By Dr Marwan Asmar
The Israeli genocide starting on 27 October, 2023 through mass bombs and missiles dropped on the Gaza Strip is being discribed as hell-on-earth. After 700 days of slaughter in which the enclave was reduced to ruin, debris and mass killings, Gazans speak of the “hell” they are going through between multiple and countless displacements, starvation and waiting in limbo for what is going to happen next. Their lives have been turned upside down and live in limbo of fog.
All the above interviews were conducted by Al Jazeera satellite channel on the 700 days of horrors the Israeli army has subjected the Palestinian civilians of Gaza to.
“700 days and the killings are still going on with the war taking everything from us,” said one man. “The blood of martyrs is still hemorrhaging,” he continued.
“I now envy the people who have died in this slaughter,” said another. “In this past 700 days, journalists were killed, civil defense men gone, hospitals bombed, children murdered and many other things disappeared…”
After 700 days there is nothing left, there is no children left, no food, no drink, starvation everywhere, life has become extremely difficult. I have started to say to myself I wish I was long dead and have left this sorry place,” said another woman.
What about the handicapped
‘“I have three teenager sons who are handicapped and the process of displacement with them is very difficult…we were forced to move by the Israeli army more than 15 times – I walked them, I sometimes carried them would you believe, there is no transport and walked under bombs and missiles, sometimes they’d fall very near us, the danger of being killed is real,” the father of the three said.
“There is no food, no drink, there is no place to live, the sewerage is bad, we can’t do anything.”
He added on this 700 day of living like this, the Israeli army has just called on us to keep moving. “They want to displace us yet again from the north to the south, what is next we don’t know.
We don’t have food, we don’t have water, we don’t have tents, we don’t have anything. On the 700 day, the world is just sitting and looking at us while we move from one place to another.
Another 30-year-old who lost her husband and five children and just stares into the void: “Now they are gone I feel life is empty and meaningless. I force myself to work just to forget but its like living in a distant memory and suddenly wake up to this nightmare.
Another man with five small children moving around him said: “I have a handicapped son – a grown up, as you can see and I have to carry him across my shoulder blades whenever we are ordered to keep moving.
We are at the end of our tethers after 700 days of devastation, we see death in front of our eyes, there is no let up, the kids keep screaming at all hours of the day and night. We don’t know what is going to happen to us and now we are called upon to keep moving.”
The same is true of another lady. Her plight is the same as many others. “We are being displaced from one place to another. After 700 days we are not able to settle down to establish a tent we can live in, being displaced is like losing one’s soul and I don’t know when this will end or how.
We are living in devastation, death, slow death. Today I envy the people who have died and become martyrs.”
Another man in crutches said: “Our savings have now ended, we are on aid to say alive, my son used to go to Zakim to get some stuff but they shot at him and now sit by me unable to move.
Blood on the streets
“The past 700 days were the deadliest, killings, bombing, starvation, you see blood seething on the streets, laying bodies of martyrs, people with no legs or arms”.
It has been an extremely difficult 700 days for a woman with the responsibility of looking after three children. “How do I cope, how do I make ends meet. My husband went before my eyes, in front of his kids, I saw, my kids saw an incredible sight of their father spluttering on the wall and now that image never leaves me nor them.
In this 700 days you lost a brother, a relative, a friend as you were forced to move from one place to another in between charities, water queues, cutting wood and all the rest of it. I just can’t describe it,” said one young man.
Sullen future
“For me, my future has perished, gone up in flames, I could have been working by now, having just finished university, but I live in a 4 by 6 tent with nothing to look forward, searching for morsels of food and hewing water, carrying buckets of water not just today but everyday, said a young lady.
Nothing is for certain. The people of Gaza, as of yet, have nothing to look forward to but more slaughter. There is a nagging fleeing, frequently made by Israeli ministers, that the aim is to push these people dubbed at around two million to other countries.
But the Gazans, still after two years of slaughter and going to the third, say they are not leaving Gaza except as dead bodies.
Marwan Asmar is the Editor of crossfirearabia.com
6 September 2025
Source: countercurrents.org