A Palestinian mother’s story of loss, grief and survival amid a genocide

October 7, 2024, marks one year since Israel launched its ongoing war on Gaza – a genocidal assault that has killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians and reduced the besieged enclave to a dystopian wasteland.

Every night of those 12 months of loss, grief, and displacement has “felt like a year” for millions of suffering Palestinians in the enclave.

Doaa Sama Eid, a displaced 28-year-old mother of seven from Gaza’s Al Shujaiah, east of Gaza City, is one of them.

This is her story.

It is also the story of the collective pain of her fellow Palestinians. And the voice of those who did not live to tell their stories.

The onset

Before the war began, Doaa Sama Eid, along with her husband, six daughters, and one son, lived in Al Shujaiah, an eastern district of Gaza City now reduced to a ghost town.

Israel began pounding the besieged enclave immediately after Hamas’ cross-border attack on October 7. On that day, Doaa’s family rushed out of their house to seek refuge at a school in the nearby neighbourhood of Zeitoun.

Yet, Israeli tanks were quick to storm into the area, cutting off access to the critical Salah al-Din road and firing on any vehicle attempting to pass.

After about two months in the school, with Israeli tanks surrounding the gates, Doaa’s family had no choice but to leave.

“We didn’t take anything with us; we left everything in the school. We raised our hands and left,” Doaa recalls.

Al Zeitoun soon became one of the most heavily devastated areas in the enclave, with countless bodies still trapped under the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli bombs and heavy artillery.

Roughly three kilometres away, al-Shifa, the enclave’s largest hospital, transformed into a site of immense carnage as early as November.

At the time, Israeli forces, claiming to have discovered an underground Hamas headquarters, forcibly evacuated thousands at gunpoint, carried out unlawful executions of civilians, and attempted to conceal the evidence by burying victims’ bodies and disfiguring them in the hospital courtyard. Hamas and hospital officials have repeatedly denied the claims.

Entrapment

Soon after, Doaa and her husband returned to Al Shujaiah, which became a temporary shelter for thousands at the time.

One day, she recalls, they were at the local market of the neighbourhood when word spread that Israeli forces were advancing toward them.

Soon enough, they were stuck in an apartment building, unable to move, in the middle of tanks that encircled them, with no route for escape, Doaa remembers.

The building eventually collapsed around them, leaving 80 people crammed into a single room for four days, unable to use a bathroom, eat, or drink –those were some of the “hardest” days Doaa experienced in Gaza.

About six people did not make it out of the rubble, but miraculously, Doaa’s family managed to survive with minor injuries.

“One man shouted at us from the direction of the gas station, telling us to get out quickly,” Doaa recalls of the moments following the withdrawal of Israeli forces.

Yet, when her and her family stepped onto the street, they were shocked by the horrifying scope of the destruction that unfolded before them. The Palestinian mother remembers: “We came out to find the entire street destroyed, except for the room we were in.”

“The streets were filled with bodies, people with severed legs, missing arms, faces gone, heads blown off – they were littered with pieces of bodies.”

An hour later, the room they had been in also collapsed, Doaa says.

At the time, Israeli forces had launched what they described as the most intense fighting since the invasion began, with their forces reaching the centres of Al Shujaiah as well as Khan Younis, Jabalia, driving Palestinians further south toward Rafah.

In December, around the same time, videos surfaced online showing over a hundred Palestinian men detained by Israeli forces, stripped to their underwear, blindfolded, and made to kneel on a street in northern Gaza, with many of the detainees, some of them journalists and shop owners, recognised by family members and the community.

Grief

About three months into the war, January 17 would become a day forever etched in Doaa’s memory.

That day, around noon, as she was making bread for her children when a strange feeling washed over her. Something felt off, she recalls.

“I suddenly felt this tightness in my chest, something was weighing me down.”

Her husband had lent her his phone before he left earlier in the morning to get flour, along with 100 shekels in his pocket “as if he knew something was going to happen,” Doaa says.

“I started crying, and my daughter asked me, ‘What's wrong, mom? Why are you crying?’” I told her, Something is suffocating me; I can't breathe.’”

Hours passed, and as the afternoon went on, the feeling persisted.

Mahmoud, her husband, would usually be home by that hour, but that day, he hadn’t showed up.

Doaa’s husband’s cousin, who lived nearby, came over to check on her. The Palestinian mother was living in a container-home at the time.

“Maybe he'll be back soon. He might be with a friend,” Doaa recalls their relative’s attempts at consolation. But she was certain her husband would never stay over at a friend’s house under such circumstances.

“He would never leave me and the kids alone, especially during this war,” Doaa told her.

By midnight, Mahmoud still hadn’t returned, and Doaa began to cry. That is when her children also knew that something might have happened to their father.

When they asked her, “Why are you crying, mom? Did something happen to dad?” Doaa said it was nothing and told them to go back to sleep.

The night dragged on, and Doaa waited until 5:30 in the morning before calling her brother and asking him to help find him.

Her brother went to the area near the flour distribution and discovered many bodies near the Nablusi checkpoint, crushed by Israeli tanks.

On the fifth day following Mahmoud’s disappearance, Doaa was told that his husband’s body was found crushed under the rubble.

For over a month, they searched hospitals for any trace of him, but to no avail.

Around this time, on February 29, headlines were dominated by reports of Israel’s ‘Flour Massacre’ in Gaza City, where at least 112 Palestinians were killed and over 750 injured when Israeli troops opened fire on hundreds of civilians waiting for food.

To this day, Doaa says she still doesn’t know where his husband’s body is.

“My son, who is ten years old, was very close to his father. He would sit by his grandfather’s window and say, ‘Dad, why did you leave me?’”

What remains

By February 25, Doaa had no choice but to flee south —with her seven children and memories of her husband.

The nights were spent without sleep, as usual: Doaa and her terrified children would cling to each other when a missile or a bomb dropped nearby. Only, now, Mahmoud was no longer there to shield them like he always had.

Hunger was a constant feeling in their days of fear. During the days leading up to Mahmoud’s death, they had to stretch a single kilo of rice, costing 40 shekels (about 10 dollars), over two days to feed nine people.

About three months later, on May 26, 2024, Israeli airstrikes hit a displacement camp in the Tel al Sultan area of Rafah in southern Gaza, killing up to 50 people, including women and children, in what came to be known as the “Rafah tent massacre”.

This camp had been designated as a “safe zone” by Israeli authorities just days before the strike.

The video of a burnt Palestinian toddler whose head was blown off during the massacre triggered significant online backlash at the time.

Now sheltering in Deir al Balah in the centre of Gaza, Doaa’s family has so far been displaced eight times.

Since then, Israeli aggression has shown no signs of stopping —with nine Israeli soldiers being detained for gang raping a Palestinian detainee in July.

According to reports, as of September 10, five Israeli assaults in al-Mawasi, a designated "safe zone" in Gaza, have claimed the lives of 217 Palestinians since May.

Many of those killed had fled there from Rafah, which was also used to be a “safe zone”.

Currently, the death toll in Gaza exceeds 41,000 Palestinians, according to conservative estimates, with over 10,000 more still missing under rubble.

“This war has destroyed us,” she says, referring to their nomadic life in dusty and fly-infested tents and caught in the summer heat.

“But alhamdulillah (thank God for everything),” she says, her faith unwavering in the face of unspeakable horrors — like so many other Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere.

Resilient and unshakeable. Like generations before them.