It's been more than two months since Israel declared war on the Palestinian militant group Hamas in retaliation and invaded the Gaza Strip.
Destruction is enveloping Gaza as the latest escalation in a decades-old conflict reaches unprecedented extremes.
Even before the current conflict, Gaza has long rested in the shadow of violence and hardship.
Some 2.2 million people called the tiny enclave – just 365 square kilometres or – home, making it one of the most densely populated places in the world.
Blockaded by Israel and Egypt since 2007 after Hamas seized control of the territory, two-thirds of its inhabitants were living in poverty and 80 per cent relied on international aid. Its unemployment rate was one of the highest in the world.
And yet, despite seemingly insurmountable odds, glimmers of hope and normality have persisted within this conflict-riven area.
Dateline spoke to three current and former residents about what life was like inside the Gaza Strip.
Their accounts tell of a place defined by paradox: a territory flanked by the glittering Mediterranean Sea on one side and barbed wire on the other; a culture of hospitality, warmth, and benevolence that is regularly fractured by the sound of gunshots, fighter planes, and bombs; a people who are desperate for peace, and yet improbably accustomed to war.
‘Gaza is like a magical city’
Amal Zaqout was born in Gaza, but it was in 2007 that it became her long-term home.
Having left the territory at the age of two, first for Egypt and then Yemen, the 51-year-old mother of two returned to her birthplace following the death of her husband. She had travelled extensively and had the opportunity to emigrate elsewhere, but something about Gaza beckoned.
Born in Gaza, Amal Zaqout returned to her homeland in 2007. Her home has been destroyed by an Israeli airstrike. Source: Supplied
Zaqout is now in Rafah, a city at the southern end of Gaza near the Egyptian border, where she fled in October after being evacuated from her home in the north. Even here she says she is not safe, with bombardments battering the area each night and telecommunications being almost completely cut off.
But amid the mayhem, she speaks warmly of her memories of life in Gaza before the siege: memories of the sea, where she would go with friends every weekend; of eating barbecued lamb and chicken under the fruit trees at her brother’s house; of playing cards and, at least once a week, visiting the animal shelter near the beach where she could spend time with the resident cats and dogs.
“We had funny days and a peaceful life,” she said. “It was difficult to live due to the blockade, but you find good people. You can adapt. I believe you can create your happiness.”
Now-displaced Gaza resident Amal Zaqout with her two sons, Mohammed and Sammer. Source: Supplied
After the blockade began, groups such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) provided basic supplies to over a million refugees.
“We managed to live with what's available in Gaza,” Zaqout said.
Such resilience was pushed to breaking point in late October when bombs started falling over the Gaza Strip - not on empty plots or fields, as would sometimes happen before the latest conflict, but on hospitals, schools, and densely-populated neighbourhoods.
We just want to build our life, to raise our kids in a proper way, to give them a happy and peaceful life. But at the end of the day, [it’s] out of our control, what happened.Amal Zaqout
Now every time she opens Facebook Zaqout discovers someone else who has died, whose house was destroyed, or who lost a member of their family. She cries for them every night.
Zaqout also cried when she learned her home had been destroyed. The apartment, which had saddled her with a debt that took nine years to pay off, was where she had lived with her two sons, now 22 and 24 years old, while they studied science and business at the university in Gaza. Israeli forces reduced the entire building to rubble.
“Every single angle in my home has a memory, and it's destroyed,” she says. “A lot of people like me, we have memories everywhere. It's unfair to spend years building your life and someone comes in minutes and destroys it.”
“It's like hell when you see it after and before.”
Palestinian farmers work on a strawberry field in Beit Lahia, a city in the northern Gaza Strip near the border with Israel, in November 2021. Source: NurPhoto / Majdi Fathi/via Getty Images
About 1,200 people were killed and 240 hostages taken, according to the Israeli government, in that attack, in what was a significant escalation of a long-running conflict between Hamas and Israel. Israel has vowed to continue military action until all hostages are released.
Hamas is a Palestinian political and military group, with a stated aim to establish a Palestinian state and stop Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, illegal under international law.
The group has governed the Gaza Strip since the most recent elections in 2006, and in its entirety, is listed as a terrorist organisation by the European Union and seven other countries, including Australia. But the UN Assembly rejected classifying Hamas as a terrorist group in 2018.
In 2021 the International Criminal Court opened an investigation into alleged Israeli war crimes in the Palestinian territories dating back to 2014, including the recent attacks of both Israel and Hamas.
Zaqout says there is no word in English for what Gazans are currently going through, but one that she keeps coming back to is ‘unthinkable.’ The scale and brutality of the siege are more than she can comprehend. Yet she refuses to be overcome by it.
“I insist to start again,” she says. “I will not leave Gaza. Even [if I am] one hundred [years old] and they destroyed it, I will rebuild it again, because this is my homeland.”
‘We are experts in war now’
Before she left Gaza for the first time at 17, Asil Ziara didn’t think the outside world, past the border fence and across the sea, was much different to the one she’d spent her whole life learning to tolerate.
She’d seen photographs and movies of places other than the Gaza Strip but had always assumed that these were not quite accurate representations of how people lived their lives.
Asil Ziara grew up in Gaza and remains hopeful her homeland will endure. Source: Supplied
She also discovered she was traumatised. After moving to Cyprus to attend university, Ziara spent more than a year seeing a therapist. Now 21, she travelled to Egypt at the end of September to meet her mother and brother and prepare for her return to Gaza. As she puts it, “There was a war telling me ‘welcome back.’”
There is a sea, a big beautiful sea, but at the same time you can't breathe. You feel you're living in a prison.Asil Ziara
In Gaza, Ziara explains, the consistency of war has come to signify a perverse kind of normality—as unstoppable as the tides or the phases of the moon.
“People in Gaza believe they have to have a war every two or three years,” she explained. “We got used to it. And before October 7th, we were expecting there was a war coming.”
“We feel it. We are experts in war now. We are experts in things we don't actually want to know.”
Ziara’s father, a journalist with American media outlet ABC News, along with seven of her eight siblings, remain trapped in Gaza. He has relocated about 16 times, she said, to avoid Israeli attacks.
As a child, she remembers him teaching her to swim and ride horses; taking her to karate lessons; or letting her sit up until midnight with him and his friends, talking.
Asil Ziara (standing, rear left) with her parents and siblings. Her father and seven of her eight siblings remain trapped in the Gaza Strip, while she, her mother and one of her brothers are in Egypt. Source: Supplied
“I’m not going to lie,” she says. “I'm not fine at all.”
Even as people who have become conditioned to the inevitability of war, Gazans have never experienced anything as bad as this, Ziara says. Yet she remains hopeful her homeland will endure.
Despite centuries of wars, conflict, and oppression, the Gaza Strip has demonstrated a tendency towards survival that Ziara describes as being “something like a miracle.”
“Gaza is a phoenix,” she says. “[But] us in Gaza, we are not sure of anything. There is always hope that it's going to be fine one day. But we don't know if we will stay in it, or if we will be alive.”
Palestinian fishermen unload their catch at the seaport of Gaza City in February 2022. Source: Anadolu / Ali Jadallah/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
‘A very warm and strange place to live’
Nicole Johnston remembers Rafah as the place to go for seafood in Gaza. Living and working in the enclave as a foreign correspondent for 12 months in 2011, the Australian-born journalist would spend her downtime there, with her Palestinian friends, at one of the cafes or fish restaurants by the sea.
“Gaza’s got beautiful beaches, really rich culture, great seafood, and just very hospitable people who are desperate to have connection with foreigners,” Johnston told SBS Dateline.
“They invite you into their homes and share their food, and they want you to know their families and their children. It's a very warm place to live.”
“Having said that,” she added, “there's always this sort of strange tension.”
Australian Nicole Johnston (right) was based in the Gaza Strip as a foreign correspondent in 2011. Source: Supplied
At one point she remembers doing yoga on a friend’s rooftop when she heard Israeli air force jets swooping overhead. In another memory, she recalls driving along a road that skirted the Mediterranean Sea, looking one way to see the surf-combed beach and the other to see a Hamas training ground.
“It's a very strange place to live, calm and welcoming on one hand and on the other, this incredibly unique situation where practically no one inside Gaza can leave,” she said.
“That's why the people there and human rights groups call it an open-air prison: because that's what it feels like inside.”
In more peaceful times, however, she also remembers Gaza as a vibrant, densely-packed community with markets, mosques, schools, and an abundance of children - unsurprising, for an area whose population is one of the youngest globally, with an average age of 18.
“Palestinian people are like people anywhere else in the world: they just want to be able to go to work, educate their children, spend time with their families on the weekend and go to the beach,” Johnston said.
“They're no different to people in Australia, but they're stuck with this situation of living under a blockade for over 16 years.”
Do you want to learn more about the life of ordinary Palestinians in the Gaza Strip? Watch this Dateline documentary from 2016.
