My year of horror in Gaza

“The life we ​​are living now is inhumane.”

Hamas may not have been eliminated, but it is dangerous for their police to be on the streets, so there is anarchy. The distribution of most types of food is controlled by criminal gangs. They have weapons and steal imported food from those who receive it, usually from charity donors in places like Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Since there are no police to stop them, they hijack trucks and steal their contents, and two or three days later it appears on the markets at high prices. The price of many items, such as vegetables and eggs, has roughly tripled.

Meanwhile, there are no working banks or ATMs. I’m still a journalist, working for a newspaper in the West Bank, although I can’t travel anywhere to report. I still receive a salary, but the only way I can get cash is from money changers, profiteers who receive more than 20% as commission.

But next to the fate of others, these are just inconveniences. We lost my cousin Muntezar in Rafah: when we left, he stayed on because of his job at the electricity company, which had promised him a higher salary if he stayed. He was not a fighter, but an ordinary worker who had two small boys. I was close to him and he had no interest in politics, but his house was hit and he was killed, along with two of his wife’s brothers. My wife’s sister was killed along with four of her children and her grandson in an attack on an apartment building that killed more than thirty people in Nuseirat at the beginning of the war.

One of my wife’s brothers was killed in an air raid along with his two sons; another with his wife, two sons and three grandsons. You expect to lose someone all the time: every time your phone rings, you rush to answer it, just in case it’s someone telling you that another family member has been murdered.

One afternoon three weeks ago there was an air raid on the building opposite our house, which is only eight meters away. We were sitting in our downstairs living room when there was a huge explosion. All our windows were shattered and we were covered in smoke, broken glass and thick, black dust. I couldn’t see, I could only hear, and my family was screaming and crying. Finally some neighbors came and took us outside and we sat in the open air to breathe.

Since then we have been trying to repair the damage, but we have no glass to replace the windows. We don’t know what will happen in winter, when the nights start to get cold. We had to throw away a lot of food because it was contaminated by dust and chemicals from the rockets.

Like most people in Gaza, we long for the war to end and seek a return to normality. But no one seems to be putting pressure on this to happen. Israel does not want to end this war because that would mean that the prime minister would have to go to court on corruption charges and that his government would collapse. The fanatical right-wing politicians in his cabinet would also lose power.

But Hamas will not surrender. Their religion means that they believe that if they are killed, they will go to paradise, and all the time they say that they will not stop. They wait, hoping that something will change. For a long time they waited for Hezbollah to enter the war, and now it has happened; they waited for Nasrallah, although he is now dead. They are waiting for help from Iran and Yemen, although no one has any idea what will happen when it comes.

All I know is that while Hamas waits, we continue to pay the price.