A 30-year-old father of a six-year-old from the town of Jabalya, Wisam recounted the bombing of an IDP camp at the Rufaydah School in Deir al-Balah:
Up until the war I lived with my wife and our six-year-old son, Hassan, in the eastern part of the town of Jabalya, in a building with my parents and siblings. Hassan has a congenital defect in his reproductive system and in the past he was treated at al-Ma/assed Hospital in East Jerusalem, and underwent a few surgeries at al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City. Hassan has a permit to undergo treatment outside of the Strip, but his mother and I had our permits rejected by Israel, and he can’t leave to undergo treatment alone.
On 8 October 2023, the Israeli army ordered us to leave our home, so we all moved to our relatives’ house in western Jabalya, and stayed there for three terribly difficult days full of very intense bombardment. When a house next to ours was bombed, we moved to an IDP shelter at the Halimah a-Sa’diyah school. There was constant bombardment and artillery fire there, too, so we decided to move to the southern part of the Strip.
On 17 November 2023, my wife, Hassan, my mother and siblings, and I – all together nine people – set off in the direction of the Netzarim crossing, south of Gaza City. My father stayed in Jabalya with his elderly father who wasn’t capable of doing the walk South. When we reached the checkpoint, the army shot live fire and shells in our direction, so we fled and spent the night in an open field in the Shuja’iyah neighborhood. The next day we went back to the checkpoint, and this time, thank God, we passed through safely and went to Deir al-Balah, where we again spent the night in an open field.
The next day we moved to an IDP center at the Technical College in Deir al-Balah, which was very crowded, and on 22 November 2024, we joined my wife’s relatives at the IDP center at the Rufaydah school in western Deir al-Balah. At that small school there were already thousands of displaced people, and the humanitarian situation was dire. Everything was filthy, hundreds of people shared one bathroom, and there was always a lack of water.
My family and I lived in the stairwell of the school – nine people in an area of two-and-a-half by three meters – because the classrooms were very overcrowded. In the beginning they distributed boxes of food with canned goods and legumes once or twice per month, but there were no basic goods like blankets and clothes. About two months ago, in August 2024, we finally moved into a classroom after a different family left the school, leaving us a little more room.
On Thursday, 10 October 2024, at around 11:00 A.M., while I was coming down the stairs, a missile hit the school. It penetrated through three floors until it blew up on the ground floor, in the area of the school’s management. In front of the administration’s office there was a small tent where people from the Ard El-Insan organization distributed milk to children, and next to it was the public kitchen where, after receiving milk, people waited for food to be handed out.
I was close to where the missile exploded, maybe 20 meters away, and I saw bodies fly in the air in the school’s courtyard. The yard was full of tents that didn’t stand a chance against an explosion like that. At first I froze in shock, I couldn’t move for a few minutes. When I recovered a bit, I tried to help the injured and clear rubble off the wounded. Ambulances arrived from the Red Crescent headquarters, which is next to the school, but there were only a few available because there were incidents in other places at the same time. People evacuated the injured and killed people in private cars and donkey carts. From what I saw, most of the killed had head and abdominal injuries, and many of the wounded people were badly burned. I collected hundreds of body parts in that massacre.
The explosion killed my wife’s cousin, Muhammad Hamuda (40), and her paternal aunt’s husband, Ahmad Hamuda (58), who were part of the school’s administration. My wife’s paternal uncle, Ihab Hamuda (65), was terribly burned and is still being treated at Shuhada al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah.
Some of the displaced people left the hospital after the missile hit, fearing it would happen again, but we’re still here; we have nowhere else to go. That massacre really affected my mental health. I can’t forget that painful day, everything I saw and the people I lost. Everyone who was there at the time has painful stories: women were widowed, mothers and fathers lost children, kids were orphaned.
My father and grandfather are still in northern Gaza, at a school that’s been turned into an IDP center in Jabalya. The situation there is terrible: there’s no water, no food, and there’s constant bombing. About a month ago, my sister’s ten-year-old daughter, Layan Wissam ‘Azzam, was killed. But they refuse to leave the north despite all the suffering of the past year, under siege and displacement.
We were displaced to the south of the Gaza Strip because the Israeli army claimed it was a safe zone, but we’ve since learned that there is no safe place. Everyone is a target, the army doesn’t spare anyone.
* Testimony given to B’Tselem field researcher Olfat al-Kurd on 26 October 2024
* ‘Abd Rabo managed to leave the Strip in February 2025 together with his son, Hassan, for treatment in Egypt