On December 1st, as a seven-day temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas ended, Omar al-Najjar rushed to his family in eastern Khan Younis. His elderly parents and his two siblings were sheltering with relatives who received an automated phone call from the Israeli Army, telling them to leave. Israeli military operations against Hamas had been focussed on northern Gaza, but now they were proceeding south. His family had already relocated four times. They weren’t sure where to go next.
Najjar, who is twenty-four-years old, was a medical intern at Nasser Medical Center in Khan Younis. It is one of the largest hospitals in Gaza. Since the beginning of the war, he had been living at the hospital and working long hours in the emergency room, but he left work immediately to join his family.
Soon after the call from the Army, the Najjars began to hear bombing nearby. They grabbed their jackets and phones and joined a procession of people who were fleeing to the central part of the city. Columns of smoke were billowing in the distance. “Everyone in the area was scared to death,” said Najjar. “People started running away, not knowing where they’re going.”
Najjar and his family found their way to a United Nations school, a three-story building, painted in the U.N.’s blue and white, situated downtown. People filled classrooms and walkways and pitched makeshift tents in a courtyard in the center of the building. The family’s only option was to settle in the courtyard without blankets, mattress pads, or pillows. “It was a catastrophic situation,” Najjar said. “Everyone was on top of each other, and it was extremely cold.” At night, the temperature dropped into the low fifties Fahrenheit. The U.N. has said that its shelters are hosting nine times the amount of people they had expected to accommodate.
With his parents resettled, Najjar went back to work, but he continued to worry about his family. Skin and respiratory infections were spreading at the school and there was little food, water, or electricity. He spent four days calling friends, looking for a safer place. He even approached an administrator at Nasser to ask for help finding a space at the hospital; nothing was available. “I looked everywhere for an empty doctor’s office, a prayer room, or a spot in the hallway,” he said. “They were all full of people.” (In October, David D. Kirkpatrick and I chronicled Najjar’s experience at Nasser during the first weeks of the war.)
Najjar finally reached a friend in Rafah, a city at the southernmost tip of the Gaza Strip, who offered to host his family. But he realized he would have to abandon his post at the hospital, where hundreds of wounded people were streaming into the emergency room. “When your family is suffering and you can’t help them, that’s the worst thing one can feel,” he said. “I had to do everything I could to take them out of their torturous situation.” On December 5th, Najjar and his family headed south. He felt incredible remorse for leaving the hospital. “This decision was one of the most difficult I’ve ever made in my life,” he said. He’d worked at Nasser since before the war began.“I know everyone and every corner. I have memories about wounded people whose lives I’ve saved and failed to save.” He felt he had “let the hospital down.”
Since the start of the war, more than a million Palestinians have been displaced to the south. The southward flow—reminiscent of the Nakba, when some seven hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians were displaced in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war—has doubled the population of Khan Younis and tripled that of Rafah, putting enormous pressure on cities that were struggling even prior to October 7th. Water has become increasingly scarce, the cost of food has soared, disease has proliferated, and access to electricity and cell service has been cut off. Hundreds of thousands have been forced to seek shelter in unbearable conditions at hospitals and schools.
Israel’s invasion of the south, which started in early December, has forced people to move every few days to stay out of the line of fire. Disabled individuals have struggled to travel from one place to another, with limited fuel available for cars. Khalil el-Halabi, a retired U.N. official, said it was particularly challenging to transport his wife, Amal, who has hypertension and diabetes and recently underwent surgery on her right leg. “She can’t walk and [the Israeli military] is telling us to change locations: ‘Go to the south, go to Khan Younis, go to Rafah,’ ” he told me. “It’s insane.” The Halabis lived in Gaza City’s upscale Rimal neighborhood, and they left at the start of the war. Khalil said that Amal was originally walking with crutches, but that she reinjured her leg, and now travels by wheelchair. “It’s horrific for a handicapped person to endure living through this war,” he said.
Khalil, who is seventy, said he, Amal, and seven of their children have been staying at al-Mawasi, a beachside humanitarian zone designated by Israel in Khan Younis. He and his children found slats of wood and draped a tarp over them to make a shelter. They built a sand barrier, but, when it rained, it couldn’t keep the water out. Now Khalil said he was more concerned about finding food for his family. “All we had today was canned tuna,” he said. “It’s painful to be so hungry throughout the day.” In recent weeks, food aid has trickled into Gaza, but it has failed to meet the vast need. Thousands have thronged the entrances to U.N. facilities; starving people have run after trucks carrying bottled water, beans, and biscuits. At soup kitchens, boys fight to reach the front of the line. Supermarkets still carry some items, but prices have skyrocketed: a bag of flour costs a hundred and thirty-five U.S. dollars, a container of salt is eight dollars, and the price of a kilogram of potatoes has increased sevenfold.
Khalil described waiting for four hours to use the bathrooms at al-Mawasi. Cockroaches and flies infested the facilities, and there was an overwhelming stench from the piles of human waste. “It’s like the sewers,” he said, adding he felt covered in filth afterward. “Honestly, it’s worse than Hell.”
Khalil’s son Mohammed is one of the most well-known Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. In 2016, Mohammed was working as the operations manager of the Gaza office of World Vision, an international Christian humanitarian organization, when the Israeli government accused him of transferring millions of dollars to Hamas. Mohammed denied the charges, but he was convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison in 2022. During the trial, his attorney had limited access to witness testimonies. A group of U.N. experts accused Israel of denying Mohammed’s right to a fair trial. (World Vision said an independent forensic investigation into the charges found no diversion of funds; an additional review by the Australian government also uncovered no wrongdoing.)
As part of the ceasefire, Israel had freed two hundred and forty Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a hundred and ten hostages held by Hamas. I asked Khalil if he hoped for his son to be released in the event that negotiations in the conflict lead to future swaps. “I swear to God that I don’t want my son to be liberated in this way,” he said. “Mohammed is a humanitarian, and he wouldn’t accept what happened.” Hamas’s actions on October 7th were “unacceptable,” he told me, a rare public criticism of the group.
Israel’s bombing campaign across Gaza has made clear that nowhere in the territory is safe. The Army’s invasion of the Khan Younis region, however, has driven many displaced people to the very edge of the Strip; they are incapable of moving farther without running into Egypt, which has indicated that it won’t tolerate Palestinians pouring into the Sinai.
So far, Sobhi al-Khazendar and his family have relocated eight times. In Gaza City, Khazendar, who is thirty years old, worked as a lawyer. During the first week of the war, he and his parents and four siblings left their home near Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, and drove south. They took refuge at friends’ homes in Deir al-Balah, Zuwaida, and Khan Younis. Khazendar would shuttle back and forth from Gaza City, bringing food and clothing to his family.
Right as the ceasefire collapsed, his family moved again to a friend’s one-room office in Rafah. The office had a single bathroom and poor insulation, and barely any room was left to accommodate the Khazendars. Around sixty other displaced people were also there, and slept on rows of thin mattress pads. The younger and able-bodied men slept in cars parked outside. At night, Khazendar folds his five-foot-nine frame into the front seat of a Renault, and his two cousins squeeze into the remaining seats.
Since the early days of the war, he has thought about how the conflict has upended his hopes of building a family in Gaza City. “Before the war, I was a respected lawyer with a bright future to look forward to,” Khazendar told me over the phone. “Today, I’m living through the misery of displacement in a car.”
Last week, Khazendar told me that he hadn’t showered or changed his clothes in twenty-eight days. His hair was oily, his skin was rough, and his eyes were puffy. “These things have become normal for me,” he said, as the signal cut in and out. “What’s more important than a shower, clothing, and smelling good is life—living and not dying,” he added. “I used to take a hot shower every morning, put on clean, high-end clothing, and drive a fancy car to work, but that’s all over now. This war has changed what we value in life.” He shared a video of him making manqousheh, baked bread lathered with za’atar and olive oil, on an improvised outdoor wood stove, and spoke about how his family has struggled to secure food.
Khazendar keeps trying to understand Hamas’s actions on October 7th. “I ask myself that question every minute of the day,” he said. “When Hamas thought about this act, what did it expect?” Khazendar excoriated Israel for killing civilians and destroying their homes. “The Israeli military is ruining our memories and our lives. It’s bombing civilians, including women, children, and the elderly.” He also emphasized that Hamas’s attack has embittered life for people in Gaza: “Instead of praying in Jerusalem, we’re praying in Khan Younis and Rafah. Instead of increasing our salaries, we’re without access to water. Instead of taking over land, we fled from our homes and property.” He said the assault “led to a Nakba for the Palestinian people.”
The Israeli government has been relying heavily on social media to distribute evacuation orders, but cell-phone service in Gaza has been subject to repeated blackouts, often lasting for hours or days. In mid-October, Hassan Shehada, a sixty-year-old textile factory owner, left Gaza City and settled in with fifty relatives in Khan Younis. According to the first iterations of a map published by the Israeli Army on social media, he was left with the impression that his neighborhood wouldn’t be targeted. “For your safety, we call on you to evacuate your homes immediately,” an Army spokesman wrote in Arabic, addressing residents of several other parts of Khan Younis. But, within days, air strikes appeared to be inching closer to his residence. The blasts were getting louder, the building was shaking, and the smell of smoke was becoming more palpable. “We thought we were in a good area, but then I wasn’t so certain,” Shehada said. “We grew worried that shrapnel from nearby bombings would fly into our residence.” By December 8th, Shehada and his family left for a friend’s home in Rafah; before they arrived, he asked his friend to reassure him that no one affiliated with Hamas was staying in the building. A few days later, he heard from neighbors that shrapnel had in fact damaged the home.
When I last spoke to Najjar, the medical intern, he told me he had started volunteering at the Kuwaiti Hospital, in Rafah, which has a much smaller emergency room than Nasser. Najjar said he was treating people who have been wounded by air strikes, in addition to children suffering from diarrhea, severe dehydration, and rotavirus. A picture posted on the hospital’s Facebook page shows Najjar caring for a bloodied child covered in debris. His family was now sleeping more comfortably, though they still didn’t have access to water and electricity. Najjar, who enjoys reading in English as a hobby, said he had recently revisited “Hiroshima,” John Hersey’s account of six people who survived the atomic bomb, published in The New Yorker in 1946. He said he had hoped to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to live through a devastating conflict.
“For days, John Hersey’s words about the six survivors of Hiroshima have stayed with me,” Najjar wrote in a post on social media. “He mentioned their profound question—why were they chosen to survive while many didn’t? . . . That will be my profound question, (if I make it).” ♦
