I’m grateful I survived the attack on my home. But surviving isn’t the same as living, and the faces of those who didn’t make it haunt every corner of my mind.
At around 7:30 a.m. on the morning of Dec. 7, 2023, my son’s tiny footsteps echoed down the hallway as I reached for my cup of tea. After a week away from home reporting on Israel’s onslaught on the Gaza Strip, which was then entering its second month, I had returned the previous night to be with my family. I was trying to create a sense of calm within our walls, away from the chaos and terror outside. It lasted only seconds.
What happened next was like nothing I had ever heard: a tearing, howling explosion that destroyed everything around me in an instant. I didn’t see the ceiling crack or the walls crumble; I only felt the sudden, crushing weight as the world collapsed on top of me. It wasn’t like falling, but rather being smothered into the earth. My body folded awkwardly beneath the debris — arms pinned, legs trapped, ribs crushed against sharp concrete.
I tried to scream, but the noise came out as a choking rasp, swallowed up by the darkness. My chest burned from the effort, but I screamed again anyway, calling out for my wife, Asmaa, my 3-year-old son, Rafik, and my parents. Their names ricocheted inside my skull as the layers of cement pressed down harder.
Then came the smell: scorched concrete, metallic blood, something acrid I couldn’t place. I shifted my hand, scraping it against broken glass, and tried to feel for anything alive in the void around me. My fingertips found rubble, sharp and cold. Beneath it, nothing.
“Rafik!” I called again — and this time, I thought I heard him. Faint, so faint, a small voice piercing the silence: “Baba.” Relief and terror collided in my chest. He was alive, but somewhere out of reach, buried as deeply as I was. I tried to move, but the pain, raw and unrelenting, ripped through me. My legs were useless. My arms wouldn’t obey me.
Time blurred into a haze of pain and exhaustion. Minutes stretched into hours, or maybe it was the other way around. The air thinned, and the dust settled into my lungs like cement. My head throbbed with each shallow breath. I wanted to cry, to scream, to claw my way to my son, but my body was locked in torturous stillness.
Somewhere above, I could hear faint noises — crumbling rocks, muffled voices. It felt impossibly far away for me to be able to imagine coming out in one piece. Each sound brought hope and despair in equal measure. What if they reached us too late? What if they didn’t reach us at all? My mind raced with terrible images: my son’s small body crushed under the weight of the rubble; my wife trapped alone; all of us forgotten beneath the ruins of our home.
I passed out.
When rescuers finally broke through some two hours later, the light was blinding, stabbing into the blackness in which I had been entombed for hours. Hands reached for me, rough but certain, and I felt the rubble peel away from my body like layers of skin. The pain was excruciating.
After I was pulled free, the first thing I saw was my son’s face. His wide, tear-streaked eyes locked on mine, filled with a terror I had never seen before. His small body was wrapped in dust, his hair matted with sweat and grime. He wasn’t crying anymore — he was too scared and in so much pain that he was unable even to do that.
I wanted to pull him into my arms, to hold him so tightly that neither of us would ever feel afraid again. But I couldn’t. My arms, my legs, my entire body had already given up.
They carried him to me and placed him on my arm, and I could feel his tiny heart racing like that of a trapped bird. I whispered his name over and over, trying to reassure him. “Baba’s here,” I said, though my voice was broken. But the truth was, I wasn’t there. Not entirely. Part of me was still under the rubble, still suffocating in that endless pit of black.
I looked around for Asmaa. Rescuers were carrying her out of the rubble as she clutched her stomach, her face streaked with blood. She was alive, but her eyes stared back at me unblinkingly. I knew she was searching for the same thing I was: a remnant of the safety we once felt in the home that had held our laughter, our arguments, and our plans for the future, yet was now nothing but shattered concrete and bent steel.
My parents, too, had survived, but with painful shrapnel wounds: metal and glass had penetrated deep into my mom’s back and my father’s legs.
The medics tried to carry me away on a stretcher, but I refused to go until I knew they had found everyone. They promised me they would, but their faces told a different story. For hours, I sat on the ground, unable to move, watching as they dug through the rubble, pulling out several lifeless bodies — including two members of my own extended family and two other young men from families who were sheltering with us. Each corpse, each bloodied toy, and each ruined piece of furniture that they found felt like another piece of me being stripped away.
Eventually, they took us to the hospital. I remember the dulled lights, the cold metal of the stretcher, the hurried whispers of the doctors. They poked and prodded at me. Their faces were grim as they cataloged the fractures to my elbow, seven fingers, and both ankles, as well as to my wife’s arm; my internal bleeding; and the scratches and bruises on all of us that would take months to fade. But the real damage wasn’t something they could see or treat.
In the days that followed, I struggled to speak, eat, or sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I was back under the rubble, choking on dust, hearing my son’s faint cries and wondering if this time I wouldn’t wake up. I stopped speaking altogether — not because I didn’t have words, but because none of them felt big enough to hold what I was feeling. How do you describe the way it feels to watch everything you love reduced to nothing?
These days, as I mark the one-year anniversary of that attack from exile in Cairo, I still hear the explosion in my dreams. I still wake up in a cold sweat, reaching out to make sure my son is breathing beside me. The physical scars have mostly healed, but the emotional ones remain as fresh as the day it happened. People tell me I should be grateful we survived, and I am. But surviving isn’t the same as living.
True, my surroundings are not scarred by war. The air is cleaner, the streets quieter. People here don’t flinch at loud noises; they don’t have to explain to their children why the sky rains fire or why their home turned into a graveyard. Yet survival here feels like its own torment: I check the news every morning, afraid to see familiar faces or read familiar names.
That morning, we were lucky — if you can call it that. But many others were not. Members of my extended family and other displaced Gazans who had come to find refuge with us, neighbors who had lived on our street for decades, and passers-by who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time were crushed in the blast. The bodies of people with whom we had shared meals, stories, and laughter were pulled from the rubble hours later, broken and lifeless. Their names, faces, and voices are with me every day, haunting every corner of my mind.
This week isn’t an anniversary. It’s a wound. And it bleeds a little more each time I remember that morning. The world expects us to move on, to rebuild, to be resilient. But they don’t understand that some things can’t be rebuilt. Some losses are too great, some pain too deep.
I survived, yes — but part of me is still buried under that rubble. And I don’t know if I’ll ever find it again.
To read more detailed coverage check out the source of this news.