The Electronic Intifada 29 September 2025
People inspect the rubble of al-Jundi al-Majhoul tower on 15 September 2025.
APA imagesOn 14 September 2025, I woke up early to the sound of trucks honking at 7 am.
I stood and looked out from my bedroom window, which overlooks the al-Rimal neighborhood in Gaza City.
I saw a number of people carrying what was left of their belongings and heading south.
Some were carrying tattered cloth bags. Others were carrying broken solar panels.
Shop owners were emptying what remained of their wares, afraid of losing them in case their stores were destroyed.
For half an hour, I stood at my window, meditating on the sight of my street and the remaining buildings.
Then I saw my friend Ibrahim al-Sosi, 28, walking down the street.
I called out. “Good morning!”
“What’s up, Ali,” he replied. “Are you guys going to the south?”
“Never – I’d rather go to heaven than go to the south. The last time my family and I were forced to go south, it wasn’t our choice,” I told him, reminding him of when the Israeli troops stormed our house on 6 February 2024 in Gaza and ordered my family and I to go south before detonating our home.
Ibrahim then prayed that God would give us strength to remain steadfast in Gaza and said he was going to buy some falafel for breakfast.
I went inside to do my daily chores: filling containers with washing water and drinking water.
I then went to the market and searched for some products to buy like flour, rice, canned tuna, instant coffee packets and any available snacks.
In the late afternoon, after a lunch of some rice and boiled potato, I sat at the table on the balcony where I study every day and started watching an Introduction to English Literature, a Dr. Refaat Alareer lecture on YouTube.
Evacuate
Around 6:40 pm, I heard the screams of women and children in the street.
I opened the windows of the balcony to see what was happening.
Women, men and children were running like lost ghosts, each carrying many things and all going to unknown destinations.
From a building near us, I saw people from the upper floors throwing mattresses and some of their remaining furniture out their windows.
I called out to a man in the street and asked him what was happening.
He told me the Israeli army had called a resident and informed him that they would be bombing the Shurrab building, a building next to us.
I went inside from the balcony but before I could say anything to my family, there was a sharp knock on the door.
I opened – it was my cousin Ibrahim, 17.
He told me we all had to get out of the building as the Israeli military had announced on social media that it was going to bomb al-Jundi al-Majhoul tower, another building near us, this one adjacent to our building at the back.
Fear consumed us.
“Where will we go?” my mother asked. “May God curse the occupation!”
My grandmother, 63, went out, taking her bag of medicines with her because she has a heart condition. My younger sister Nada, 15, accompanied her.
The rest of us were getting the important bags – where we had packed some clothes and food – from the living room.
I then made sure all the windows and doors to our apartment were left open, in order to avoid them getting shattered from the air suction when the missile hits.
When I got to the street and looked around, I saw hundreds of people who lived in the nearby buildings and tents with terror in their eyes, their faces pale, running to evacuate to safety, though unsure where to go.
I saw a woman, maybe in her 30s, standing at the intersection of our street carrying a backpack and crying.
She first went right, came back again and went left, and then stood still – all while trying to call someone and holding her child in her right hand. “Where should we go,” she kept asking.
The goal behind targeting high-rise towers seems to be to spread panic among the residents of Gaza City to force them relocate to the south of Gaza Strip.
I tried to help some people in the street carry their luggage before I went to a small shop in the next street where relatives sheltered my family.
Some 22 women went inside the shop. We were around 27 men who stayed outside.
We were not really far enough away, but there was no other place for us to go.
The long wait
While we waited, my cousin Omar, 28, our relatives and I reminisced about our childhoods – how we used to play hide-and-seek in the large yard behind the tower, filling balloons with water and tossing them at one another.
During Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, our grandparents would invite us to a communal iftar – the meal eaten after sunset to break the fast – where we feasted on rice and chicken and enjoyed knafeh for dessert.
These memories connected us to the building – just like our memories in Gaza connect us to our land.
We waited about an hour. Then, around 8:10 pm, while we were chatting, three missiles struck al-Jundi al-Majhoul tower, turning the night crimson and streaked with a dim white light.
Shrapnel sped through the air. Two of my father’s cousins, Yousef and Ziyad, suddenly screamed out in pain. They had been hit by an aluminum sheet that had fallen on them from above, causing them some minor injuries.
My little brother Abdul-Rahim, 10, came and hugged me. He was terrified.
It kills me when I see that I can’t protect my family – but I can’t even protect myself.
I kept coughing as a result of the sand and dust that filled the air, our lungs and our eyes.
The smell of explosives pervaded the area.
About an hour later, around 9 pm, two more missiles hit the tower. We could hear the sound of the tower falling, as it crumbled to the ground.
Some people went to check, then returned shouting, “The tower has fallen. You can go back to the area.”
Omar and I went back to check our building.
The front door of the building was nowhere to be found. The entrance was full of rubble.It took us about 10 minutes to clear the debris before we could enter and go to our apartment on the first floor.
We had rented this apartment in March 2024 after returning to Gaza City from the south. It was unrecognizable when we entered. Everything bore the marks of the nearby shelling.
Shattered glass littered every corner, wooden doors had been ripped from their frames – some splintered into pieces – while aluminum window frames had been reduced to fragments.
The sofas were half torn, the fridge was split into four, the washing machine had been rendered useless, the sink was smashed and the sewage system was completely destroyed. Two of the four solar panels lay broken on the floor.
Most of my university books, which I had left on the balcony, were torn apart. Even my mattress was ripped in half.
Still, we returned to the apartment to clean and to repair what we could.
Nightmares
When night fell, I laid my head on the pillow, trying to find sleep.
But almost every night, once my eyelids begin to close, nightmares strike like sudden flashbacks.
I see myself running through blazing red flames, thick grey dust clouding my vision. I’m carrying too much, and things keep falling from my hands. Crowds surround me in a distant circle, silent, unreachable.
The only sound is relentless bombing.
I feel lost. I search for someone to help.
I wake up sweating, my breathing rapid, my heart racing. I realize it is just a nightmare – this, a horror Israel has inflicted on me in my sleep.
There is no relief in waking up, however. Israel has inflicted a real nightmare on me and every one in Gaza City when it ordered us to evacuate to the south.
Maybe the south is less dangerous than the north, but it is not a safe zone as they claim. What’s more, there is not enough space for all the people of Gaza.
Dangerous or less dangerous, we are all destined to die one day.
My family and I decided not to go south.
If death must come, it can find us in Gaza City – the place where we were raised and where we took our first breaths and our first steps.
The place where we became who we are.
*Ali Skaik is an English student and a writer in Gaza City *
