I feel like the life I had before the war was compiled

“I don’t think God intended people to live with their parents at the end of their 20s,” says Hanya Alyamal.

She hangs on the balcony of the tiny apartment, where she lives with her mother, her father and the five grown brothers and sisters – because this is the only place where she can get calm and silence.

Two years ago, 28-year-old Cana worked as an English teacher and lived in an apartment. She applied to colleges in the United States to make a master’s degree in international development and a scholarship course to pay for it. Things went well – but life is different now.

Like most days, Sunday begins with a morning coffee on the balcony, while Hanya watches her neighbor, a man of her 70s, carefully restraining vessels of herbs, seedlings and plants in his arranged garden, right beyond the road from an explosive building.

“It just looks like the purest form of resistance,” says Chania. “In the middle of all this horror and uncertainty, he still finds time to grow something – and there is something absolutely beautiful about it.”

Cana lives in Deir al-Balah, a city in the middle of Gaza, a 25 miles of land in the southeastern corner of the Mediterranean, which is the area of ​​the war of October 2023. It has recorded an audio diary she shared with the BBC about a radio documentary What is life there.

The school he was taught had to close when the war began. Cana became a teacher without students and without school, her feeling of what she slipped through her fingers.

“It is very difficult to find a goal at this time, finding some kind of comfort or meaning when your whole world breaks down.”

The apartment that Hanya shares with her family is her fifth home since the beginning of the war. The UN estimates that 90% of the gas are displaced by the war – very many times. Most Gazani now live in temporary shelters.

On Monday, Chania was shaken awake in bed at 2am.

“There was an explosion that was really followed by a second and a third,” she says, “it was so strong and very scary. I tried to calm down to sleep.”

The Israeli government says that its military actions in Gaza are intended to destroy Hamas’s capabilities, which is described as an Islamist resistance movement. It is appointed a terrorist organization from the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel and others.

Israel’s military actions began after the Hamas armed Palestinian groups attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people, most of them civilians and took 251 hostages.

So far, the Israeli military has killed over 56,000 people in the conflict – the majority of civilians – according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, led by Hamas. Currently, Israel does not allow international journalists to report freely from Gaza.

Cana works for a help organization called Action for Humanity and spends the day in one of their projects. A group of girls wearing white T -shirts and with a yogurt tied around their waist perform dance and then participate in a group session for therapy.

One talks about what it means to lose your home, others talk about losing your belongings, your friends, someone they love. And then one suddenly starts crying and everyone else is silent. Teaching assistant takes the girl to comfort her alone.

“And then someone tells me that she has lost both parents,” Hanya says.

On Tuesday, Chania watches five colored kite that rises in the sky from her balcony.

“I like kite – they are like an active act of hope,” she says. “Everyone has a few children down there, trying to have a normal childhood among all this.”

Seeing the flying of the kite made a pleasant change in the drones, the jets and the “killer machines”, Chania is accustomed to seeing over her apartment, she says. But later that evening, the “night orchestra” of nearby drones begins, buzzing in divergent terrains. It describes the sound they make as “psychological torture”.

“Sometimes they are so strong that you can’t even listen to your own thoughts,” she says. “They are kind of a reminder of watching, waiting, ready to throw themselves.”

On Thursday morning, Hanya hears a strong, permanent shooter and wonders what it can be. Maybe theft. Maybe a war of grass between families. Maybe someone who protects a warehouse.

She spends the bigger part of the day in bed. She feels dizzy every time she tries to get up and puts him to the effect of starving before Aid al -ADha when she is already very malnourished.

Cana says that the lack of control over what she eats – and for the rest of her life – has a great psychological impact.

“You can’t control anything – even your thoughts, even your well -being, even what you are,” she says. “It took me some time to accept the fact that I was no longer the person I identified as.”

The school in which Chania taught was destroyed and the idea of ​​learning abroad now looks very distant.

“I felt like I was Gasla,” says Hanya, “like all these things were made up. As none of this is true.”

The next morning, Cana wakes up the sound of birds that fuck and the call to prayer.

This is the first day of Aid al -adha, when her father usually sacrifices a sheep and they will share the meat with the needy and their relatives. But her family has no means of traveling now and anyway has no animal to sacrifice.

“The whole population of gas has not eaten any kind of protein, outside the canned fava beans for three months,” she says.

Cana’s family discovers that one of her cousins ​​has been killed while trying to get help.

“To be honest, I did not know him very well,” she says, “but this is the common tragedy of someone, hungry, looking for food and shoots in a process that is quite grotesque.”

In recent weeks, there have been numerous firing incidents and hundreds of deaths in or near the distribution points. The circumstances are contested and difficult to check without being able to freely report in gas.

Cana knows at least 10 people who lost their lives during the war. This number includes several of her students and colleagues who got married a month before the war began. She was the same age as Cana and shared her ambition.

Cana updated her CV to remove her college name. He was her referee and writing mentor – but now he is dead.

“It is a huge thing when someone tells you that they see you believe in you and that they bet on you,” she says.

Chania does not think she is saddened for some of these people correctly and says she thinks she should be to radiate her emotions if one of her nearby family is hurt.

“Grievers are a luxury that many of us cannot afford.”

Pubile roosters marks the beginning of another new day, and Cana takes a beautiful pink and blue dawn from the balcony. She says she has developed a habit of looking at the sky as an escape.

“It’s very difficult to find the beauty in gas already. Everything is gray or soot -covered or destructive,” says Hanya.

“The only thing about heaven is that it gives you colors and relaxation of beauty that the earth is missing.”