Israel killed my family and destroyed my home. The world just kept scrolling

The last time I saw my home in Gaza was on my 31st birthday, 13 October 2023.

I had just bathed my children, folded their clothes and packed a bag with what little we could carry. It was time to evacuate. We didn’t know if we were leaving for a night or forever.

Two months later, it was gone – bombed, like so many others.

At the time, I was displaced in a small, unfurnished apartment in Deir al-Balah. I was cooking over an open fire when my husband arrived. His face was pale, sad and distant. I knew something terrible had just happened.

I asked him what was wrong. He said nothing. But I could sense the truth in his silence. I insisted. Then, he told me. He had just seen the news in the neighbours’ WhatsApp group. The building where our home once stood had been bombed. There were three photos. I begged him to show me. He refused. I cried. I screamed. Finally, he gave in.

And there it was. My dream home. Rubble.

I had lived there for less than two years. But those two years held more joy and struggle than a lifetime. We had just cleared its debt. Just started to call it ours. I worked three jobs to build that home. I was online just two days after my first C-section with the twins, trying to pay for a future we could hold on to.

That home stood in the Nasser neighbourhood of Gaza City. Every corner of it knew our laughter. Every room had witnessed our tears.

I am the kind of person who mourns a chipped cup, who keeps a sweater for 10 years because it reminds me of a dear friend. I still kept the clothes I wore in high school. I hold on to things. I give meaning to objects.

So, imagine what it feels like to lose everything, to lose the walls I painted with care, the curtains I picked out with love, the kitchen where I prepared meals for the people I cherished, the hallway where my twins took their first steps, the bookshelf I filled during lockdowns.

It wasn’t just a home. It was proof that we had survived before, that we had built something beautiful from nothing.

And now, even that proof is gone. 

The world didn’t see my story. Like so many others in Gaza, I was invisible.

I am a mother, a teacher, a survivor. But in Gaza, it doesn’t matter who you are. Whether it is an infant, a student, a farmer or a professor, the world refuses to see us as human.

In a world that reduces our lives to numbers, even our survival goes unnoticed.

Finding hope

For most of my life, I have lived under siege.

I have lived through war, hunger, air strikes and the long silences that follow them. But I also lived through weddings, poetry readings, graduations and golden days at the beach. I raised children through it all.

No one knew what was coming. No one could have imagined that such joy would soon be buried under rubble

Just a week before 7 October, I took my twins to my neighbour Rama’s wedding. She adored my children. I had bought a beautiful little outfit for my son, Kinan, and a matching orange dress for my daughter, Kinda. They looked like joy itself.

We danced with the bride as she spun in her white gown, hand in hand with her groom. We clapped. We laughed. We wished her a beautiful married life. 

My children watched in awe as people danced the dabke to our traditional songs. They listened to the music, smiled at the joy around them and clung to my hands, as if they could sense how fleeting that happiness was.

That night, we were just a family celebrating love. No one knew what was coming. No one could have imagined that such joy would soon be buried under rubble.

Distorted narratives

In both western and Arab media, people like me are made to disappear – flattened by bombs or by headlines.

I saw this happen to my own uncle, Yasser Radwan, a university professor with the most beautiful smile. He was displaced in Deir al-Balah when an air strike hit a neighbouring building. He, his kind wife and their six bright, beloved children were all killed.

To the media, they were not a family but a number in the toll – lives mentioned without context, if mentioned at all.

This is how Palestinians are portrayed: not as people, but as statistics. Dozens killed, hundreds injured, thousands displaced. We are victims, not voices.

What does it mean to be killed with your entire family and not even earn a footnote?

Meanwhile, Israeli civilians are named. Their professions and dreams are lovingly described. The media makes space for their experiences, their fears and their futures.

They run stories about “panic” injuries among Israelis rushing to shelters. In Gaza, we have no such category. Panic injuries are a privilege we are not afforded. Our dictionary of suffering is different.

Western media coverage collapses the difference between the occupier and the occupied, between an air strike and a homemade rocket, between systematic siege and desperate resistance.

Language plays a central role in this erasure. When outlets report on Gaza, they resort to abstraction: “militant target”, “collateral damage”, “claims of destruction”.

Even when atrocities are captured on video, the reporting remains tentative. Headlines hedge with phrases like “alleged”, “it is believed” or “appears to show”, as though first-hand footage were hearsay.

During the massacre of paramedics in Rafah, filmed in real time, western outlets still relied on this language of doubt. The facts are there, yet the framing remains uncertain, conditional, and evasive.

Arab media, too, has its silences. It often presents Palestinians from Gaza as endlessly resilient, capable of enduring anything without breaking, leaning on mythologies of strength and sacrifice while ignoring fatigue, dissent and the unbearable toll of survival.

But the truth is, people are worn out. They are exhausted beyond words. They didn’t choose this life. They have simply been forced to endure it.

This isn’t just about media ethics. It’s about history – about whose pain is recorded, whose is erased, and whose voices shape public opinion, international policy and the historical record.

Lives erased

The world often sees only the rubble, not the people whose lives were demolished along with their homes – bodies without biographies.

But behind every number is a life interrupted. A future stolen.

Palestinians are not asking for pity. We are asking to be recognised, to be seen as human and to have our stories told truthfully – not obscured, dismissed or erased. That means not only telling the stories of our suffering, but also of our lives, our joy and our dignity – the fullness of our humanity.

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I want the world to know that in Gaza, my uncle Mustafa lost his home – a four-storey building he spent his life constructing, with seven apartments – one for each of his sons, so they could marry, raise families and remain close, as is common in Gaza. 

It was destroyed in December 2024.

My uncle built his life there, brick by brick, dream by dream. He watched his six sons and his 14 grandchildren grow before his eyes – each one a story told in laughter and mischief, in schoolbooks and quiet, proud moments. Together they celebrated weddings and births, shared bread and sorrow, and held on through hard times with hope in their hearts.

There was always a dream: of a bigger house, of education, of peace. Then, in a single breath of fire and smoke, Israeli missiles turned it all into rubble.

Now he stands in the dust of what once was – an elderly man with tired lungs and a heart bearing the weight of everything he’s lost.

He is the son of refugees from the 1948 Nakba. And now, for the second time in his life, he has been stripped of his home.

What does it mean to lose not just a house, but the place where joy once lived? How do you keep going when everything you built – every smile, every prayer, every quiet promise – has been buried beneath broken stone?

I want the world to know about my neighbour’s 18-year-old daughter, Sadeel, who should have been in her first year of university. She is still stuck in high school, a year behind, because of the war. She used to be at the top of her class.

Two weeks ago, she asked me if I knew anyone abroad who could help her apply to a university, so she doesn’t lose more years of her life. Her classmate managed to leave for Bosnia four weeks ago and is now studying there.

Her three older siblings – bright, ambitious, dreaming of resuming their medical studies – now wonder if they will ever see a classroom again.

For Palestinians, education is not just important. It is everything. It is our power, our hope, our weapon against despair.

Deafening silence

I want the world to know about my sister’s one-year-old son, Ashraf, born four months into the genocide.

He was born into tents, into chaos, into a life no child should ever know. He plays in the dirt – the same dirt that coats his toys, his clothes, his tiny hands.

People talk about survivor’s guilt. But they don’t know what it means to survive while your family is still living the nightmare you fled

He doesn’t know the home he was meant to grow up in. He’ll never remember the colour of its walls, the warmth it once held. It’s gone, just like the future they were building.

His three young sisters, once full of dreams – talking about what they wanted to be and where they wanted to go – now only talk about how much food is left and how much they should save.

Their childhood is gone, replaced by the need to survive.

I want the world to know what it means to survive a genocide – not just to escape it, like I did, but to carry its weight every day.

Two days before the Israeli military invaded Rafah, I fled with my husband and our three small children. We ran for our lives but left our hearts behind. My entire family is still there, living through a nightmare I cannot reach, only witness from afar.

People talk about survivor’s guilt. But they don’t know what it means to survive while your family is still living the nightmare you fled.

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We may have survived in body but never in spirit. 

In Cairo, when a civilian plane passes overhead, I freeze. The sound is too close, too familiar. 

We never sleep through the night. We wake again and again to check the news, clinging to the hope that our loved ones have survived another round of air strikes.

We don’t enjoy food. We don’t laugh the way we used to. And in Cairo, we live without legal status, without recognition. The world does not see us as refugees. The truth is, the world does not see us at all.

We are not just numbers. We are not just victims. We are people with names, with memories, with futures we were building. We deserve to be seen.

I am not the first to say these things. Palestinians have been telling the world their stories for decades. But nearly 20 months into this genocide, we are still not being heard. The silence persists – louder than the bombs, heavier than the rubble.

How much more must we lose before we are finally seen as human?

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.