It’s really, really easy to get killed in Gaza – anywhere, at any time.
- 6 mins read time
- Published: 20th July 2026
Hear directly on what life is like in Gaza City
It is one thing to hear about a genocide through news headlines and statistics. It is quite another to hear a person’s own testimony of their experience living there.
Fidaa Al-Araj, Oxfam’s Gender Advisor in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, spoke of her experience from Gaza City.
The beginning was actually the end of life as we knew it. It was very life disturbing in every sense of the word.
On October 7th 2023, everything changed. We woke up to a very different reality; a full-scale war like nothing precedented before has broken out and we were the target. We, the civilian people of Gaza. We, the unarmed people of Gaza. We’re not a state, we don’t have an army.”
Fidaa described the experience of being displaced and being given only an hour or less to leave everything she owned.
The act of leaving our homes in thousands - this scene is something that I will never ever be able to get over. I remember the day when I left my house, I literally wasn’t able to grab anything because the bombing was too heavy. The house was shaking. There was no way you could take anything with you. If you are lucky enough to grab your kids and go, that’s that.
Fidaa and her family spent the first few months in Rafah.
Rafah is the most southerly part of Gaza, on the border with Egypt. Now, it’s no longer there, so you can imagine I’m speaking about a place that doesn’t exist anymore. Now it’s a military base.
They stayed with friends, as they thought it would be temporary. When it became clear that it wasn’t temporary, they began to seek other options.
I can’t forget that I lived in a part of a house that has no plumbing. No toilet, no toilet seat, no running water, no water faucets, no sink, no doors.
I remember having this list written down on a notebook of things that I missed.
The items she placed on this list are mostly everyday things people take for granted. Things like doors with a frame, handle and key, running water and beds.
Since day one of this, all borders into Gaza were tightly closed. We’ve lived under blockade for 17 years prior to that. But this was like no other blockade, that was really tightly locked. Nothing could enter, so we had to live off what was in Gaza.
Fidaa describes what it actually means to be injured in Gaza. She also speaks of the many women who were pregnant in Gaza, people who lost their pregnancies and infants who died.
You get hit and you’re lucky if anyone could find your body. But the unlucky people who are the injured in the vicinity of this strike for example. You get injured, you lose parts of your body, you’re gravely injured, there is shrapnel (pieces of a bomb, shell, or bullet that has exploded) and bullets in your body with no way to remove them and you live with that. So, this is a kind of torture that’s really not highlighted enough or talked about enough, but it’s a real torture. I know many people personally who faced that and there was no medicine, no medical supplies allowed to enter, so it’s really bleak.
“Surgeries performed without any anesthesia whatsoever. It seems like fiction when you talk about it, even to me, but it really happened.”
She speaks about the break of the first ceasefire and the wave of starvation that hit.
Let me tell you, it was like nothing we’ve ever experienced before as Palestinians, as people in Gaza, I still find it really, really difficult to imagine or to think, we’ve gone through a starvation. We were hungry, literally. We couldn’t find a piece of bread. Nothing, nothing. I don’t think we’re ready to describe this, but it was really difficult. People died from that. And believe me when the IPC and the UN officially announced starvation in Gaza, it was overdue, it was happening for months and months before. But of course, officially you need numbers of people who have died out of hunger. Can you imagine a person dying of hunger?”
Fidaa describes what it’s like in Gaza at the moment.
“Let me tell you how it looks like this ceasefire. So, every day, of course, there’s the drones and the fighting jets. They don’t leave the sky of Gaza. 24/7 they are on duty. They are very much heard and seen you know, you feel it over your head, literally. I have to use noise suppressor app, just so that you can’t hear it that it doesn’t infiltrate to my meetings and calls.
But there’s no app to keep it from infiltrating your mind or your sleep.
She describes how the government of Israel decides when eggs, or different kinds of vegetables and fruit are allowed into Gaza.
We are the land of citrus. We’re known to grow citrus and to grow oranges, lemons. It’s only by a military decision that you can find an orange or a lemon in any vegetable stand in Gaza. You know to follow the news to know if you can have orange juice today.
She outlines the stress she feels at the thought of anyone in her family getting sick.
So many medicines are missing, so it’s very, very unlucky. Unlucky is a light word – if you get sick, or any of your kids, any of your family gets sick. For me, this is a personal phobia. I pray all the time: please don’t make any of the family sick, please don’t make us need any medical care, because there isn’t any to seek.”
“Do I fear for my life? Every moment of every day and for my family.
She describes how her children haven’t gone to school for two years. She found a makeshift tent and teacher, then she stopped them going to school, as it was too dangerous.
In her role as Gender Advisor, Fidaa notes how this work doesn’t take priority in the best of circumstances, but especially during a genocide.
She speaks of the monthly hardship women and girls face experiencing their period. Many use potato sacks or grain sacks, made of coarse fabric, as no period products were available.
She reminds us that people living in a genocide are more than a number, they are people.
Being a subject or a target of a genocide, it doesn’t stop you from being a human being.
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