We’ve interviewed more than 700 people in Gaza over the past two years. Their stories stayed with us.
We kept wondering: Did they find their missing relatives? Are their homes standing? Did they bury their dead? Were they forced to flee again? Were they even still alive?
So we tried to find them again. This is what they said.
No single experience can fully contain the agony of Gaza, the near-obliteration of a society and a place.
Collectively, however, the people we spoke to over the past two years have helped us see how the war has crushed those who have lived it.
They told us about the raw wounds of their grief, their fear of the next airstrike, their dread of tomorrow. About the first time they fled home as Israeli bombs and shells fell closer, the first time they put up a makeshift tent, the second time, the third.
About their weakening bodies, their children crying for bread, their days searching for baby formula and lentils. About their hopes of being evacuated for medical treatment, of going back to school, of reuniting with their families.
We tried to get back in touch with many of them. Many did not respond. Some phone numbers no longer worked. Others had escaped Gaza. Some, we learned, had been killed.
Of the nearly 100 we reached, everyone lost something or someone: a family member, a friend, their home, hope.
I lost a sister, a brother, and nearly 40 relatives. That alone feels like more than enough grief for one lifetime.
Ismail al-Sheikh
Our lives are nothing but suffering on top of suffering. We’ve lost relatives and been scattered across tents.
Hanaa al-Najjar
When we spoke last summer to Samar al-Jaja and her nephews, Mohammed, Mahmoud, Ahmed and Abdullah Akeila, it had been 10 months since the brothers’ parents and baby sister had been killed in an airstrike.
Under their tent at a charity camp, they still held out hope that they would see their parents when they were allowed to go home to Gaza City.
But when they got home earlier this year, only their parents’ bedroom was still standing.
There was no one inside. The five of them stood there, numb.
“The kids said sadly, ‘We wish we were buried with them,’” Ms. al-Jaja, 32, said when we contacted her again recently.
They have never been able to mourn properly. The sweets that people in Gaza traditionally distribute on the anniversary of a death were too expensive to make, given the wartime price of flour and sugar.
They couldn’t even say a prayer at their parents’ graves. They do not know where they are.
“Even that closure has been taken from us,” she said.
She spoke to us from a half-destroyed building in Gaza City where she and her nephews were sheltering.
Days later, Israeli forces stormed the city, the latest operation in the two-year campaign against Hamas in Gaza, which began after the militant group’s deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Negotiators from Israel and Hamas began holding talks in Cairo on Monday about a possible swap of Israeli hostages in Gaza for Palestinians in Israeli prisons. If they agree, the war could be one step closer to ending.
But as they wait to hear what will happen to them, Palestinians in Gaza must keep trying to survive.
Ms. al-Jaja and her nephews moved to another neighborhood to escape the offensive in Gaza City, then fled south. They paid nearly $4,000 to a truck driver to load half their belongings — it was “pay or risk death,” the driver told them, Ms. al-Jaja said.
After a 14-hour journey, they ended up back in the same charity camp they were living in last year. This time, they have no tent.
Almost everyone we spoke to has been displaced from homes or shelters multiple times. Many have no home to return to.
If, God forbid, an evacuation happens to my family, it would be the 10th time so far since the start of this war.
Nour Barda
We’ve been left with this choice: die in Gaza City or be displaced to the south. It makes you feel helpless rage and humiliation.
Montaser Bahja
Last October, when we wrote about Hammam Malaka and his wife, Najia Malaka, they had been separated for almost the entire war.
They had gotten stuck less than 20 miles apart after Israeli troops cut off northern Gaza from southern Gaza.
He was trapped in the south with Yamen, 6, and Sandy, 4. She was in the north with Seela, 3, Ashraf, the baby, and Mohammed, their newborn.
When we spoke to Mr. Malaka again recently, he said they had finally managed to reunite in January, during the brief cease-fire.
He told us how they found each other at what had been the border between north and south Gaza: “I switched on the flashlight of my old Nokia phone and began shouting into the dark — ‘Ashraf! Mohammed!’ — hoping she could hear me and find me more easily,” he said.
Then he saw her. “I ran and hugged her and our children with everything in me,” he said.
But their 3-year-old, Seela, was not there. She had been killed while they were apart.
After reuniting, the family returned home to Gaza City, but then were forced to flee south again.
Since Israel broke the cease-fire in March, their days have been spent in a perpetual struggle against hunger and danger, which Mr. Malaka said were like “endless waves crashing over us.”
Without work, he said, he has taken the risk of grabbing supplies from passing aid trucks or lining up at aid distribution points.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed searching for something to eat, according to aid officials.
Many people we spoke to told us about hunger: suffering from malnutrition, losing significant weight or going days at a time without food, even as they tried desperately to find it.
I lost 20 kilograms during the time of famine. There were times when I just collapsed and could not carry injured people and run for 100 meters to reach the ambulance.
Naseem Hassan
As a mother, all I think about is how to save one meal for tomorrow, how to bring water without quarrels in the long lines.
Yasmin al-Attar
Most of the people we knew are barely recognizable. They lost so much weight that we don’t recognize their faces anymore.
Ramez Souri
Aaed Abu Karsh, 35, had managed to carve out a sliver of something like normal life when we first spoke to him last November.
He was managing a shawarma place in Deir al Balah, one of the few places where ordinary life went on amid the agony all around it.
In January, during the cease-fire, he moved home to Gaza City.
That was the last good thing that happened, he told us recently.
He lost his wife’s sister to an airstrike in June and his uncle to another strike in September. He has been displaced four times since January.
Since August, he has also been injured twice: once when an airstrike hit near his house, wounding him and his wife with shrapnel, and again when he was passing a Gaza City high-rise that was bombed.
“The hardest thing is living with the feeling that all you can do is wait for death,” he said.
He added: “Now I look at my children and wonder, will I see them alive in the months ahead? Will they be safe? And as a father, will I have the strength to protect them?”
He no longer sells shawarma to eager customers. Instead, he spends his days scrounging for food, clean water and cash to pay the astronomical prices at the markets.
There have been many days when all he could bring his family was bread with cheese and thyme.
“Daily life is another kind of war,” he said. “This is what life has been reduced to: moving from one danger to another, trying to feed my children, trying simply to survive.”
The anguish of just getting through the day came up again and again as we spoke to people about what it feels like to live through the war.
Even animals, if they were subjected to what we’ve lived through, couldn’t become accustomed to it. We are living through a catastrophe.
Fatma Edaama
I try to hold on to hope — to be the father who reassures his children, and the son who stands with his extended family. But fear and despair haunt us everywhere, as if this tragedy has no end.
Amir Ahmed
My daughter Batoul wakes up screaming day and night from the bombings or the sound of warplanes, suffering from severe terror.
Safaa Zyadah
Every night, I lie awake wondering if tomorrow will bring anything better, or if it’ll just add another layer of pain.
Mohammed Shubeir
Not everyone we tried to reach survived.
Some died, or were killed, after we first spoke to them.
In October 2024, when we talked to Mohamed Kilani, a lawyer in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahia, he was barely able to feed his twin 2-year-old daughters.
“We have been given one option only: that is to die,” he told us at the time.
Later, we saw social media posts from his family that mourned his death. When we reached his cousin, she said he had gone to look for food for his family and never returned.
After he disappeared, family members saw some photos of stray dogs eating corpses in northern Gaza, the cousin said. They thought they recognized his body among them.
Many people spoke about waiting — or wishing — for death.
I wish for a missile at any moment. It would strike us all together, so that it would be better than this life.
Ahmed al-Nems
Some people we spoke to were lucky: They managed to leave, whether by paying their way out, through their foreign passports or because they were evacuated for medical treatment.
But it is a tainted prize.
They all have loved ones in danger back in Gaza. And for all the safety of where they are now, it is not, in the end, home.
Niveen Foad is one of them. She was the only available caretaker for her 6-year-old cousin, Sarah Yusuf, who was badly injured in an airstrike. Israel allowed Ms. Foad, her three daughters and Sarah to be evacuated to Italy in February 2024.
Since we first spoke to her there, two more of her children have managed to join her in Bologna.
Sarah, the 6-year-old, is doing better after intensive medical treatment, and her parents and brother have also come to Italy.
Ms. Foad is learning Italian and training to be an assistant chef: moving forward.
Yet thoughts of what, and who, she left behind sit heavily in her mind.
“I feel like I betrayed my own country by leaving, but sometimes I also think that I deserve a chance in life,” she said. And her kids deserved that chance, she said.
“It’s a confusing and constant fight with myself,” she added.
On the bus home from buying fish recently, she thought of her father in Gaza, who loves fish.
“My tears poured down, thinking I can afford to buy food and eat, but they can barely get anything,” she said.
Italy is her present, she said. Gaza, she believes, is still her future.
She wants her daughters to continue their education in Italy. But for them to get married and settle in Italy — impossible, she said.
“Whatever happens, I’ll end up in Gaza,” she said. “Staying in Italy is just a temporary solution.”
We reached dozens of people who had been able to leave Gaza for places like Italy, Jordan and Egypt. Some, like Ms. Foad, were determined to go back. A few were less sure. Though physically safe, all are tormented by Gaza.
Guilt claws at them, and worry keeps them up at night.
I try to stay away from people and sit alone all the time because I am constantly thinking about my mother, my sister, and my two brothers who are still in Gaza.
Ruba Abu Jibba
If I were in Gaza it would have been easier for me, because my situation would be similar to that of the people around me, but the emptiness I live in now abroad is extremely exhausting.
Mohammed al-Aloul
When we first spoke to Maher Ghanem last year, his grief was fresh.
His wife had died from cancer weeks before. She had been prevented from leaving Gaza for treatment after Israeli forces seized a crucial border crossing out of the enclave.
He told us when we called him again recently that he had remarried — a traditional, arranged union — so he wouldn’t have to care for his seven children alone.
In September, he went to a graduation ceremony for one of his daughters, who had just nominally finished middle school. But it seemed absurd to Mr. Ghanem, he said.
Realistically, his children have had almost no schooling for the last two years.
His youngest son was in first grade when the war began. Now the child talks to his father about trying to make some money ferrying passengers on a donkey cart, Mr. Ghanem said.
“There isn’t a school for him to attend, anyway,” he said.
Mr. Ghanem, a former security officer with the Palestinian Authority, recalled attending joint Israeli-Palestinian meetings at a kibbutz in central Israel in the late 1990s.
The point was to discuss how to co-exist peacefully.
Those meetings, too, now seemed absurd.
“There isn’t a glimmer of hope left in Gaza,” he said. “Me, and everyone else I know, just wants to get out.”
Many of the people we spoke to wanted to leave Gaza.
Even if the war ended somehow, few still thought there was any future left for them in Gaza.
The future has gone, the shop has gone, my sons’ and daughters’ future has gone, the feeling of happiness has gone.
Mohammed El-Sabti
I dream of this war ending so I can finally sit for my high school exams — exams I’ve been preparing for over two years.
Shahd Jweifel
I am staying for nothing. It isn’t going to end. We are not doing anything — we are just getting killed.
Mazen Alwahidi
But I don’t want to die. I still want to grow up, become an architect, rebuild Gaza, become a football player in Palestine’s national team, and win the World Cup.
Mohamed Abu Rteinah
We don’t have a present or a future. The only hope we’re living with is to be able to leave. That is the only way we will give our kids a normal life.
Ehab Fasfous
