Samir (name changed) works for CARE West Bank and Gaza. Originally from Gaza, he writes about the worries for his family, the difficulties of keeping in touch with them, and how his humanitarian work helps him find hope amidst the war and desperation.
I was born in Gaza and have lived there for all 30 years of my life. My family is there, my memories, everything that is important to me. When the escalation in Gaza started on October 7th, it became impossible for me to be with my family. Ever since I am feeling torn into a million pieces. It is as if my mind, heart, and soul were still in Gaza under attack, while my body is elsewhere, in safety.
Now, all I have of my family are our short conversations and messages via the phone if I can get a hold of them. The internet and telecommunications infrastructure has been damaged, and the electricity supply has been cut off. The phone lines are often down, and my family can only rarely charge their phones. They have had to evacuate seven times. They fled the bombings; they ran for their lives. They stayed with different relatives, but time again and again they were under attack and had to find another place to seek safety. They also told me that my house and car were completely destroyed.
The telephone calls and voice messages with my family have changed over these past five months. When the war first started, I asked them how they were doing, how they had slept, where they were. Now I don’t really dare to ask them these questions anymore. Instead, I ask them if they were able to eat, if they found bread, if they were able to drink any water, whether they were freezing again at night. I want to talk to my friends and my family, but it is hard asking them difficult questions, and it is especially hard hearing their answers. Some of my close friends in Gaza City have experienced severe attacks; they cannot find clean water, and they have started eating animal feed as they would simply starve otherwise.
It’s the uncertainty, that I find the hardest. In January, I could not reach them for ten days. Ten long days when I feared they were all dead. Every time the telephone rings or I receive a notification I prepare myself for more bad news. So many of my friends have already died, two of them with their wives and all their children. Their entire families just gone. There is nothing I can think of or do to even remotely grasp how this is possible, what this is for, and why this is just going on and on.
The person I miss the most is my mother. She has always been a rock to myself and my brothers and raised us as kind and caring men. She has a PhD in mathematics and always stressed how important it is to be educated. Whatever else we lose, our education and what we have learned cannot be taken away from us. Thinking of her, in her sixties, running from one place to another, fearing every night could be her last, is the most painful thing I have ever felt. My family tells me they are now sharing one latrine with 25 people. At 6 am., my elderly mother is queuing up with other women, children, and men to be able to use the bathroom. I wish I could be there for her right now. I also worry a lot about my brothers. Both usually live outside Gaza. For the first time since COVID-19, they were able to travel back to see our mother. I remember how excited they were for this family reunion. Little did they know they would be trapped in a warzone for five months, with no end in sight. One of my brothers has gout. He has trouble walking, cannot get the medication he needs for this chronic illness, and has lost a lot of weight as the only food that is available is not suitable for the diet his condition requires.
What helps me right now is to focus on my work as a humanitarian aid worker for CARE. Growing up in Gaza, I always wanted to help and find a way to use my expertise to make the lives of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank better. Right now, I support the CARE team in Gaza to raise funds for our work, and to ensure that we can distribute hygiene kits and potable water. Since last week, we’ve been able to start with water trucking. We distributed water to 75,000 people living in 32 collective centers.
I was able to speak to our partners, and they described to me how much this means for people right now. Parents were especially relieved they, for once, did not have to walk hours every day to get a glass of water for their children, often walking barefoot while bombs kept falling, fearing they might never return to their families. As a water engineer, it is important to me that people receive safe and healthy water. As a humanitarian, I want to ensure that our support is holistic. In what is now also a public health crisis, women and girls need hygiene kits, people with disabilities need to access the latrines, and we want to raise awareness about health, hygiene, and protection.
I have been a humanitarian worker for many years. I grew up amidst conflicts, poverty, and desperation. I have lived through escalations and sieges. What I am witnessing now is pure and utter horror. Some people tell me that I am lucky that I am not in Gaza right now, that I am safe where I am, that I have food to eat and a bed to sleep in. I can tell you that I don’t feel lucky. I don’t know when and where and how I can see my family and people I love again or when I can hug and console them. What gives me hope and the strength to continue is the change I can make in people’s lives right now, people just like my own family, by working as hard as I can to provide them with clean water, food, the basic necessities of life, and hopefully a reminder that their plight hasn’t been forgotten.
