On Saturday, while U.S. President Donald Trump stated an agreement to end nearly two years of horror in Gaza was “very close,” Ali Musa al-Dibs was caring for his teenage son Musab in the besieged capital of the Strip. Musab has been in a coma since May, when an Israeli attack left him with a serious head wound. Musab has necrotic lesions and is severely malnourished, his father says. In the photos, he looks skeletal and has lost a lot of hair, one of the symptoms of starvation.
“Until October 7 [2023], we had a more or less happy life. That day, that was cut short. We’ve had to move 15 times. It’s always about finding a suitable place and finding a way to transport things, which is very expensive. It’s like this, over and over again,” Al-Dibs explains via audio messages. It’s the first morning in months with little in the way of shelling. Last Friday, Hamas responded positively — albeit with reservations — to Trump’s peace plan, after which the Republican called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt the attacks.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are already in a defensive position, and negotiations to finalize the details of the agreement are underway. So Al-Dibs, 54, repeats a wish: “God willing, the war will end well. We hope to live like everyone else and that our children can play like other children.” The life of his son Musab depends on it. He is 14 and “cannot walk or open his mouth to eat,” and suffers from “a constant fever, spasms, difficulty breathing, and severe ulcers all over his body,” his father summarizes.
Like many other Gazans, Al-Dibs’ family eats only once a day, and little. “Bread, nothing else. Just ordinary bread. There’s hardly any food in Gaza, and if we find it, it’s at exorbitant prices.” His son, he explains, needs the vitamins and proteins that have become luxuries due to Netanyahu’s decision to use hunger as collective punishment, which causes daily deaths from starvation — especially among children — and led the UN to declare a famine in Gaza City in August.
“There’s no meat, fish, eggs, or anything else my son needs. So we blend whatever we can get and give it to him so he can eat it easily,” he continues. “Vegetables are available, but their price is far beyond our financial means. Some organizations gave us milk, and we thought Musab could drink it, but it had expired in September.”
Food distribution in Gaza City, October 3. Hassan Jedi (Anadolu/Getty Images)
Al-Dibs and his family have ended up sleeping on the floor due to a lack of beds at the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital in Deir al-Balah, after escaping from Gaza City, which — before Trump, obsessed with winning the Nobel Peace Prize, presented his plan — Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz had promised to raze to the ground, like Rafah or Beit Hanoun. This week, in a major statement overshadowed by the assault on the humanitarian aid flotilla, Katz stated that the IDF will consider those who do not take advantage of the “last opportunity” to escape from the capital — where hundreds of thousands of people are still hungry and unable to afford yet another flight — as “terrorists or supporters of terrorism.”
Fidaa al-Araj, a 40-year-old psychologist and mother of six children aged four to 16, left Gaza two weeks ago. She is the Food Security, Cash, and Protection Coordinator for the NGO Oxfam in the Strip, and has ended up in central Gaza, displaced once again and with the sensation that time has passed over the last two years in a very particular way. “So many things have happened…! But I also have the feeling that we are trapped in time, that our lives now come down to one thing: being the subject of genocide.”
Al-Araj’s words come from her feelings. Like the green towel that a friend gave her during one of the forced displacements she has made, which makes her sad to see now because it reminds her that she had to flee her home without any of her own belongings. Or the inaccessible faucet she has imagined in her dreams. “A simple faucet that dispenses water when you turn it on,” she describes. She says she also dreamed about “a normal door with a wooden frame.” “I opened and closed it at will, and it wasn’t a makeshift door or a curtain made from old fabric.”
It’s not just dreams. It’s also reality, the surprise at everything she never imagined herself doing. Like learning how to light and use a clay oven because there’s practically no other way to cook in Gaza. “It’s one like the ones we saw in museums and our grandmothers used in rural areas. I never thought I’d have to use it one day. And there it was, in a neighbor’s yard.” Or learning how to chop wood, light a fire, and keep it burning. Or killing, plucking, and gutting a chicken. “You tell yourself it’s temporary, that it will be a few days, then a few weeks… until it turns into more than a year and a half.”
Civilian casualties
Their stories illustrate the immeasurable suffering of more than two million Gazans, victims of what a commission of inquiry established by the UN Human Rights Council and a growing number of authoritative academic voices are calling genocide. There are other, more incontrovertible words: massacre (the death toll in Gaza has now exceeded 67,000, mostly women and children), war crimes, crimes against humanity, or collective punishment. And one that has long since ceased to have any meaning: war.
Since June 2024, there has been little fighting between Israeli troops in Gaza and Hamas militants, apart from occasional ambushes and very isolated rocket fire against border towns in Israel, a war crime due to its indiscriminate nature. The vast majority of the few weapons possessed by the Islamist militia come from converting 10,000 tons of unexploded Israeli ammunition into rockets, mortar shells, or explosive devices. This represents between 10% and 15% of the 100,000 tons that Israel is estimated to have dropped on the Gaza Strip, the most densely populated place on the planet.
These are practically unprecedented figures, as is everything that has happened in Gaza in these past two years. And as was the episode that led to this latest offensive: the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, which killed nearly 1,200 people in Israeli territory and in which another 250 were taken hostage. The deadliest day in the history of Israel, which went from surprise, a sense of fragility, and trauma, to a spiral of power and revenge.
A man carries the body of a child on September 27 in Gaza.Hamza Z. H. Qraiqea (Anadolu/ Getty Images)
Just listen to Israeli leaders speaking in Hebrew (when they speak to their audiences, not to the outside world), and in particular to one of the most influential: the ultra-nationalist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. “We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn’t stopping us,” he said at a press conference six months ago.
Over the past two years, certain images seemed to mark the definitive turning point in ending the terror: the death of little Hind Rajab, who was gunned down while pleading for help (portrayed in a docudrama that shocked the Venice Film Festival); the murder of a group of civilians chasing a truck carrying flour, or of paramedics rushing to help the wounded; the bombing of chef José Andrés’ NGO convoy; the attacks on hospitals that later became routine; the successive displacements of almost the entire population; the ruins of Rafah, which Joe Biden dismissed as a small, localized operation, the invasion of which he had drawn a supposed red line on that Israel crossed… But these episodes continued to occur, and the turning point never came.
Therese Pettersson is a senior analyst at the Conflict Data Program at Uppsala University in Sweden, which has been tracking global conflicts and their civilian casualties since 1989. They cross-reference sources to try to distinguish them from combatants, using the criterion that “a civilian is anyone who does not belong to a militant group or carry weapons,” which excludes, for example, Hamas members who held a civilian role in the Gaza government before the war.
With that definition, Pettersson believes that “everything points” to the fact that the proportion of civilian casualties in Gaza is “very high.” Around 80%, and “probably much higher,” she clarifies in a video interview. This is the same percentage (83%) that was revealed in a classified Israeli military intelligence database, brought to light in August via a journalistic investigation.
Acled, an independent organization that also monitors armed conflicts and receives support from the UN and Western governments, goes further. It states that 15 out of every 16 deaths in Gaza since March 18 are civilians (94%), the date when Netanyahu unilaterally broke the truce he had agreed to two months earlier.
Pettersson cites two sieges as the “cases closest” to Gaza: that of the Russian army on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol (95% civilian deaths), between February and May 2022, and that of the forces of the now-overthrown Bashar al-Assad on the city of Aleppo (59%) during four years of the civil war in Syria.
Besides Mariupol, only two other examples equal or exceed the proportion of civilian deaths in the Palestinian Strip, and both have been declared genocide by the International Court of Justice in The Hague: the massacre by Hutu extremists of around one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in 1994 (99.8% civilians) and the massacre of nearly 8,000 Bosnian men by Bosnian Serb forces a year later in Srebrenica, a UN “safe area.” Ninety-two percent were civilians.
“The Gaza war isn’t the bloodiest in modern times, but it’s certainly one of the most intense,” Petterson says. “Its uniqueness lies in its high population density. Ukraine, for example, is a vast country, and the front line is very long. It’s practically unpopulated, and people have been able to move from the conflict zone.”
“We see a very different pattern in terms of deaths,” the analyst continues. “In Ukraine, the number of civilian casualties is quite low, except in the first months of the large-scale invasion in 2022. Currently, there are relatively few, mainly soldiers on both sides, while in Gaza there are indiscriminate aerial bombardments in a densely populated urban area, causing a very high number of civilian casualties. The situation is further aggravated because people have nowhere to go and humanitarian aid is not really reaching the population.”
Bread and nothing else
Let’s return to the everyday reality of devastated Gaza. Nasser Rabah is a 62-year-old writer, author of two novels and six collections of poetry. He lives in what has always been his home in the Magazi refugee camp, in central Gaza. An Israeli bombardment partially damaged his house and destroyed his library.
Now he doesn’t start his days writing, but rather splitting firewood, which he buys for a little over $2 a kilo. This is how almost everyone cooks, given the lack of electricity. “I started doing it after using up all the wood in my house: tearing and splitting the doors of the rooms, the tables, and the chairs,” he explains. Then he grabs the buckets and waits in a long line to fill them with water. He lights the fire and prepares the meal: “Two or three things that are repeated over and over again. One is lentils; we already call them sacred lentils. We save the dirty water to flush down the toilet. We drink little and can only bathe once a week,” he explains.
He remembers the last time he ate meat. It was January of this year. “I completely understand why our wounds don’t heal as quickly as they used to,” he says. He also remembers the three months during which Israel blocked all food, water, and electricity supplies to Gaza, just before breaking the ceasefire it had signed and thus preventing the end of the invasion. “We ate one loaf of bread per person for the whole day, which we dipped in salt or tea,” he recalls. He had to pay about $23 for a kilo of flour, plus another $2 for firewood.
A truck drives through the rubble of Gaza City on Saturday.Amir Cohen (REUTERS)
The yearning for a ceasefire, tinged with skepticism after so many dashed hopes, mingles in Gaza with the desire of many to escape. This has been impossible since Israel took Rafah last year and closed off the only option: paying thousands of dollars to a mafia for a spot on a list to cross into Egypt. And always with the fear of playing into the hands of the Israeli governing coalition, which dreams of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, although Trump’s plan insists that Palestinians who leave will be able to return.
Escape is what two young people in the Nuseirat refugee camp, in the heart of the Palestinian enclave, pray for, without luck. Their stories might seem parallel, but they are not.
One, Hassan Abo Qamar, is at home with his parents, three brothers, and sister-in-law. He is an exception: practically the entire Strip has suffered forced displacement. For many people, more than 10 times. The UN estimates that 92% of residential buildings (some 436,000 homes) have been destroyed or damaged since the start of the invasion. Not only by bombing, but also by bulldozers, controlled explosions, or fires set to make Gaza uninhabitable. Aware of their privilege, the Abo Qamars welcome anyone in need. Up to 16 people have lived in their house, crammed together.
The other, Mohammed, is in Nuseirat as a displaced person after having to flee his home, and is “alone,” as he repeatedly points out, after his entire family left the Strip in February 2024. He represents a distinct exception: the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimated last month that 100,000 Palestinians fled the horror while it was still possible.
Hassan is 18 years old. On the morning of October 7, 2023, just after the massacre perpetrated by Hamas, the first Israeli missiles caught him studying for his upcoming English exam, oblivious to what was unfolding around him. “The genocide,” he explains over the phone two years later, “has paradoxically made me realize how much I still have to gain in this life. It has transformed my dreams. And I am proud of it.” The teenager yearns to return to his studies after two lost years. “I will be an engineer, because they [Israel] fight us through science, but I will respond with my knowledge.”
Their enthusiasm fuels their hopes, but hunger seeps into the family’s stomachs. Despite having money that many in Gaza lack, months ago they could only afford a piece of bread a day. Often, not even that. “Now things are a little better, but only for some,” he notes, referring to the prohibitive prices at the market. In his home, the distribution now provides enough for four slices of bread, sometimes with zaatar (a traditional Middle Eastern condiment) and cheese, plus rice or pasta a few days a week. “I’m privileged,” he concludes.
For Mohammed, a journalist in his thirties, however, the horror has made him realize how much he stands to lose. What he loves most, the family he has built, is far away. His parents, his sisters, his four children, and his wife, who was pregnant when she left Gaza, are in Cairo. He stayed in the Strip because he is one of the few with a job that allows him to support his exiled family, but now he regrets his decision.
Mohamed laments on the phone that he has yet to see his fourth child, born in Egypt, in person. The little boy doesn’t react when he sees his distant father on his cell phone screen during video calls, during which his older children criticize him for not being with them. “It breaks my heart,” he says, his voice cracking. “My children and my wife can’t afford to lose me.” Mohammed has long focused his efforts on staying alive so he can return to them. He stays away from people to avoid the bombings and spends lonely nights in his car near the sea.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition