(Phone and internet connections are increasingly scarce in the Strip, but Rulin sent me this message & photo and asked me to show you – M)
This time, I left Jabalia after they forced us to abandon it. They intensified the bombardment, raining down every kind of weapon upon us. Even our tents collapsed on top of us, shrapnel scattered everywhere, and the sound of rockets made the earth tremble beneath our feet. We had set up our tent in front of the rubble of our destroyed home, trying to gather ourselves and buy the bare necessities to survive. We endured a suffocating siege—some days, we found nothing to eat, exhausted from hunger. We tried to adapt to everything.
Then, suddenly, the danger escalated beyond endurance. We had only one choice left: to flee with our lives and the clothes on our backs, leaving behind everything—literally everything. We walked for hours, carrying what little we could, under the scorching sun, terror all around us. I couldn’t walk any further—I collapsed on the shattered roads, torn apart by shelling and bulldozers, stumbling over stones with every step.
Everyone was fleeing on foot. The lucky ones found some means of transport. Children wept. Women barely carried their infants. Girls were broken. Fathers bore the weight of the world on their backs. The sky turned a deep, suffocating black, as you can see.
They burned the tents—everything inside them—and even the crumbling houses still barely standing collapsed bit by bit with every missile strike. The ground was nothing but a vast field of tents. The explosions echoed, the shrapnel’s reach widening. They destroyed an entire residential block right over the heads of its people.
We have never witnessed brutality like this in all these years of war. We slept in the streets, with no shelter to take us in. At night, the horror grew worse, the danger more relentless. What is happening here is unprecedented—nothing like it has ever happened before.
Can you even imagine—can you comprehend—where people are being displaced from? From piles of rubble where they pitched tents on the ruins of their homes? Fighting over scraps, wrestling with the wreckage, clinging to fragments of life and shattered dignity, struggling just to survive? Hungry, thirsty, terrified, in pain—for the thousandth time, we flee death, our bodies pushed to the brink of exhaustion. We have no strength left to endure. Our minds cannot withstand this madness any longer—this oppression, this grief.
They have gone too far—beyond all limits. There is no restraint left in them.
What is happening here is not just a crime, not just a catastrophe. It is something beyond what any Gazan can describe, beyond what anyone outside this land can fathom. The world has betrayed us. It has drunk the blood of our children, our women—everyone. Everyone is oblivious.
If the Day of Judgment has come, then it has truly begun in Gaza. And the world will never be the same again. We are witnessing horrors no human should ever bear.
Right now, I am in a state beyond words—my letters fail me. But carry these words to Patreon, share them. Tell them they came from the land of death, from Gaza, from Rulin. Tell them we no longer have the courage to go on living—because our lives have been stolen entirely, and now, even the rubble of our existence has been taken. Because now, more than ever, you may soon be writing our eulogies.