Hassouna

Today, I stayed in Jabalya. This meant not visiting Wissam in the hospital and not going to the Press House. Checking in on Wissam is crushing. I guess I’m weaker than I realized. I told myself that to be able to see her tomorrow, I needed to rest today. Besides, I can’t use the car every day.

There’s no gas left at the petrol stations. Yesterday, I saw the owner of the station at the entrance of Jabalya Camp desperately pleading with a crowd, trying to convince everyone that he had no fuel and that queuing was futile. One man shouted, “How come you’re a petrol station but you have no fuel?”

The owner angrily replied, “Ask the war.”

I made my way toward Eisha’s place in the Tel al-Zaatar neighborhood of the camp. Heaps of rubble and half-collapsed buildings lay everywhere. By this stage, I’ve become indifferent to the explosions ripping holes in the city around me. Everyone who dies here dies by sheer bad luck. They just happen to be where the missile strikes at that moment. One small consolation is that when you hear the sound of the rocket, you know it’s not going to hit you. This is a lesson all Gazans learn. When you’re the target, you don’t hear anything; you just die.

“Is life in Gaza always difficult?” I get asked this question a lot. I struggle to remember a time when it wasn’t. Maybe, for a few scattered moments back in the early ’90s, when the Palestinian Authority established a base in the city, there’d been some calm. Or the promise of calm. For my generation, 20-year-olds at the time, the future seemed open. The peace process signaled a new beginning. Thousands of people took to the streets in support of it. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were clutching at straws. My mother participated in one of the many demonstrations that celebrated the Oslo accords; she believed it might lead to the release of my brother Naeem, who had been sentenced to seven years in jail after a clash with the Israeli army. She died without seeing Naeem free.

Mohammed Saber

Sadly, this atmosphere lasted only a few years, after which everything collapsed. Peace became a burden for Palestinians, the cost of it — the presence of Israeli police everywhere — too much. The future was canceled. The economy stagnated, the airport was bombed, people were hemmed in. Even when Israeli settlers and soldiers moved out in 2005, walls went up and the Gazan people knew, once again, that they were prisoners here, not citizens.

For the whole of last night, the tanks kept up their bombardment. Eisha’s place is on the eastern side of Jabalya, close to the border where the tanks stand in the hundreds. It was a risky decision, coming here, but after 17 days of moving from place to place, with scarce access to water, I’d had enough. I needed a shower and a proper night’s sleep on a real bed.

Atef Abu Saif

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Diary of Gaza during conflict, bombings and destruction

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Opinion ‘I’m still alive. Gaza is no longer Gaza.’

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