“I don’t think God intended for people in their late 20s to live with their parents,” Hanya Aljamal says.
She’s hanging out on the balcony of the tiny apartment where she lives with her mother, father and five grown-up siblings – because it’s the only place she can get any peace and quiet.
Two years ago, 28-year-old Hanya was working as an English teacher and lived in a flat of her own. She was applying to colleges in the US to do a Master’s in international development, and on course for a scholarship to pay for it. Things were going well – but life is different now.
Like most days, Sunday begins with a morning coffee on the balcony, while Hanya watches her neighbour, a man in his 70s, carefully tending pots of herbs, seedlings and plants in his tidy garden, just across the road from a blown-up building.
“It just looks like the purest form of resistance,” Hanya says. “In the middle of all this horror and uncertainty, he still finds time to grow something – and there’s something absolutely beautiful about that.”
Hanya lives in Deir al-Balah, a town in the middle of Gaza, a 25-mile stretch of land on the south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea that’s been a war zone since October 2023. She has recorded an audio diary which she shared with the BBC for a radio documentary about what life is like there.
The school where she taught had to close down when the war started. Hanya has become a teacher with no students and no school, her sense of who she was slipping through her fingers.
“It’s very hard finding purpose in this time, finding some sort of solace or meaning as your entire world falls apart.”
The apartment Hanya shares with her family is her fifth home since the war started. The UN estimates 90% of Gazans have been displaced by the war – many multiple times. Most Gazans now live in temporary shelters.
On Monday, Hanya is jolted awake in bed at 2am.
“There was an explosion really close by that was then followed by a second, and a third,” she says, “it was so loud and very scary. I tried to soothe myself to sleep.”
The Israeli government says its military action in Gaza is intended to destroy the capabilities of Hamas, which describes itself as an Islamist resistance movement. It is designated a terrorist organisation by the UK, the US, Israel, and others.
Israel’s military action began after armed Palestinian groups from Gaza led by Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, killing around 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking 251 hostages.
So far, the Israeli military has killed more than 56,000 people in the conflict – the majority civilians – according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas. Israel doesn’t currently allow international journalists to report freely from Gaza.
Hanya is working for an aid organisation called Action for Humanity and spends the day at one of their projects. A group of girls wearing white T-shirts and with keffiyehs tied around their waists perform a dance and then take part in a group therapy session.
One talks about what it means to lose your home, others talk about losing their belongings, their friends, someone they love. And then one suddenly starts crying and everyone else falls silent. A teaching assistant takes the girl away to comfort her in private.
“And then someone tells me that she lost both parents,” Hanya says.
On Tuesday, Hanya is watching five colourful kites soaring in the sky from her balcony.
“I like kites – they’re like an active act of hope,” she says. “Every kite is a couple of kids down there trying to have a normal childhood in the midst of all this.”
Seeing kites flying makes a nice change to the drones, jets and “killing machines” Hanya is used to seeing above her apartment, she says. But later that evening, the “nightly orchestra” of nearby drones buzzing at discordant pitches begins. She describes the sound they make as “psychological torture”.
“Sometimes they’re so loud you can’t even listen to your own thoughts,” she says. “They’re kind of a reminder that they’re there watching, waiting, ready to pounce.”
On Thursday morning, Hanya hears loud, consistent gunfire and wonders what it might be. Maybe theft. Maybe a turf war between families. Maybe someone defending a warehouse.
She spends most of the day in bed. She feels dizzy every time she tries to get up and puts it down to the effect of fasting ahead of Eid al-Adha, when she’s already very malnourished.
Hanya says the lack of control over what she eats – and the rest of her life – is having a big psychological impact.
“You cannot control anything – not even your thoughts, not even your wellbeing, not even who you are,” she says. “It took me a while to accept the fact that I am no longer the person that I identify myself as.”
The school where Hanya used to teach has been destroyed, and the idea of studying abroad now seems very distant.
“I felt like I was gaslit,” Hanya says, “like all of these things were made up. Like none of it was true.”
The next morning, Hanya wakes to the sound of birds chirping and the call to prayer.
It’s the first day of Eid al-Adha, when her dad would usually sacrifice a sheep and they’d share the meat with the needy and their relatives. But her family don’t have the means to travel now and there’s no animal to sacrifice anyway.
“All of Gaza’s population has been not eating any sort of protein, outside canned fava beans, for three months now,” she says.
Hanya’s family discover that one of her cousins has been killed while trying to get aid.
“To be honest, I hadn’t known him very well,” she says, “but it’s the general tragedy of someone hungry, seeking food and getting shot in the process that is quite grotesque.”
There have been multiple shooting incidents and hundreds of deaths reported at or near aid distribution points in recent weeks. The circumstances are disputed and difficult to verify without being able to report freely in Gaza.
Hanya knows at least 10 people who have lost their lives during the war. This number includes several of her students and a colleague who had got engaged a month before the war started. She was the same age as Hanya and shared her ambition.
Hanya is updating her CV to remove her college professor’s name. He was her referee and writing mentor – but he is dead now too.
“It’s a huge thing when someone tells you that they see you, that they believe in you, and that they bet on you,” she says.
Hanya doesn’t think she’s grieved for any of these people properly, and says she feels she has to ration her emotions in case any of her close family are hurt.
“Grieving is a luxury many of us can’t afford.”
Crowing cocks mark the start of another new day, and Hanya is taking in a beautiful pink and blue dawn from the balcony. She says she has developed a habit of looking up to the sky as an escape.
“It’s very hard to find beauty in Gaza anymore. Everything is grey, or soot-covered, or destroyed,” Hanya says.
“The one thing about the sky is that it gives you colours and a respite of beauty that Earth lacks.”
