BEIRUT (AP) 鈥 Gaza has always been a small, crowded space with hardly any exits. Now the world for Palestinians there has shrunk to the size of whatever refuge they can find: a jammed shelter, a car, the walls of a shared apartment, or floors and benches in hospital corridors.
The strip is 25 miles (40 kilometers) long by some 7 miles (11 kilometers) wide, and Israeli troops are . More than 2 million people, the majority of Gaza鈥檚 population, cram into what鈥檚 left.
Beginning in mid-October, The Associated Press has followed four people trying to survive and communicate from that diminished world, using texts, voice messages and video clips and the rare phone call from a balky 2G network whose fate also hangs in the balance. Explosions and the buzz of drones pierce some of nearly 80 recordings.
One lawyer, determined to stay in Gaza City, carries her paralyzed father from place to place to escape bombs. A U.N. worker shelters with tens of thousands of displaced, retreating to his car for a sliver of privacy. A writer is trapped between four walls and is urged by his family to stop documenting the war for their safety.
Israel says it is dismantling Hamas, the group that unleashed that killed around 1,200 people in Israel. Weeks of Israeli bombardment have killed more than 13,000 Palestinians, 70% of them women and children. That's more than the number of civilians killed in 18 months of war in Ukraine.
While most civilians have been able to flee the combat zone in other wars , Palestinians in Gaza have
All four people followed by the AP are part of its , living of Gaza City which has largely been spared in past conflicts but is at the heart of this one. AP contacted eight Gaza residents and these four were able to maintain the connection, despite evacuation, multiple hits on their areas and
They now are nowhere near each other, but they chronicle the despair of the anguished world that is closing in on them.
HOSEIN OWDA, U.N. WORKER
Moving day was scheduled for Oct. 7 for the Owda family. The windows were in place and the last pieces of furniture were due to arrive.
Hosein Owda had spent two years and most of his savings getting the apartment ready.
It helps to have a long timeframe for home construction in Gaza, which has been under economic . It also helps to have one of Gaza鈥檚 most coveted jobs, working for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, which assists more than three-quarters of the Strip鈥檚 population, all of them refugees.
When he woke that morning to the barrage of Hamas rockets, Owda knew Israeli retaliation would be swift. His first thought was that the move would have to be postponed.
In a matter of days, his world fell apart with dizzying speed. Owda鈥檚 new apartment was gone in one airstrike and one of his best friends killed in another. He still agonizes over ignoring pleas for help from a neighbor trying to find a daughter thrown out of a window in an Israeli strike. He was busy evacuating his own family to safety.
On Oct. 13, he and his extended family of 15 people crammed into two cars, one with a broken windshield.
They were now among 22,000 people sheltering at a U.N. vocational center in Khan Younis. There are 24 bathrooms 鈥 more than 900 people per toilet 鈥 but no beds, mattresses or running water. The numbers continue to swell.
His wife, three children and six other relatives shared a 3-by-3-yard (meter) classroom. Owda slept in the car.
鈥淚t is a struggle with life for the most basic, simple things. If you want to take a shower, this is a faraway dream,鈥 he said.
On Oct. 29, Owda learned an Israeli strike had hit It took him hours to confirm what he feared: were killed, including his uncle, aunt and two of their three adult children. A few days later, the third died of his wounds.
Two of his cousin鈥檚 daughters survived, but Owda couldn鈥檛 do anything for them. The 15 miles (25 kilometers) that separated them were insurmountable.
鈥淭hey are in one place, all alone, and we are far,鈥 he said. A fighter jet roared in the background of the recording.
Almost immediately after, another strike killed a friend who had been his companion on evening walks. Also killed were the man鈥檚 parents, sisters and their families.
Everyone he knew had lost someone. Finding bodies was barely possible.
鈥淭here is no space to grieve,鈥 he said. 鈥淥nly our vital signs show we are alive. We breathe, but other than that we have lost all other signs of life.鈥
Owda felt trapped by all the things he couldn鈥檛 say: He wouldn鈥檛 tell his children, ages 9, 6 and 1, that they no longer have a home, and he couldn鈥檛 bring himself to tell his father about the relatives dead in the airstrike.
At least 108 of Owda鈥檚 U.N. colleagues have been killed, and he said fear is spreading among the rest, who number about 13,000.
Owda had made his living trying to help Palestinian refugees. Now he lives among them in a shelter. The despair he witnessed all around consumed him. He lost 20 kilograms (44 pounds) in about a month. His gentle sense of humor vanished, replaced with the hollow voice of a drained man. He left the shelter only twice, to search for medicines for his father, but needed to hire a donkey cart because for a car.
Usually in charge of documenting the positive impact of aid on people鈥檚 lives, now Owda found himself in charge of and recording accounts of survival. One man tried to take his own life in the shelter. Children talked about seeing a chicken pecking at lifeless bodies , and he was grateful his own children were relatively unaware of the upheaval back home.
His text messages grew more somber. Deaths among the displaced are becoming grimly routine, even in the so-called 鈥渟afe zones鈥 proclaimed by Israel. Gaza's health ministry's ability to count the dead in the north has collapsed.
鈥淲hat is really shocking to me also is that the ceiling of my expectations has become so low,鈥 he said in a recording Nov. 20. 鈥淭o tame an animal, you make them hungry, they will obey and that way they do what you want.鈥
ASAAD ALAADIN, WRITER
Asaad Alaadin鈥檚 home near the Israeli border ended up on the wrong side of the front line almost as soon as the first bombs fell.
He took shelter in central Gaza City, usually the safest spot in previous wars. On Oct. 11, he was trapped alone in a downtown office by the acrid smoke of Israeli bombs. Alaadin turned on his phone camera and breathlessly described the scene. He feared those moments could be his last.
By the next morning, it was calm enough to venture to his grandfather鈥檚 house, also in central Gaza City, joining his immediate family, in-laws, and seven families of cousins. They huddled together as missiles screeched overhead.
A 33-year-old writer, Alaadin contributed to various publications, including an Arabic website aimed at Palestinians inside Israel, covering the arts, literature, protest movements and Gaza鈥檚 social dynamics. His wife was in Canada for her studies, which, for a moment, seemed like a relief.
The family debated: Stay or go? They prayed together. His mother鈥檚 argument won out. Time to split up. If something happens to one of us, she reasoned, 鈥渟omeone survives and keeps going.鈥
They set out at 7 a.m. on Oct. 13, the day 1 million Palestinians in northern Gaza to evacuate. His father went to central Gaza; one sister stayed in Gaza City. He, his mother and a sister headed to Rafah, the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, near the border with Egypt.
, a car with a mattress tied to the roof and some people trudging through the smell of gunpowder and munitions with their belongings in their arms.
Hours after the Alaadins passed, the road was jammed. Explosions with families, leaving the ground strewn with dozens of bodies. Israel and Hamas blamed each other. The road emptied again afterwards.
They couldn鈥檛 stay long in Rafah. Their hosts asked them to leave because they feared Alaadin鈥檚 filming the war put them in danger.
The last core of his family broke apart. His mother and sister went to , a few miles (kilometers) north. Alaadin moved in with his in-laws near the border with Egypt. They, too, asked him to stop filming.
He agreed but kept sending out voice messages, which included the background rumble of warplanes. When more relatives arrived, he and his in-laws left the airy home with its garden and olive trees for a tiny apartment to make room. It was Day 10 of the war.
Their focus turned to day-to-day survival, finding water and food, securing fuel for the generator that keeps their phones charged.
Sunset brought the day鈥檚 only meal 鈥 mainly pasta, beans or lentils. He treated it like a fast: to save food, build resolve and be closer to God. They listened to the radio for news, read a Kindle, and most of all, searched for network to get news from friends and family.
It was not Hamas that he felt trapped by, he said, even if the group had tried at first and failed to stop people moving south. People didn鈥檛 want this bloodshed, 鈥渂ut the reality is our killer is not Hamas. It is the Israeli army,鈥 Alaadin said.
His mind raced down dark passages. Finding food was hard, but easier than having a strike crush you to death under your own home. Even worse was to be injured:
But the darkest passages of all were such as the one Israel imposed on Oct. 27. Everything beyond the walls of his in-laws鈥 house went black. The worst imaginings filled the void.
His wife Jenin, in Canada, 鈥渨ent mad,鈥 he said.
When the internet came back on after 36 hours, it was 鈥渓ike the return of the soul to the body.鈥 He broke down in tears at the sound of each voice: his father, his siblings, his mother, his wife. He had feared the worst for his sister in Gaza City, and when they spoke, she wept from the stress of the bombing around her but still refused to leave.
Communication 鈥渋s more important than food and drink,鈥 he said. 鈥淚t tells us all the details that we need 鈥 who is dead and who is still around.鈥
The communication blackout marked the beginning of the Israeli ground assault into northern Gaza. Israeli troops have since moved into Gaza City and
His sister and her children finally made it out of Gaza City by Nov. 7. He joined them and their mother in Khan Younis.
Communications cuts became routine. The only way to get a signal was through Israeli or Egyptian e-SIM cards or to wait for brief moments when local providers came online. Alaadin鈥檚 voice recordings arrived sporadically, sometimes taking days to land. His voice croaked and grew fainter.
鈥淲e feel the danger getting closer. Gaza is shrinking,鈥 he said. 鈥淓very war, no matter how destructive, they (Israelis) never changed the features of the city. Now they have.鈥
SALEM ELRAYYES, JOURNALIST
Salem Elrayyes considers himself a student of Gaza鈥檚 urban landscape and how its growing population adapts to being hemmed in by the sea, Israel and Egypt.
Just before Oct. 7, the journalist was working on a podcast about how Gaza grows vertically 鈥 apartment towers replacing old villas, crowded shantytowns and farmland.
His 13-year-old daughter鈥檚 screams at the sound of hundreds of outgoing rockets woke him early Oct. 7, alerting him to events over the fence.
鈥淚t was madness, one after the other, phsst, phsst, phsst,鈥 Elrayyes recalled.
At first, he thought it was rockets from Palestinian factions responding to an Israeli attack. Tension was in the air before Oct. 7.
The reality was harder to fathom.
paragliders, the storming of Israeli communities. Israeli jeeps taken by Palestinians raced through Gaza鈥檚 streets.
For hours, Palestinian militants controlled several Israeli communities, including villages and towns of the ancestors of current residents of Gaza before Israel鈥檚 creation in 1948.
鈥淔or me it was the stuff of imagination ... I never thought that could happen,鈥 Elrayyes said.
He thought Gaza might expand for the first time, even if just by a bit. But when the Israeli retaliation came, the opposite happened.
spiraled over the following weeks. 鈥淓ach strike on a building would level it. Roads were closed with rubble. Movement became hard for us and for ambulances.鈥
The 37-year-old journalist, who had covered all of Gaza鈥檚 wars since 2008, had never felt the need to even stockpile supplies in the past. Calm and grounded, he was always confident that living in central Gaza was security enough.
But a week into the war, Elrayyes and his wife decided that it was time to evacuate from their modern apartment and the roof garden his father had cared for meticulously.
His parents, who lived in the same building, took more convincing. His mother needed dialysis three times a week. He explained that Gaza City鈥檚 Shifa hospital, the largest in the Strip,
On Oct. 13, he packed clothes, passports and IDs, and drove his wife and children to an apartment in Khan Younis. He came back for his parents, taking them to a refugee camp in central Gaza near a medical center that offered dialysis.
Then he based himself at the hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza鈥檚 second-largest, where he documented bombings and the deluge of killed and wounded.
He had two daily drives: One to Gaza City to check on the apartment, have a cup of coffee alone and water the plants, and the other, inside Khan Younis, to see his children. The distances weren鈥檛 far 鈥 about 20 miles (35 kilometers) total.
His last trip to Gaza City was on Nov. 1. He made himself coffee at home but can鈥檛 remember if he watered the plants.
Elrayyes鈥 calm began to fray. He reminisced about quiet nights listening to music and playing with his kids or visiting friends. He dreamed of home-cooked meals.
鈥淣ot only the physical space is tightening. My private space is eroding,鈥 Elrayyes said in a long, ranting voice message.
He slept in his car outside the hospital and filed reports and photos from a tent for journalists or an emergency staircase.
At least have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an international organization that documents threats to the media. Four were Elrayyes鈥 friends.
By Day 17, like many in Gaza, Elrayyes had the flu. . Irrigation water was used for showers, and some people washed in the Mediterranean to avoid contamination. Eleven bakeries had been bombed, and only nine were left to provide for the hundreds of thousands displaced in the south.
A stale piece of bread was Elrayyes鈥 only meal on a recent day and he wondered whether he could keep going. 鈥淲e are not eating well. We are not sleeping well. We get sick easily, not to mention the rockets and whatever else they are lobbing at us,鈥 he said.
He has seen his mother twice since they evacuated. Her dialysis had been cut to twice a week, and she was growing frail.
His communications through WhatsApp with AP were a with the outside world.
On Nov. 6, he and his wife were in the car when the dust and smoke of an explosion darkened the air around the shelter housing their children. Fearing the worst, he hit the accelerator. It took just a couple of minutes of frenzied driving behind ambulances to realize the shelter was intact.
Elrayyes couldn鈥檛 bear to see the children so soon after envisioning his worst nightmare. He dropped his wife and continued to follow the ambulances.
Fears for his haunt him. If anything happens to them 鈥渋t will kill any relation between me and Gaza even after the war.鈥
On Nov. 20, Elrayyes was called into the morgue of the hospital where he'd camped out to see four of his cousins, including an 18-month-old. They were killed in a nearby airstrike.
AYAH AL-WAKEEL, LAWYER
Ayah al-Wakeel has made a career campaigning for better rights for women. The Gaza City lawyer is used to uphill battles in a conservative society whose religious courts often side with men.
When the war broke out, she stayed focused on the right to a dignified life, raising funds to provide necessities for the thousands who followed Israeli orders to evacuate northern Gaza. But she and her family were determined not to be among them.
They, like many, the 1948 鈥淣akba,鈥 鈥 the catastrophe 鈥 when some 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from homes in what is now Israel.
Back then, al-Wakeel鈥檚 family was a city 40 miles (65 kilometers) to the north that the 33-year-old has never seen. They refused to take the chance of losing yet another home to Israel forever, she said in a voice note on Oct. 17 from her house in Gaza City.
鈥淲e had a consensus in the family,鈥 she said in a recording. 鈥淲e will not leave, and we won鈥檛 give them what they want. Whatever God has preordained will happen.鈥
For 12 days, she stayed with her parents, sister, brothers, and uncles in the family building as bombs fell near them.
Then the story of displacement that began in a town al-Wakeel has never seen resumed with a vengeance in the only city she鈥檚 ever known. On Oct. 19, in a series of frantic pre-dawn texts, she explained what changed their minds.
鈥淭hey bombed our house over our heads. We miraculously survived,鈥 she wrote.
Her neighborhood, she wrote, was surrounded by what she called a 鈥渞ing of fire,鈥 describing successive . The barrage seemed designed to drive out anyone who dared stay, she said. She and her neighbors pulled her partially paralyzed father to safety.
She wrote in fragments:
鈥淔our people carried him鈥
鈥淓ach holding an arm or a leg鈥
Twice, her father asked them to leave him to die.
鈥淲e sat around him and said if one rocket hits, we all go together. We kept praying and reading the Shahada,鈥 she wrote, referring to the Muslim profession of faith recited when death seems near.
They managed to carry him out, but another strike hit as they fled. The family scattered, reuniting later at Shifa Hospital.
For six days, al-Wakeel went silent. Then briefly, she wrote: 鈥淚 am sorry. I can鈥檛 keep in touch now. The situation is very terrifying. I have no brain. There is no internet.鈥 A similar message landed the next day.
The next day, she wrote: 鈥淚n no other war before was I so scared of strikes. After what happened to us, I am terrified beyond words. I can鈥檛 keep myself together.鈥
Again, she fell silent. It was the first communication blackout, on Oct. 27.
When she surfaced two days later, it was to report on another Israeli warning, to leave the Shifa hospital area where Israel claims headquarters.
鈥淲e don鈥檛 know where to go. We are calling friends to try to find a place. We have a bus.鈥
Eight hours later, al-Wakeel and her family joined about 14,000 people sheltering at al-Quds hospital, about 2 kilometers (1.4 miles) away.
Another evacuation order, another 鈥渞ing of fire.鈥 Two neighboring apartment towers were bombed. and damaged one of its wards.
鈥淭he sound is really loud and terrifying. The hospital is shaking,鈥 she wrote. In a photo she shared, people slept on the floor.
The next morning, the family moved again to another hospital, their third in three days.
鈥淔ather is ok. He is just tired of moving.鈥
Al-Wakeel thought obsessively about a cold drink of water. She was limiting her intake to two sips a day to avoid the crowded, filthy bathrooms.
Since she left home on Oct. 19, she had had one shower but had no change of clothes. She bought new underwear.
Al-Wakeel was thankful she got her period at a time when she still had some privacy. There were reports of Palestinian women to delay their menstrual cycles.
鈥淢y sister is praying she doesn鈥檛 get it until after the war,鈥 she texted on Oct. 30.
Five days of silence.
On Nov. 4, she wrote that a 鈥渞ing of fire鈥 surrounded They returned to Shifa, the first hospital.
鈥淚 want to collapse but I really don鈥檛 have the energy for that,鈥 she wrote.
On Nov. 7, she said Shifa was unsafe but neither was going south. On the same day, al-Wakeel wrote to one of her best friends outside of Gaza: 鈥淚 miss you, my love.鈥
Israeli forces breached the hospital on Nov. 13. She has not been heard from since.
