It is six o’clock in the morning on Saturday 7 October 2023. Half awake, I call out in a hoarse voice to my two sisters who are sleeping on their beds next to me: “Enas, Remas, wake up – you have school.”

We were not to know it yet, but this was the day when everything would change. The day when horrific events across the border in Israel would lead to a war that became a gateway to hell itself.

Malak Tantesh and her father, Amjed Tantesh, in the ruins of their home in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza. Photograph: Enas Tantesh/The Guardian

I went back to sleep, not caring much whether my sisters woke up or not. My university classes started a little later at eight in the morning. Then suddenly came the sound of rockets firing. I could not tell if I was still dreaming.

But soon my sisters and I were wide awake, and at first we told ourselves they were test rockets and would fall into the sea, so we didn’t care much, until the sound grew so loud it was impossible to ignore.

Rumours started spreading – “maybe one of Hamas’s top leaders was assassinated, maybe Hamas was attacking Israel”, but everyone was guessing. Not comprehending what was happening, we waited for any confirmed piece of news.

My uncle and his family came, still in their sleepwear and extremely agitated, since they live near the Israeli border. They were in a state of terror, their clothes messy, the interrupted sleep and their panicked departure visible on their faces.

Some videos began to appear on social media showing Hamas storming into Israel and capturing dozens of people and taking them back to Gaza. We could not grasp the scale of what had just happened.

And then, the Israeli response began: a lot of bombing in all directions, the windows of the house trembling, and with them our hearts trembling, the sound of ambulances, all kinds of aircraft, and the cries of children.

We have become used to war, and as in every war we have experienced, we started packing some of our belongings. We did not expect to be gone for long, so we only took the clothes we were wearing and one extra change, and gathered up the most important documents, putting them in school bags.

On Friday 13 October, the pace of bombing on Beit Lahia increased. Leaflets were dropped telling us to evacuate. At that time we were afraid and reluctant to comply, but later that day, when we were making Thai food for dinner, the Israeli army started dropping smoke bombs on our houses until the city was covered with smoke. A state of terror broke out among our neighbours and everyone started running out of their homes, leaving everything behind. As for us, we left in our car, taking with us my grandfather and grandmother and our family of seven, and headed south for the first time.

The view over Beit Lahia from the roof of Tantesh’s grandfather’s house in February 2025. Photograph: Enas Tantesh/The Guardian

We did not know what was waiting for us. We thought we would stay for two or three weeks and then return.

We did not expect that we would face dozens of wars instead of one.

The second war we faced was finding a place to stay. We didn’t know where to go, we just kept moving south with no specific destination, our feelings swinging between fear, loss and hesitation. We ended up in an apartment in Deir, where we lived for three months, sleeping on the cold floor with no blankets or bed clothes. And there were the other wars, such as getting water and food, and the short life of the tents we had to live in.

Despite obeying the evacuation orders and heading south, we found nowhere was safe. Not a day passed without the sounds of explosions, the roar of warplanes, shells and bullets fired by Israeli naval boats. We always imagined waking up to find the wall of the apartment falling on us. I had visions of remaining alive, alone amid rubble, screaming for my family but getting no response. We wrote our names on a piece of paper and put it in our pockets in case the house was bombed and we all died, so that paper would serve as an identity card if our faces were erased.

Malak Tantesh with family members in northern Gaza. Photograph: Enas Tantesh/The Guardian

When we felt the danger getting closer, we decided to go and live in tents in Rafah. The situation was a little better than living in an apartment, and at least those nightmares stopped. In the first week we were very happy, imagining it was our first camping trip in rainy winter weather, but what we didn’t know the challenge we would face in getting water and food, and in contending with the punishing, severe cold. We were constantly falling ill.

My younger brother Ibrahim and I were infected with Hepatitis A, suffering so much that sometimes we felt as though we were dying. There was no medicine. All we could do was take strict safety and hygiene measures so that the rest of the family wouldn’t get infected.

When the ground invasion of Rafah began, we moved many times from one place to another, living in tents. It is hard to describe the feeling of being forced to live in this way. Only those who have experienced it can fully understand it.

Faced with a lack of clean and safe food and water, we had to stand for hours and walk long distances to get them. We endured extreme heat in summer, turning to bitter cold in winter. On top of that were the insects, rats and stray animals. Our education and healthcare, our simplest rights, simply evaporated.

During our displacement in Khan Younis, my grandmother fell ill. She struggled with the illness for weeks until it overcame her. She stayed in the hospital for a week, receiving treatment that was not sufficient due to the large number of cases, which caused dozens to die weekly, and then my grandmother was among them.

People carry an injured man after Israeli airstrikes in Beit Lahia, Gaza, in October 2023. Photograph: Amez Habboub/Anadolu/Getty Images

The pain of losing her was very hard. She was a second mother to me. She had lived with us since I was born and took care of us while my mother was busy with her studies.

After my grandmother’s death, we started trying to build a life in the south since hope of returning to the north had vanished. My father and uncles started planting some crops to make us feel like we were back home in Beit Lahia, and this indeed helped us move forward and gave us a little sense of security. Then came the ceasefire in January 2025. I still remember the joy of the residents returning to the north, where almost all of them returned on the first day without taking much with them. Others, out of excitement, burned their tents thinking that the suffering in the south had ended.

We returned to Beit Lahia. Sadness engulfed its corners, its destroyed houses and its dry fields, the silence hanging over its streets serving to tell its returning residents what had happened after they were forced to leave.

Leaflets are dropped by the Israeli military, urging evacuation in September 2025. Photograph: Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP/Getty Images

We began trying to rebuild, clearing the rubble and stones, putting up tents next to the destroyed houses and planting some new plants to break the grey colour and give everyone hope that life could bloom again. But that hope vanished. The war came back to burn everything once more.

Fear and anxiety returned as we once more moved from one place to another, amid explosion after explosion, death after death. I lost my dear uncle Bahjat, killed by a tank shell while he and my father were collecting some of our possessions from an old shelter. Two weeks later, we were displaced yet again and rented an apartment in Gaza City.

This was a bigger and worse siege than the one before, and we started suffering from hunger, which caused the death of hundreds – children and the elderly. We would share one loaf of bread between us all, and sometimes, when we couldn’t find any bread to eat, we went to sleep hungry, trying to stave it off by drinking water, which often came to us contaminated.

Amjed Tantesh, Malak’s father, hugs the tree he planted before the beginning of the war in Beit Lahiya after finding it had grown. Photograph: Enas Tantesh/The Guardian

Then, out of nowhere, came the plan to occupy Gaza City, and we were forced to evacuate to the south yet again.

This week, when the ceasefire deal was announced, the streets filled with whistling and cheering and everyone started jumping and dancing with joy, hoping that this time the war would end for ever. But they remain afraid it might fail at the last moment, preparing themselves for the worst, so they are not struck down with despair if it does collapse.

I look back on how my life was the day before 7 October: going to work to teach girls swimming, then celebrating my cousin’s wedding, where we had all gathered happily, wearing dresses and putting on lots of makeup. I remember my university, where I only stayed for one month. I remember my grandmother and my uncle Bahjat, whose death we sometimes envied. I am sure all the people of Gaza have such memories dancing in their minds: family meals, friends – many now dead – the normal and everyday. We all wonder if we will ever get the chance to live such lives again.