{"id":8337,"date":"2025-10-03T07:59:26","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T07:59:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/race-against-death-gaza-mother-recalls-11-displacements-loss-of-husband-and-father-in-war\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T07:59:26","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T07:59:26","slug":"race-against-death-gaza-mother-recalls-11-displacements-loss-of-husband-and-father-in-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/race-against-death-gaza-mother-recalls-11-displacements-loss-of-husband-and-father-in-war\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Race against death\u2019: Gaza mother recalls 11 displacements, loss of husband and father in war"},"content":{"rendered":"
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NUSEIRAT, Oct 3 — Two years of war, multiple displacements, and the deaths of her husband and father have reduced Lamis Dib’s life in Gaza to a relentless fight for survival.<\/p>\n

“It’s indescribable,” the 31-year-old mother of two said of the war that continues to devastate the Palestinian territory.<\/p>\n

“Friday, October 6, 2023, the last day before the war, was a beautiful day,” she recalled.<\/p>\n

Her oldest daughter, Suwar, five at the time, had just started kindergarten, and Dib would watch her come home every afternoon from the window of their apartment in Sheikh Radwan, a middle-class neighbourhood in the north of Gaza City.<\/p>\n

Her son Amin, then three, “was taking up all of my time”, said Dib, who would often bring him to the nearby seaside.<\/p>\n

Dib had studied to become a social worker, but could not find a job in Gaza’s impoverished pre-war economy, partly stunted by a strict Israeli blockade since 2007.<\/p>\n

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But she had built “a happy family” with her husband, an accountant who ensured that she “never lacked anything”.<\/p>\n

Their neighbourhood was one of the first to be hit by Israeli strikes following Hamas’s unprecedented October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.<\/p>\n

The attack resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people on the Israeli side, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.<\/p>\n

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has since killed at least 66,225 Palestinians in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run health ministry, which the United Nations considers reliable.<\/p>\n

The destruction in Gaza is vast, with entire neighbourhoods flattened and millions of tonnes of rubble now covering areas where families once lived.<\/p>\n

Buildings, hospitals, schools, water and sanitation systems have borne the brunt of Israeli attacks, and the humanitarian consequences for the territory’s more than two million people have been severe.<\/p>\n

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Hundreds of thousands of homeless Gazans have crowded into shelters, makeshift camps and open areas, lacking even basic protections.<\/p>\n

‘Race against death’<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Dib’s area was struck, she and her family fled to a nearby district—the first of a series of displacements—before leaving northern Gaza for the city of Khan Yunis in the south.<\/p>\n

“One of the most difficult days of our lives,” Dib said, describing their long expedition along torn-up roads and through military checkpoints.<\/p>\n

She and her children have been displaced 11 times as fighting between Israel and Hamas rages.<\/p>\n

“Each move was a race against death, under air strikes. It was as if I was on autopilot, I carried my kids, held them against me, and ran without looking back, without knowing where we were going,” she said.<\/p>\n

When the family relocated to the southern city of Rafah for a time, shortages and overcrowding were the norm.<\/p>\n

“For six months, in Rafah, 30 of us would sleep in a single room with no toilets. It was hard to express what we felt: confinement, nonstop air strikes, hunger, thirst, lack of hygiene and a total absence of privacy,” she said.<\/p>\n

In August 2024, the family was living in the central Gaza refugee camp of Nuseirat when Dib’s life changed again.<\/p>\n

“On a Friday at 6:00 pm, my husband and my father were on the rooftop with five young people from the family, when we heard the sound of a missile and saw smoke,” she said.<\/p>\n

“I ran towards the rooftop, and the scene was unimaginable; they were all dead.<\/p>\n

“My husband’s body seemed intact, I thought he was alive. I tried to wake him up, but he had been struck in the head. And then I found my father’s body… his hand had been blown off.”<\/p>\n

‘A little bit of peace’ <\/strong><\/p>\n

From that day on, Dib had to care for her children alone, just when life in Gaza was at its hardest.<\/p>\n

She moved into a tent in Al-Zawayda, a camp where thousands of Palestinians share the same harsh daily life, living under tarps that flap in the wind, bake under the summer heat and leak during the winter rains.<\/p>\n

“Everything is difficult,” she said from inside her shelter.<\/p>\n

While her friends can appeal to their fathers or husbands for help, Dib must weather the unending financial difficulties by herself.<\/p>\n

In May 2025, Israel eased a total blockade on supplies that it imposed in March, but the humanitarian aid trickling in since then has not been enough, the UN says—a charge Israel contests.<\/p>\n

“Our children were robbed of education, food, and a normal life,” she said as Suwar and Amin studied on her knees.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, they look at photos of their father and relatives killed during the war on Dib’s phone.<\/p>\n

“We’ll return to our home,” she said. “We will rebuild it, but we just want a little bit of peace.”<\/p>\n

Like their mother, Suwar and Amin are mostly preoccupied with survival, tasked with filling up the family’s jerrycans at a temporary water station near the tent.<\/p>\n

For them, the war’s consequences may outlast the air strikes.<\/p>\n

The UN’s agency for children, UNICEF, estimated in 2024 that every child in Gaza was in need of psychological support. — AFP<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

‘Race against death’: Gaza mother recalls 11 displacements, loss of husband and father in war<\/sub><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NUSEIRAT, Oct 3 — Two years of war, multiple displacements, and the deaths of her husband and father have reduced Lamis Dib’s life in Gaza to a relentless fight for survival. “It’s indescribable,” the 31-year-old mother of two said of the war that continues to devastate the Palestinian territory. “Friday, October 6, 2023, the last…<\/p>\n

Read More “\u2018Race against death\u2019: Gaza mother recalls 11 displacements, loss of husband and father in war”<\/span> »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8338,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8337\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}