Gaza War: Day Eight – October 14, 2023
If there’s anything worse than fleeing your home under fire, it’s what comes next—the waiting. The not knowing. The cold. The endless, sleepless night.
We had arrived in Deir al-Balah exhausted, displaced, and emotionally shattered. The school we had reached was already overflowing with families like ours. Inside one of the classrooms, nearly fifty women—my mother, wife, daughters, sister, and sister-in-law—huddled together for space and safety. I couldn’t join them. There was simply no room.
So I stayed outside.
October nights in Gaza aren’t forgiving. The air grows sharp after sunset, and the concrete absorbs every ounce of cold. I didn’t even have a spot on the ground to stretch out. I found a plastic chair—one of those old, creaky ones you see in schoolyards—and I claimed it like a fragile throne. That chair became my bed, my post, my companion. I sat upright the entire night, shivering, aching, barely able to close my eyes.
Sleep was a stranger. Around me, men like me tried to doze off on sidewalks, steps, or just hunched over against the walls. Radios crackled in the background with constant updates and evacuation orders, Israeli recordings repeating the same chilling demand: “Leave.”
But where to?
I kept thinking about how the night before, I had told my daughter we’d go to the ice cream shop “tomorrow.” Tomorrow had become this. A chair under the open sky. The sound of drones instead of laughter. And the realization that this was only the beginning of a much longer nightmare.
There was no food yet. No certainty about where water would come from. No bathroom with privacy. The children cried themselves to sleep—if they slept at all. The mothers whispered prayers, wiped tears, tried to remain strong in front of little eyes that had already seen too much.
I looked up at the stars that night, but they didn’t shine with hope. They stared back coldly, like witnesses to a crime.
We survived the seventh day by running. The eighth day demanded something harder: enduring.
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