Two years after Israel’s Nuseirat ‘rescue’ success, we are still bleeding

My sister Eman was lying on the ground in a pool of blood, while my brother Abdullah sat beside her, saying in a trembling voice: “Say there is no god but God… say God is great… say the shahada.”

On the other side, my other sister Yasmin was calling out to me in a broken voice, injured in her chest, barely breathing: “Lina… I can’t… help me… I can’t breathe…”

The ambulance finally arrived. It carried us through streets covered in rubble.

At Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, we found an even greater horror.

When the doors opened, we saw hundreds of people waiting: tense faces, frightened eyes, some searching for family members, others already grieving.

Inside, the floor was covered in blood. People kept trying, futilely, to wipe it away.

The horror was difficult to comprehend as real: hundreds of injured people, bodies without limbs, screams and moans merging into one another. I tried to distract my brother, but there was nowhere to look that was not covered in blood.

A nurse approached and examined me. She noticed an injury I had not even realised I had. “Don’t be afraid,” she said calmly. “Stay here.”

I stood there barefoot, staring at everything around me in silence. I was not crying. I was in a state of complete shock, as if my mind had detached from reality but was still observing it.

It was in that state, surrounded by blood and screams, that I first heard someone describe what had just happened as a “military operation to free captives”.

We stayed in the hospital for five days. Five days in which I did not sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, the scenes of death returned to me: tanks, dust and the explosion.

After we were discharged, we went back to the apartment because we had no other shelter. But staying there, in the place where it had happened, was psychologically unbearable. Eventually, we moved back into a tent.

The impact of that day is still visible in my family. My sister Eman still has a shrapnel fragment lodged in her hand near a sensitive nerve. It cannot be removed because of the risk of permanent damage to her hand’s movement, despite the constant pain it causes her.

Yasmin still carries shrapnel in her chest, which left her struggling to breathe for a long time. My mother’s facial wound remains clearly visible. My grandmother continues to live with shrapnel injuries across her back and ongoing pain, made worse by her age and weak immunity.

Two rooms of our apartment were completely destroyed, and most of our belongings, including clothes and furniture, were damaged by shrapnel. We became afraid of windows, and of any place exposed to the outside. Every view out took us back to the moment of the shelling, and to the terror that came with it, a memory that has not left us since.

It was only after I recovered that I saw how the attack that shattered our family was being described: a “successful rescue operation”. Reports described how armed individuals in civilian clothing had entered the area in aid trucks, while others had spent time in the streets posing as vendors as a form of camouflage. At the same time, dozens of tanks had advanced towards Salah al-Din Street, where we were living, and the main roads had been surrounded under heavy fire, including shooting from helicopters and quadcopters.

The so-called “rescue operation” killed at least 274 people and injured nearly 700 others, according to health authorities. Nevertheless, some media outlets described it as “bold” and considered it an outright “Israeli success” because it freed a few captives. No attention was paid to the destruction left behind, or to the lives shattered in the process.

That Nuseirat had been turned into hell was no more than a line in news bulletins.

Two years later, I still wake up to recurring nightmares: shelling, tanks, loud sounds, and seas of blood. Any sound of shelling still brings me back to that moment, to the same feeling of suffocation and danger, and to the question that has never left me: Will I survive this time?

No one has been held accountable.

No real investigation has been opened.

Two years after that massacre, the tragedy is still ongoing in different forms. Violations continue day after day without any real accountability, and there is no actual ceasefire that can be felt on the ground.

There is no safe place in Gaza. The skies are constantly filled with surveillance drones watching us around the clock, along with repeated artillery shelling and the continuous expansion of what is known as the “yellow line”, which keeps increasing the zones of danger and further restricting people’s movement.

Access to aid and medical supplies has become extremely limited. The prices of basic goods have risen to unimaginable levels, far beyond our capacity.

People have been exhausted for years by a continuing crisis that drains every aspect of our daily lives.

Our lives as civilians remain under constant danger. Young men, mothers and children are killed without warning, while simply going about their lives. I walk in the street, and just metres away, a group of young men is targeted without warning.

I survive by a miracle, but for how long?