S. Jean

A Voice from Gaza: Coping with the Siege

by S. Jean
- Gaza City -


Boom! I can feel a rumble under my feet and hear the windows clatter lightly in our two-bedroom apartment. My husband and I live on the third floor of an apartment building in Rimal, regarded as a safe neighborhood in Gaza City. The Gaza Strip is tiny, only 140 square miles, and we can easily hear explosions, even those a couple towns away.


This building is part of a government complex that the Israeli Air Force bombed using an F-16. Ten children from nearby homes were wounded in this attack, launched in the middle of the night in the Tel Al Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City.
My husband, born and raised in Gaza, doesn't even flinch at the sound of the explosion. We don't look at each other or say anything. Even in just the six months I've lived in Gaza, I too have become accustomed to the sounds of bombs, heavy gunfire, missiles, Qassam rockets, F-16s, Apache helicopters. One of our friends once described a radio program he heard, where they were interviewing a pilot in the Israeli Air Force. He described how Palestinians react to shelling: "A bomb was dropped [in a residential area] and when I circled back around, I saw a group of Palestinian men playing cards on the roof of a house. The bomb had fallen on their street so they got up to look at the damage. After they saw it [the damage], they went back to playing their card game."

You name it… it's all a normal part of our lives here in Gaza. And little stops us, and everyone else, from going about our day-to-day activities. After all, it's only 7:30 in the morning and we are getting ready to go to work. We don't even check the TV for news about the blast.

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