The Electronic Intifada 18 March 2025
The bodies of Palestinians killed by an Israeli strike in Khan Younis in the European Hospital, 18 March 2025.
APA imagesI don’t know what time it is.
I don’t remember what day it is.
I don’t know what’s happening.
All I know is that I am now awake and the occupation’s missiles are shaking the ground.
I turn on my phone and look into the glow of the small screen: 18 March 2025, 2 am.
Five minutes before I was in a deep sleep. Hours before my family and I had gathered for a meal at our home in Khan Younis.
Despite the sadness in Gaza, we have tried to make Ramadan nights beautiful. My mother was making tea on the stove and had gathered cookies for the family.
Then we went to bed, dispersing around the house, each of us taking a corner to sleep in or to read until we fell asleep.
But now I am awake, and I consider that perhaps the entire population of the Gaza Strip is also waking up at this very moment because the explosions are so loud.
We are in a terrifying new reality.
Minutes pass and the sounds of bombardment get louder. Explosions continue and I try to decipher how near they are.
My little sister is also awake and crying and I try to calm her down, but my own anxiety is unbearable.
Will we survive?
I don’t know how to describe how I feel now.
I am writing from a building near the Nasser Medical Complex. I am watching the ambulances and cars rush by in desperate attempts to save one soul from death.
But I also sense that each ambulance carries one soul that is departing this earth.
It has been a month since I smelled death in Gaza, but now it comes back to me with ease.
I try to write about hope and strength, but the only voice I can channel now is the one of horror inside me.
I’m writing to you now, not knowing if we will survive this time or if we will see the sun rise tomorrow. We didn’t have our pre-dawn meal, suhoor, and my mother has now warned us to stay away from the balcony, lest shrapnel hit us.
Time passes, and morning comes.
My brother went to the hospital to see if he knows anyone who has been wounded. There, at the morgue, he said that many journalists had arrived, along with people looking for their loved ones.
A man guarding the morgue shouted, “Stay away and please don’t take pictures.”
He asked that the crowds respect the women’s privacy.
Today we had planned a shopping day for my little sister to pick out new clothes for Eid. But now we will stay inside.
We are good people with deep feelings. We dream of journeys other than displacement and living in something other than tents.
We grieve when we bury our children, and we try to understand how death has become ordinary.
How can a few people control the fate of another people?
Jannah Ahmad Abu Sitta is a writer in Gaza.
