The Sunday Story: Losing the Gaza They Knew

This is the holy month of Ramadan for Muslims around the world. It's a time of fasting, prayer, and celebration. But in Gaza, with the Israeli-Hamas war in its fifth month and warnings of famine growing, many residents are too hungry and sick to experience Ramadan as they wish. Israel currently prohibits international journalists from entering the territory, so reporting on Palestinians in Gaza and the hardships they're facing is an ongoing challenge. But NPR's Leila Fadl has been finding ways to stay in touch. Today, on the Sunday Story, my colleague and the host of NPR's Embedded podcast, Kelly McEvers, talks with Leila about two stories she's been following. One is about a Palestinian American family who was visiting Gaza when the bombardment started and got stuck in the war. The other is about a college student in Gaza who's been sending Leila voice memos for months.

My cousin just went out this morning, and he saw the troops from a distance, and he told us how they looked. They've shot people who were headed from the north to the south, and it's really dangerous to move right now, and the bombs are just getting closer and louder.

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We're back with the Sunday Story. I'm handing it over now to Kelly McEvers. Kelly sat down with NPR's Leila Fadl, who's been documenting the experiences of Palestinians in Gaza.

Hey, Leila.

Hey, Kelly.

So the Israeli government does not allow international journalists to report in Gaza.

Right.

And for Palestinian journalists reporting there, it's incredibly dangerous. More than 85 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 7th. But still, you've been finding ways to tell people stories from Gaza.

Yeah.

One of them is a young woman. Her name is Shema Ahmed. She was 20 years old when she first started sending you voice messages over WhatsApp. That was in October, at the beginning of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

Hello, Leila. As you hear, the situation now may not be the best situation to report anything ever, but when I have service, hopefully these messages will get to you.

You've been documenting her experience over the last several months. Can you just tell me a little bit more about her?

Yeah, I mean, the way I found Shema was I was trying to find people in Gaza. during the very first blackout. The telecommunications company had been struck, cell phone lines were down, and all of a sudden we had lost contact with Gaza. And through a nonprofit, I was connected to Shema, and when people were able to communicate again, Shema and I started talking. I would send her texts asking her what life was like before, what she was going through, what she was eating, how she was surviving, and she would talk to me about life.

The neighborhood I used to live in is in Shejaia. It is a place that is very close to the borders of Gaza.

She would record voice memos into her phone whenever something came to her, whenever something was happening around her, something occurred to her, and then I would receive them in batches whenever she got a moment of service. And at the end of October, she sends me this first batch of messages, and she talked a lot about her life before October 7th, the beautiful rose garden in her grandmother's house, the room she had just redecorated, saved up money with her sister and redecorated in their home with the help of their uncles, who are carpenters. She talked about our university.

To put it simply, I really loved university. I loved the library. I befriended one of the librarians who was very kind to me and always gave me book recommendations, and I'd always give him some of my book recommendations. We just had an amazing relationship. And he also helped me in a lot of things.

What a beautiful nerd, I thought, when she was describing how much she loved her professors and she loved science and she loved the projects she was working on. She said me and the other students thought we were going to change the world with these projects. Maybe we wouldn't, but that was what we thought.

And we had this goal that once we graduate, we have to at least put together a computer that we connected on our own. That was just something we had to do at some point.

What's that sound in the background?

That's the drones. That's the constant soundtrack of this war, Israeli drones in the sky. So many of her voice notes came in with sounds like that, sounds that were much worse.

My cousin just went out this morning, and he saw the troops from a distance, and he told us how they looked. They've shot people who were headed from the north to the south, and it's really dangerous to move right now, and the bombs are just getting closer and louder.

So when I was messaging with her, she was still in the north of Gaza, when the Israeli military had told civilians to move south because Israel said anybody left in the city would be treated as a combatant. And this mass displacement had happened, that the world was watching with extreme concern, people getting killed by the Israeli military on that path, people walking, carrying everything they had. But Shaymat and her family, they had nowhere to go, so they didn't make the move, and the war is just escalating around her.

Today, six tons of bombs, six rockets each weight one ton, were bombed on a single residential square, and those bombs were U.S.-made.

She knows she's talking to an American journalist. She knows she's talking to an American audience.

It's really hard to see that people are aiding this violence, and it's really just so hard to live through.

Oh, my God.

That is all I have to say.

I mean, I don't know if 20-year-old Shaymat knows if each of those bombs was a ton, and I don't know if she knows if those specific bombs or missiles were U.S.-made. But her point was there is a sizable amount of military aid, weapons, and support coming from the U.S., and she's asking why, at a time people are questioning what many see as a disproportionate response to the attack on October 7th. And there are questions about whether war crimes are being committed, with the level of civilians that are being killed, the fact that Israel isn't letting food and water and fuel and electricity into the Strip, the number of children that are killed, buried, the number of people under the rubble. All of this is coming across in those first batches of messages that she's sending me. And then, on October 31st, around 3 p.m., Shaymat goes silent.

So, at that point in the conflict, the Israeli military had basically ordered half the population of northern Gaza to evacuate and head south, as you said. Families would pack 10, 12 people into a car, navigate these bombed-out roads. So did she join that big move south?

I mean, I didn't know anything. I didn't know if they had made that move. Frankly, I wasn't sure she was alive at all.

Hello, Leila. How are you? I hope you're doing well. Thank you so much for sending all the messages to confirm that I'm still OK and for sending me news and updates. Thank you so much.

The temporary ceasefire at the end of November, in which there was a hostage exchange deal and there were several days without attacks, had gone into effect. And so there weren't the sound of bombs. There weren't the sound of drones. But you could hear that she was getting tired.

If I wanted to explain what was going on the past few weeks, it's really hard to. It's like, I feel like big parts of my life, bits of my life, have been fading away. It was every day past.

At this point, she's moved a little further south, to Nusayrat. She was staying in a three-bedroom apartment with close to 100 people in it.

Every corner had people sitting, kids screaming and crying, and people talking, noisy, 24-7.. It's crazy.

And there were only two toilets for 100 people.

And that's just the worst thing for me. I hate not being able to use the toilet properly, not being able to wash myself properly, and being smelly. I just hate that. And I'm a clean freak. That's how I am, usually.

Can you imagine, not just not having running water, but nowhere to clean yourself, to clean yourself up as a woman who has a period?

Every night as I go to sleep, my dream is just me in my room with my sister, watching a TV show with a bowl full of food and chicken that we haven't eaten for the longest time ever. You know, just relaxing with my family after having had a bath, and, you know, having dived in a bathtub full of hot, boiling water. That is just a dream that I really wish could come true.

There's so much that's in there, right? The unsaid there. The food that can't come in, so she's not eating. The hot bath, the hot shower, all things you can't have in this moment.

So, you were getting these messages from Shayma during the temporary ceasefire, which lasted about a week, and then ended on December 1st. And we know that, Nusrat, the area where she was, was hit pretty hard. after that. Were you able to get in touch with her?

So at this point, as soon as I heard hostilities had resumed, that the bombardments, the Israeli bombardments, had started again, I messaged her saying, are you okay? Are there any attacks in your neighborhood? Is there any fighting? And she sent me a long message that started with, yes, it's true.

It is continuous.

And then I didn't hear from her again. And I kept thinking, okay, when is she going to get in touch? How do I get in touch with her? What's happened? And then finally, at the beginning of February, a new batch of voice memos.

We're about to move. I'm by the window, just to record this. My parents are running around. My uncles and aunts are running around.

They're from the weeks that she wasn't in touch with me. She was recording for the day that she got cell data and was able to send them. And remember, she's not a journalist. She's documenting what she's going through for the world as she's going through it. The first one describes a day in early January where she's being displaced again.

It's already been 90 days or more. It's not something easy to handle. I have no idea if this is ever going to get to you, because the place we're about to move to this time would be a complete isolation.

She was on her way to the camps in Deir Ebelah, which is a refugee camp in central Gaza. And remember, really, much of Gaza are refugee camps from 1948, when Israel was created, and when Palestinians describe what they call the Nakba, the catastrophe, their mass displacement, hundreds of thousands of people forcibly, sometimes violently, displaced. And Deir Ebelah was a place that became a refugee camp in 1948, that started with tents, became hardened apartment buildings, and now is back to tents. So the historical echoes are everywhere in everything she says that day.

Right now we're walking out of this one terracotta. We're basically running away. And just as a note, this is the seventh place we're evacuating to. We're the eighth? I seriously lost count.

This is the seventh place we're evacuating to, she's saying, or the eighth, she doesn't even know.

She doesn't even know, that's how many times, that's how many times. And around her, everybody's walking too.

As I'm walking, nobody's laughing, everybody has a grim face on. After they had been kicked out of their houses, kicked out of everywhere, they could evacuate to, ended up on the streets,

Wow, her voice sounds so different from those first voice memos she sent you.

Yeah, I mean, it's changed, it's hardened, Kelly. That's when I get afraid, because when people are in so much pain, going through so much trauma, they do want revenge. I remember that after October 7th, I was talking to a young man from the Kibbutz Berri, who told me, I don't care what happens to the people of Gaza, shoot them all. And it wasn't because he's a bad person. He was a traumatized, angry, scared person, who was hurt because about 100 people in his community were killed. And now, listening to Shay Met, and she's talking about payback, and that's the cycle. You're hearing it happen because people are human. And I've met people who say, I know that I've been hurt, but they're opposed to this level of the Israeli government retaliation. For example, I met a person whose brother was killed in the October 7th attack, who said, I know my brother's killed, but this bombardment won't make me safer. If you go kill Palestinians, civilians, it won't make me safer. We have to solve it in a different way. But that is not the common reaction of a person who's been through something like this.

What about Shima? How is she doing? Is she okay?

Physically, she's okay. You know, she hasn't been hurt so far. She's lost her grandmother, her two uncles, professors, friends. She knows her university is gone. Her neighborhood on the border with southern Israel, Shejaiya, is gone. Her house is gone. She's in this refugee camp, and she's living a life that you shouldn't be living in 2024.. No gas. People are cooking over an open fire. They're constantly looking for food, for water. And a reminder here, this is a man-made humanitarian disaster. You know, we're just a few months in, and people are on the brink of famine. The UN just put out a report saying 10 children in Gaza have died from starvation or dehydration, including a baby that we reported about here on NPR. Shemat said the camp is really crowded. It's cold. People are sleeping in poorly insulated tents. And she and everyone there are digging out their own toilets in the ground.

It's pretty hard to see a future here, especially not being able to get access to education. I'm so passionate about learning. It's just what defines me in some ways.

Recently, she said she's even abandoned, that. They're just finding a way to get out of Gaza, and that could cost a lot of money to try to get on that list to cross into Egypt.

Although if Gaza was the same as it used to be, I would never. All the people I love are here. All my friends are here. But at the same time, it's the only choice I have, basically.

She's realizing there's no future for her in this place that she described with such love in those early days, and probably would still describe with love, but she knows there's nothing to go back to.

After the break, Laila will talk about how this conflict is affecting one Palestinian family who lives here in the U.S.

At first, we were doing a lot of stories about Israeli-Americans and other dual nationals who were feeling unsafe in Israel, and they wanted to get home. And there were all these efforts to help people get out of Israel. And so I started to wonder, what about dual nationals in Gaza? What about Americans in Gaza? What is being done to help them? And that's how I ended up getting in touch with Wafa and Abud through a colleague here at NPR. And they hadn't been to Gaza, where their family lives, in years. And they had wanted the family to meet Yusuf, their baby. So Wafa and Abud took a quick vacation. Well, they thought it was going to be a quick vacation. And then they find themselves with their child in Gaza. when the war breaks out. You know what's the hardest feeling?

The hardest feeling ever is to hide your fear and show the opposite, just to keep my son positive and full of energy,

because he doesn't understand anything. He thinks this is a fireworks. OK, Mommy, clap, clap. This is a fireworks.

But sometimes he will jump. He will be scared and freaking out if I'm not next to him.

This is the first time I ever spoke to Wafa. And this was after them, for days and days, trying to get help, calling the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, calling the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, being told really nothing, getting no information. There was no way to get out. The borders are sealed, remember. Nothing is coming in or out, not just people, but anything else, not fuel, not food, nothing. And so they start going public. They start talking to the press because they don't know what else to do.

Please, please, save us.

What happened next? Like, how did they get out?

Yeah, so for 29 days they were trapped in Gaza. And then one day, Habut said to me that their names showed up on the list of people that are approved by Israel and Egypt to leave via the Rafah crossing, the border between the south of Gaza and of Egypt. And they got out. They got out. They went to Egypt and finally got back to Massachusetts. And then I got to talk to them again at home with Youssef Saif. Is this Youssef? This is Youssef. Hi, Youssef.

Youssef.

Hi.

And what about Rafah and Habut? How are they doing?

I mean, even the decision to leave was very hard for them, because they had left their parents at that point behind and other extended family, siblings. And so they had a lot of survivor's guilt, like, why am I okay? How come I got to cross the gate?

I think we were supposed to be extremely happy when we crossed into Egypt, yet I think Rafah and I, for the first two hours of that drive, were just in tears, because you look back and you think about the people you left behind. Even those family members that you were not close with or you didn't know, you became extremely close with, because you were facing moments where you thought you all were going to die together. So I think when Rafah and I got to Cairo, we both had the same feeling. We took showers back to back, and we both cried in the shower, because we haven't taken a shower for weeks, and we know our parents still can't take a shower.

What does he know about his family now? How are they? Are they okay?

At this point, when I spoke to Rafah and Habut, Rafah was checking on her family constantly. They had gotten out of Gaza just after her, and so she knew that they were safe. Habut's parents were refusing to leave, because his siblings were still there, and their grandkids, but they did just get out. Habut said, though, he can't always get in touch with his family, that's still there, his siblings, because of the comms blackouts. And he says, in some ways, being on the outside, it's harder, because you're not there to know that they're safe, and so you're just guessing, like the rest of the world.

We hear of bombings in an ex-neighborhood, and you try to reach out to the people that live in that neighborhood, and the calls won't go through, and then there's no way for you to confirm.

So he's not even sure how many family members they've lost.

How many American citizens are still in Gaza, do we know?

It's really unclear at this point. When I was speaking to Rafah and Habut at the beginning of all this, there were hundreds. We know that there are still Americans in Gaza, and there were a lot of people, Rafah and Habut included, that felt that the American administration did not take the same type of care for American citizens in Gaza that they did for citizens in other places. And the question was raised, do American lives have less value in one place than they do in another? Publicly, the administration says, no, we work hard to get American citizens out, no matter what. But a couple families sued the Biden administration over all of this. They said the government just didn't do what it was supposed to do. They didn't try hard enough to get U.S. citizens and relatives of U.S. citizens stuck in Gaza out of danger.

What about Rafah? Like, how has this experience affected her? How does she talk about it?

I mean, when I spoke to them, I felt like they were still shell-shocked. I feel right now, I don't want to leave the house. I feel like I want to stay here. I feel safe here. I think they were still struggling to express what they've been through. A lot of people, they were asking, like, would you like to go back to Gaza or Palestine? For now, I don't have an answer.

But I don't know if I'm going to go back with Yousef again to Gaza.

Because every moment, every moment, I imagined Yousef under one of the houses.

or in the hospital, or dying. I don't know. I think with Yousef, it's hard to do it again.

You know, something I was thinking about is they would sleep all on top of each other in Gaza, so that if something happened, they would die all three. As Wefat put it, not one, not two, all three.

Listening to their story, I just can't help but think about how Palestinians from Gaza will never really be able to go back to the place they knew. I mean, what do you think will be their relationship to this place in the future?

Yeah, I mean, I think about Yousef, right? Like, Yousef had never been to his parents' homeland before. And the first time he goes, it was war. And it's not even the original ancestral home, because Wefat and Abud's parents and grandparents were displaced from where they really are from. And Abud and Wefat grew up with multiple incidents of either violence or war or encounters with Israeli soldiers. Gaza had several conflicts that were considered extremely deadly before what we're seeing now. And so I thought about the generations and generations of pain, you know, decade after decade of living under occupation and the dehumanizing thing that it does to everybody involved, because the security of everyone in this strip of land is intrinsically linked. And if you live through something like what we're seeing right now, where, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 12,000 children have been killed so they don't have a future. What is the future for the civilians, the young people, the children who do survive?

I mean, this makes me think about Shema. When's the last time you heard from her?

About a week ago, she posted a video to her Instagram from the refugee camp she's living in, so I knew she was still alive. And she's sent me messages. since. At this point, she doesn't know if she'll be able to get out of Gaza. And if she stays, she's not sure what her future will look like. You can hear her wondering about that in lots of the voice memos she's sent me over the last five months.

You know, we're craving everything. We miss our life so bad. We miss our home, so bad. We miss Gaza that we knew so bad. Because now everything we know is gone. And when we see the pictures and we see our memories and all the nice times we spent together, it feels like these times didn't exist in the first place. And even after this is over, we're going to go back to destruction. Total and complete destruction. Because it's just full of rubble on rubble, and that is all.

Does that mean permanent displacement for people like Shema?

Moela, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.