War between Israel and Hamas: portraits of Gazans

February 4, 2024

A little girl, a 12-year-old girl, a mother, a photojournalist.

Their lives were shattered in one of the deadliest and most destructive wars of the 21st century.

Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, now in its fourth month, is often couched in stark numbers and historical comparisons: Some 27,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Almost two million are displaced and more than 60 percent of residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed in a territory smaller than Manhattan.

However, the lives behind those statistics are often hidden from view. Internet and mobile phone services are frequently cut off; international journalists cannot enter Gaza except on trips escorted by the Israeli army; and dozens of Palestinian journalists have been killed in a military campaign sparked by the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7.

Samar Abu Elouf, a New York Times photojournalist, spent weeks following a handful of Palestinians who seemed to have lost everything: a boy with charred limbs, a journalist who lost four of his children in an Israeli attack, an orphaned boy who can never walk again.

Then in December, The Times evacuated Ms. Abu Elouf and her family as the Israeli ground offensive spread across southern Gaza.

Since then, Gaza has spiral into famine. Some residents say they eat grass and animal feed to survive. Giant bombs fall near the last functioning hospitals. Torrential rains batter disease-ridden tent camps. Exhausted doctors make heartbreaking decisions.

Throughout all of this, Ms. Abu Elouf has tried to keep in touch with the people she photographed, but she can no longer locate some.

Their stories, like that of Gaza itself, are still unfolding.

The orphanage

At first, rescuers thought Melisya Joudeh was dead.

His limp body was pulled from the rubble of his family home, 10 hours after the building was crushed by a devastating attack on October 22. At the hospital, she was put in a tent full of corpses.

But an hour later, 16-month-old Melisya began moaning and spluttering. An outcry broke out and she was rushed to the hospital for emergency treatment, said Yasmine Joudeh, an exhausted aunt who kept bedside watch over the girl days later as she dozed in a pink bunny T-shirt.

She was one of three survivors of what relatives and local journalists said was an Israeli airstrike.

Her mother, who was expecting twins, had gone into labor hours before the strike at her home and was carried dead from the ruins still clutching her belly, Yasmine said. Melisya’s father and brother were also killed, as were her grandparents, five uncles, two aunts, their spouses and dozens of cousins, he said, in total about 60 people from the Jarousha and Joudeh families who had lived in that complex. homes for decades.

Children account for around 40 percent of those killed in Gaza since October 7, according to the Gaza authorities and the international community organizations. Melisya cheated death and joined the 19,000 children that the war has left without parents or without adults to care for them, according to UNICEF.

And she will be marked for life. Weeks earlier, Melisya had taken her first steps, her aunt said. They were probably the last.

The bomb fragments severed her spinal cord and paralyzed her from the waist down, doctors said. But a few weeks after being injured, Melisya was discharged. Doctors said they lacked medication to treat her and needed her bed for new victims.

Yasmine took Melisya home. She considered the orphan to be a blessing from God, but caring for her was still difficult.

Melisya screamed as her wounds were washed. And at night she would wake up screaming “Mom!” or “Baba!”

Mother

October 7 began as a day of joy for Safaa Zyadah.

Just hours before midnight on the 6th, she had given birth to her fifth child, a girl she named Batool, in a hospital in Gaza City.

But as she cradled her newborn, the sounds of war echoed through her living room.

Zyadah, 32, who had lived through several wars in Gaza, hoped it would end quickly. But when he returned home later that day, it was clear that this time was different.

The walls of their home shook as Israeli warplanes roared overhead, dropping bombs in retaliation for the Hamas-led attack that Israel says killed about 1,200 people on October 7. Ms. Zyadah and her husband gathered her five children, the oldest 13 years old, and started running.

In the first weeks of the war, they moved houses several times and took refuge in relatives’ homes until fighting or Israeli warnings forced them to move on. As the family ran through the streets, he said, they saw fighter jets firing at targets and saw bodies strewn on the side of the road.

They eventually stopped at a makeshift UN-run camp in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis. It was crowded and dirty, but supposedly safe. Crammed into a small tent, her family began to organize their lives as best they could. A few days later, she cradled Batool as she spoke to The Times, grateful they had survived.

“We’re tired of running,” he said. But her respite was short-lived.

In early December, Israeli troops entered Khan Younis, waiting to go out Hamas fighters, they said, were hiding among civilians. The fighting raged around the perimeter of the UN camp, which housed 43,000 people, and at times passed through it.

On Jan. 24, several projectiles hit a U.N. shelter in the camp housing about 800 people, killing 13, the U.N. said. The White House said it was “gravely concerned” for the episode.

It was unclear whether Ms Zyadah and her family were affected. They recently could not be reached by phone.

The photojournalist

Confronting the pain of others is central to the career of Mohammed al-Aloul, 36, a photojournalist who for years has framed Gaza’s struggle in his viewfinder.

But on November 5, the pain came.

It was etched on al-Aloul’s face as he clutched the wrapped remains of his son, killed in what Gaza authorities said was an Israeli airstrike. And that pain roared through him again that same day when he stood over the bodies of three of his other children who, it turned out, had died in the same attack.

Falling to his knees, he cried.

“God, help me endure this pain,” he said.

After October 7, he barely saw his own family, running from the scene of one attack to the next, recording videos for the Turkish state media agency, Anadolu. But she missed her five children very much, she said.

Before the war, they would join him after work to watch football games on television at home, cheering and shouting “gooool!” along with the commentators. Once the fighting started, he put on his son Ahmed’s baseball cap to go to work.

“I carried his scent,” he said.

On Nov. 4, after spending a rare night at home, al-Aloul said his six-year-old son Kenan had begged him not to go. But he left, and while he was documenting displaced families the next day, a friend called.

There was an attack near his home in central Gaza. What followed was frantic confusion, al-Aloul said.

He scrolled through social media and called friends as bits of news came in.

Finally, at the hospital, she learned that Kenan and three of her other children (Ahmad, 13, Rahaf, 11, and Qais, 4) were dead, as were four of her brothers and some of her children and neighbors. His wife was seriously injured.

The only survivor among his children was his youngest son, 1-year-old Adam, whose face was battered by shrapnel.

“He is all I have left,” al-Aloul said days later, clutching the child to her chest.

Mr. al-Aloul’s family is now in Turkey, where his wife is receiving treatment for her extensive injuries.

Wisal Abu Odeh, 34, fainted after queuing for an hour to go to the bathroom. Life was hard for everyone in the dirty, overcrowded displaced persons camp in Khan Younis. But she was five months pregnant.

“Sometimes,” he said in November, “I think it would have been better to die at home.”

Before the war, Abu Odeh was thinking about decorating a nursery with a Spider-Man theme for his unborn baby. After the fighting began, he worried about surviving his pregnancy alive.

Conditions are dire in the UN camps that house most of Gaza’s displaced people. According to the United Nations, diarrhea, respiratory infections and hygiene-related conditions such as lice are on the rise. Thousands of people often share a single shower or toilet.

In the midst of all this chaos, some 50,000 pregnant women live, and about 180 give birth every day, the UN estimates. Basic care is not available. Sometimes C-sections are done without anesthesia. Many women give birth in tents. or bathroomsaccording to Doctors Without Borders.

Ms. Abu Odeh said she was sleeping in a space with 14 other girls and women. Struck by hunger and fear, they sometimes felt tensions flare. She had seen women hitting each other or pulling their hair in disputes over food or water, or jumping in line to go to the bathroom.

Lately, fighting reached her camp and she could not be reached by phone.

A child burn victim

Mohamed Abu Rteinah, 12, doesn’t remember much of what happened when an explosion ripped through his home on October 24. At one point, he was having tea for breakfast while his grandmother read the Quran. The next minute, he was running and screaming, with his limbs apparently on fire, he said.

His mother, Ula Faraj, 33, said she recoiled in horror when she first saw the burns covering about 30 percent of his legs. Her 8-year-old sister Batool suffered similar injuries.

It was not clear who fired the munition that hit his home in the southern city of Rafah, although Gaza authorities and The Associated Press reported Israeli airstrikes in the area at the time. Many of the tens of thousands of bombs dropped by Israel since October 7 were supplied by the United States, including 2,000-pound “bunker busters” that have killed hundreds of people in densely populated areas.

Human rights groups say those weapons could implicate US officials in war crimes. Israel says it respects the laws of war and takes precautions to limit civilian casualties in its war against Hamas. President Biden, who once warned Israel that it was lose support for their “indiscriminate bombing”” says he is urging Israeli forces to minimize those casualties.

Veteran doctors say The extent of pediatric burns in Gaza. It is worrying, especially when the territory’s collapsed health system can barely treat them. Only basic painkillers were available to treat Mohamed and Batool, her mother said at a hospital in Khan Younis. Gauze, ointments and clean water were in short supply.

She could barely watch, she said, as her children cried as doctors tried to clean their wounds.

Weeks later, the family managed to leave Gaza to undergo emergency surgery in Cairo, and on Wednesday they were evacuated to the United Arab Emirates along with other injured children from Gaza for further treatment.