25-year-old, from the neighborhood of a-Shuja’iya, has been suffering from anxiety ever since she fled her home during airstrikes in “Operation Cast Lead”, when she was 11. Her anxiety was exacerbated when her home was bombed in 2014.
In 2008, I was eleven years old when the war broke out (“Operation Cast Lead”). I still remember every moment. When the bombings started, I was at school. We heard explosions very close to us, and all the children ran home from school. I ran too, while the bombings were happening, and I made it home shaking with fear. It felt very arbitrary. No one knew exactly where they were bombing and why. It was terrifying. Ever since then, I’ve been suffering from restlessness, and I get anxious every time I hear Israeli planes. We’ve been through several wars and escalations since then, and every time it starts again, I can’t even watch the news, because the sight of blood, dead bodies and destroyed homes makes me so anxious.
During the war in 2014, our house was bombed while we were inside. We ran outside and kept running through the streets while Israeli army planes flew over our heads and continued to bomb. The slaughter in a-Shuja’iya in 2014 gave me a shock that hasn’t completely passed to this day. I can’t forget the horrors I saw when we ran away. It comes up again and again in our family conversations. We walked over the bodies of martyrs. There were wounded people there too, and I remember women and children screaming. This war was like Judgment Day. Everyone ran in the street as if death itself was chasing them. These are painful memories. Every now and then, there is hope that the wars will end, but they don’t stop, and the pain just continues. We can’t forget them and relax because every year, there is another attack on the Strip. Every time I start to recover a little and overcome the shock, another war starts, and my condition only gets worse.
When the Israeli army bombs us, there is no safe place in the house. We have no shelters. It’s not safe outside, either. Everyone in the Strip is a target for the Israeli army, which makes no distinction between civilians and combatants at all. They bomb arbitrarily, and I constantly have the feeling that my turn is coming, and they’ll bomb our house over our heads again. When I wake up from the bombs in the middle of the night, I thank God that we are still alive.
I’ve had different kinds of therapy to get over the anxiety and improve my poor mental health, but they didn’t help.
In 2021, when Israeli warplanes bombed the Strip again, they bombed a house right across from ours, a few meters away. The bombings were so intense, I felt like our house was going to collapse on us. It was a really difficult night. It’s impossible to describe the fear and terror we felt. We all ran into the street in the dark, barefoot, in pajamas, not knowing where we were running. The planes kept bombing all the streets, and I felt like I was going to lose my family. We tried to find a safe place, even though there really is no such place in the Strip and it’s just an illusion. I remember I started screaming when I couldn’t find my parents and my siblings because we all ran in different directions.
My mental health has taken another turn for the worse since 2021. It affected my appetite, sleep and social relationships. I could hardly talk to people and became isolated. I tried to go to therapy, but it didn’t help. When I see fighter planes in the sky, I get terrible anxiety, and I’m sure another war is breaking out. Good God, how hard it is. When will the suffering end? When will this nightmare that repeats itself every year end? As long as the wars continue and the occupation planes fly over our heads, we won’t be able to recover from the anxiety. They haunt us like demons.
In 2022, there was another attack by the Israeli army, which bombed everywhere in the Strip, and again in May 2023. This time, my mother was in Egypt during the war, and I was even more stressed because I felt responsible for my father and my siblings. I kept praying it would be over and we would come out of it safely. We all just sat at home. I hugged my siblings and didn’t let them go out of the house for fear that they’d be martyred.
* Testimony given to B'Tselem Field Researcher Olfat al-Kurd on 11 June 2023.