Last October, Fadi Abu Kheir of southern Gaza had big plans. He was going to be engaged to the woman he loved. After they got married, he said, they would move in together, into an apartment that he spent years building.
“Now,” Mr. Abu Kheir, 24, said, “I am clueless about my future. I cannot even think how I can adapt to life postwar.”
It has been a year since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks impelled Israel to launch a retaliatory offensive in Gaza. For Mr. Abu Kheir — and, indeed, for Palestinians across the enclave — every day since, he said, has teemed with “sadness, depression and fury.”
The war has killed over 41,000 people, according to Gazan health officials, and devastated entire neighborhoods and cities, leaving hundreds of thousands without a home and fueling a humanitarian catastrophe.
More than 2 million people lived in the strip before the conflict. No one has been unaffected.
“We were so happy before this war,” said Maisaa al-Naffar, 20, of Khan Younis, breaking into tears as she recalled her first few weeks as a newlywed before the war began. She added: “I am not the person I used to be.”
Nine months pregnant, she is sheltering in a tent in southern Gaza.
“I miss my old life. I miss the days when we used to have fun or laugh at even the smallest things. I miss my life when we had enough healthy food and snacks,” Ms. al-Naffar said. “Today, everything has become a hell, full of dust and darkness.”
Throughout the enclave, similar stories abound. For Mr. Abu Kheir, the image from the war that lingers is that of a naked, lifeless woman lying in the street, blown out of a house that had been bombarded, he said. The conflict has killed two of his best friends, and displaced him and his family, he said. It also destroyed the apartment in he was building, in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
The war, he said, has “destroyed my dreams.”
Jehad Abu Hatab, a 35-year-old father of four originally from Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, said the most difficult part of the last year has been the constant displacement. His youngest son, Siraj, was born just two weeks into the war. Repeated evacuation orders have driven them from one place to another to another — seven times in all, he said, with no hope of returning home soon.
“This year has turned us into bodies without souls,” Mr. Abu Hatab said. “We just tasted all different types of suffering and hardship.”
Maisaa Naim, from Khan Younis, said Israeli airstrikes killed two brothers-in-law, a nephew and a niece, as well as her father. He died, she said, because the hospital was so overwhelmed with injured people that he could not receive medical attention. A mother of an 8-year-old boy, Ms. Naim, 28, said she was anxious “every single moment” of the day.
“I am in a panic of losing any more beloved family members,” she said. “It is a nightmare that we never even had in our worst and most pessimistic thoughts and nights.”
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