A Gaza resident says although she loves life, a quick death would come as a relief from future suffering as the area continues to be pummeled by Israeli fighter jets.
On Wednesday morning local time, a residential building was flattened, killing at least four Palestinians.
The latest raid comes more than a week after fighting between the two sides began. At least 219 Palestinians, including over 100 women and children, have died.
Twelve Israelis have died, including two children.
“Whenever someone asks me if I’m OK or if I’m fine, I can’t find the words to tell them that I’m fine because they know that I will be lying to them,” Oxfam’s women empowerment coordinator Asmaa Abu Mezied, a resident living in the middle of the Gaza Strip, told Breakfast.
“I always say I’m physically OK or physically fine, but I’m not OK.”
Abu Mezied said while news reports out of Israel say there will be a ceasefire tomorrow, it will launch its attack on Gaza today, before the ceasefire.
“We have, over the past seven days, we have grown to fear nights so much that we don’t want to sleep at night anymore. We hate it when the sun sets,” she said.
“I don’t know even how I’m going to tell my nephew to sleep well.”
Abu Mezied said she and her family struggled to shield her twin 11-year-old nephews from the bombardment.
“At the beginning of the aggression, whenever we hear a missile falling or an artillery shelling, they would be so scared that they would run to their mother... We try to tell them that it’s fireworks and we clap our hands and we laugh though we are completely scared.
“It looks very fake, our laugh to them, that they stopped to believe us after two days of the heavy bombardment that Gaza has been experiencing.
“We told them that as long as you hear the warplane hovering on top of our house, it means that the missile will not hit our house - it will hit someone else, someone far from us.”
She said while it “worked for another day, whenever they hear a bombardment … they go and pray”.
“They tell their mother, ‘Let’s pray’ and every five minutes, they would come again like, ‘Let’s pray’ so I think now, they pray more than they have even thought they would pray in their whole life.”
Abu Mezied expressed feeling an “emotional guilt” for living in an area less hard-hit than other parts of Gaza.
“That fills my heart with so much guilt... My experience of this aggression is about a missile falling near my village, my house shaking. Yes, I have a roof on the top of my head; yes, I can have food that I eat every single day which is not the experience of Palestinians in Gaza."
She said she tries to stop herself from sleeping in an attempt to ease her guilt.
“I feel like by sleeping, by not following the local news, by not knowing about every house that’s being hit, every soul that’s being lost, I’m failing them. I’m not knowing their stories, I’m not knowing who are they, the ones who are killed. Who are the new massacres that is committed against them?”
Abu Mezied said before her call to Breakfast, an entire family, including a disabled man, his pregnant wife and their baby girl, “was massacred”.
“I think how unfair the world is and how completely helpless I feel and that there’s nothing I can do - not even take that hit instead of them, not even take that pain."
She also expressed feeling overwhelmed that “sometimes, even though I love life, even though I have a garden that I care for and love to see how it blooms, the past two days made me be very OK with death”.
“I look at death as something of a relief, that I don’t want to live again to experience another aggression in a few years, to see how my nephews have become so accustomed to the conflict that they can differentiate between the type of missiles that are falling on the top of our heads and how their future will be very bleak.
“When I think about the future, I really think that maybe this quick death is much of a relief than the slow death that we will suffer from in the future.”
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