Ahmed Mduch thought he would only be leaving his home for a couple of hours when he was ordered by the Israeli military to evacuate, three days into the war in Gaza.
Israeli forces were preparing to target buildings nearby, said to belong to Palestinian Islamist Hamas, as Israel responded to the attacks of October 7.
That was a year ago.
Mduch, 45, and his family are still waiting, longing to go home.
The Israeli air force first began striking targets in the Gaza Strip hours after the attacks by Hamas and other extremist groups in southern Israel, killing 1,200 and kidnapping up to 250 people.
But it is mainly the civilian population in the now widely destroyed strip who are paying the price.
Some 90% of the residents in the densely populated Gaza Strip have been displaced at least once in the military operations launched by Israel as it seeks to eliminate Hamas.
The fighting was initially worst in Gaza City, where Mduch and his family lived.
They fled their homes, but that was only the first time. In the past year, he, his wife and his four children have been repeatedly forced to flee.
“Every time we are displaced and have to go to another place, we lose our belongings, a piece of our dignity and our will to live,” he told dpa.
They are now camping in the city of Deir al-Balah in the south of the Gaza Strip.
Their tent measures less than 9 square metres, says Mduch, who used to work as an actor. Unsurprisingly, it has no toilet, water or electricity, and no protection from the heat or the rain.
“We are fleeing death but escaping into hell,” he says.
The same applies to most of the 2.2 million people living in the Gaza Strip, many of whom have also fled repeatedly to temporary dwellings. They are the survivors.
So far, some 41,870 Gazans have been killed, most of them women and children, according to the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry. The figures cannot be independently verified and do not distinguish between fighters and civilians but the UN has said the Gaza health authority’s figures are generally credible.
And the death toll continues to climb daily, even as the world’s focus is now on the mounting hostilities on the Lebanese border, as Israel battles the Shiite Hezbollah militia.
No end to the war in Gaza is in sight, with indirect talks about a ceasefire stalled for months between the Israeli government and Hamas, mediated by the US, Qatar and Egypt.
As the Israeli invasion, airstrikes and ground offensive continue, many residential areas in the strip lie in ruins.
The Israeli military accuses the Islamist organization of misusing hospitals, schools and homes for terrorist purposes and using people as human shields, accusations Hamas has denied.
Some 59% of all of Gaza’s buildings were damaged if not wholly destroyed between the start of the war and July 2024, say US researchers using satellite data. That adds up to some 170,000 buildings in the 40-kilometres strip.
Humanitarian areas attacked, say Palestinians
The grey ruins of buildings and mountains of debris dominate the northern part of Gaza.
Abdullah Masud fled from the Al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City, in December last year.
He and his family first found shelter in Al-Mawasi, in the south of the strip designated as a “humanitarian zone.” There was no water, no electricity and no medicine, says Masud, who is 44 but looks years older.
He says the Israeli army also carried out attacks in this area, even though it is supposed to be protected.
Masud, who used to be a bank employee, says what stays in his mind is the air strike that killed Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif in July.
“I will never forget the huge sea of flames,” he says.
People fled in panic as the fire raged, while the remains of bodies lay on the ground. Ninety people were killed in that air strike, says the area’s health authority.
As people ran, Masud, father of five, shouted out loud his family’s names through the panic. They survived.
The Israeli military said it bombed a fenced-off Hamas site within the humanitarian zone. Deif is said to be one of the masterminds of the October 7, 2023 attacks.
Gazans get a meal every other day, aid groups say
Masud and his family then moved to a densely packed refugee camp in Deir al-Balah, a little further north.
Given the horrific situation, he often wishes he were dead, he says.
He has lost almost 25 kilograms in body weight since last year, he says, and now weighs 75 kilos.
Israel’s restrictive controls mean food and aid are scarce, with 83% of the required food aid not making it into the strip, according to Care and other aid organizations.
That means people in Gaza have gone from having an average of two meals a day to just one meal every other day.
Tens of thousands of children are malnourished.
Only 17 of the 36 hospitals in the strip are partially operational.
Care, Save the Children and other non-governmental organizations have criticized the Israeli controls on aid, including medicine. Israel dismisses the criticism.
“If we were to add up the damage caused by the war, we couldn’t,” says Khaled Al-Frandschi, who also comes from Gaza City but is now also in Al-Mawasi.
“I hope this war will end soon.” People need security at last, including in order to rebuild the Gaza Strip, he says.
Reconstruction, researchers say, could take decades.
