We have no real options: stay in the north and suffer, or flee south and suffer all the same.
Where can we escape, when every corner is pervaded by death?
My family and I look into each other’s eyes. We don’t say a word, but our anguished faces are all asking the same question: Do we flee to the south, where bombardment and killing never cease — where death only comes slower? Or do we remain in Gaza City Governorate, just before the Netzarim checkpoint, which has also become home to everyone from Gaza’s north — more than 1 million people — only to be erased quickly, because the occupation has already decided to wipe it out completely?
The choice seems to be between how quickly we may die.
The occupation has devastated Gaza’s northern area — Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahia — and its eastern frontiers in Zeitoun and Shuja’iyya, by land and air, leaving behind a trail of blood, destruction, and unimaginable suffering. Today, these areas lie 90 percent destroyed, flattened to the ground, utterly uninhabitable — no buildings standing, no shelter, no life. Entire neighborhoods were erased as if they had never existed. This total destruction is precisely what Israel today threatens in Gaza City Governorate— to turn it into a mirror image of the north and east, despite the destruction already present, leaving it as lifeless as those areas have become.
Between 2023 and 2024, Israel launched three brutal ground invasions into Gaza City Governorate, with tanks rolling through the streets, crushing everything in their path. Tel al-Hawa, Al-Rimal, and Al-Sabra bore the heaviest blows, with nearly 70 percent of homes destroyed and countless lives torn apart. Entire streets were reduced to rubble, and the air was thick with smoke, dust, and the stench of death.
The most merciless of these attacks came in March 2024, during the sacred month of Ramadan. Al-Rimal was placed under a suffocating siege for nearly 20 days. During that period, we could not even drink safe water. We could not contemplate moving or even looking out from our windows. My family and I endured a real famine, facing death by starvation during those 20 grueling days. Al-Shifa Hospital was completely destroyed, leaving behind total ruin, while surrounding neighborhoods were shattered, and residents trapped under relentless bombardment from tanks and airstrikes. Everything that moved in the streets — whether human or animal — was targeted.
I lived through those cursed days. I witnessed the full reality of an Israeli ground invasion: tanks patrolling day and night without pause, their engines roaring like beasts, the streets trembling under their weight.
