Israel unleashed its heaviest-ever bombardment of Gaza and a siege last October after Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 as hostages, according to Israeli estimates.
Since then, Israel’s retaliatory bombardment of Gaza has killed almost 42,000 people, the majority women and children, according to the Palestinian health ministry. A further 10,000 are thought to be under the rubble and an unknown number have been taken into Israeli detention. Swathes of Gaza has been razed to the ground.
The Independent spoke to those inside Gaza about what they have been through over the last year.
Ziad Abdul-Dayem, 55, is a paramedic and ambulance driver. In November he spent 12 hours digging through rubble, trying to rescue nearly a dozen members of his family killed in an Israeli airstrike. He risks his life working day and night to pull survivors from collapsed buildings.
Just a few minutes after Ziad, an ambulance driver, had dropped his son off at the house where they were sheltering, he received an emergency radio call: the area had been bombed.
His son, also a medic, had finished a punishing shift at a hospital in Gaza City, treating the massive influx of wounded from Israel’s offensive. Ziad, whose family had been displaced from northern Gaza, had taken him to get some rest at a flat in Jabalia refugee camp. The extended family was temporarily sheltering there. Since Ziad was the closest ambulance to the bomb site, it was his job to try to rescue survivors.
“The house was bombed along with four others. I was digging for my relatives for 12 hours straight. They were all under the rubble,” he tells The Independent in despair.
“I lost 11 people from my family, including my son, my daughter’s husband, and their children.
“The pain and shock were indescribable.”
He tried to bury them in the local cemetery, but the intensity of the bombing made that too dangerous. So, he had to bury his family in a mass grave dug with an excavator next to the nearby Indonesian hospital. After that, he says, there was no reason for him to stay in northern Gaza, so he fled south and continued working there.
He says the biggest struggle paramedics and ambulance drivers face is being shot at and bombed while trying to get to a scene, along with the lack of fuel preventing them from even reaching the injured. There are days when they have to use donkey carts and tuk-tuks to transport the wounded.
“Worse than that, there are injuries that are difficult to extract from under the rubble. We do not have the equipment or capabilities to reach those still alive beneath the debris,” he continues.
“This is a great tragedy and an obstacle we face often. The injured are alive but die under the rubble because we can’t get them out. We sit and cry. We want to help, but sometimes we cannot.” Ziad has personally lost 10 colleagues, all ambulance drivers, since Israel began its offensive. Israel denies targeting healthcare facilities but the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates since October 2023, there have been hundreds of attacks on healthcare in Gaza, resulting in 765 deaths.
One of Ziad’s colleagues was fatally wounded while sitting in the same vehicle next to him. “He was hit by shrapnel that sliced off his hand directly,” Ziad says. Now, he feels he has nothing left to live for but his work. “I have no home, no shelter, and little family left. This has pushed me to work all week long, always with the ambulance, working 24 hours a day.
