I Was a Child in Gaza and Witnessed the Brutal Realities of Life

I grew up in Gaza, where my parents worked for the Baptist nursing school from 1989-1995.

The past months have been agonizing as I watch my childhood home destroyed. With the war unfolding in the news every day, many are calling for an end to violence, and to liberate Gazans from Hamas.

I share these calls, and deeply wish our current involvement there had a chance of doing either. If we intend to work for peace and dignity in Gaza and beyond, here are some things I feel we must understand about life in Gaza.

First, a primer. Hamas originated in 1987 as the resistance branch of a religious charity that provided humanitarian services to Gazans living under Israeli military occupation.

Hamas' charter, written in 1988 and revised in 2017, calls for the establishment of an Islamic state in all of Palestine, and claims the Israeli state is illegitimate. Hamas' violence in its early years primarily targeted Palestinians–Israeli sympathizers and those thought to oppose Hamas' moral code.

In 1994, Palestinians were massacred by an American-Israeli settler. After that, Hamas began targeting Israeli civilians, often via suicide bombing. Rocket launches into Israel followed in the 2000s. Hamas' militarization and political evolution are extensively documented.

Its popularity in Gaza fluctuates—a July 2023 poll conducted by the Washington Institute showed 70 percent of Gazans support transferring administrative power to the PA and the dismantling of Hamas' armed units.

When I was five, and we were preparing to move to Gaza, my sisters and I practiced rolling our R's and singing Arabic songs that my parents learned in their language classes. We spent a few months in Maryland while my parents went to language school.

My parents told us about our new home, that it was a place we read about in some of our Bible stories, that it was known for its citrus, goldsmiths, and poetry; that it was experiencing a war.

Falling asleep, my mind filled with images of dark streets, shadowy strangers, and sudden threats.

When we arrived in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City in September 1989, I did not recognize my premonitions anywhere. Blue skies, birdsong, and fresh air made me wonder if my parents had made a mistake.

Fixating on anticipated perils, I had forgotten about the citrus, gold, and poetry. For the next six years, both the joys and the terrors would become vividly real.

Israeli army (IDF) jeeps blared orders from loudspeakers: Announcing a "strike" meant that no vehicular movement was permitted until further notice, pedestrian activity was allowed. "Curfew" meant no one may leave their home for any reason until further notice. Sometimes this lasted a day.

The longest curfew I remember lasted two weeks. The emotionally longest curfew was the summer we were caught with little in the kitchen except for a huge crate of eggplant. That week was the culinary lowpoint of my life.

IDF presence in Gaza in those years involved door-to-door patrols, helicopter surveillance, fluctuating access to infrastructure, and an evolving rotation of checkpoints.

My parents learned to stock white paint for the routine army-supervised task of painting over any words spray-painted on our front wall. The electrical grid was turned on and off at will by the army.

One year, among more spontaneous blackouts, power was always turned off on Tuesday evenings, but that kind of predictability was the exception. Water was also unreliable.

When we moved to Gaza, we drank tap water just like everyone else, and whatever early turmoil this may have caused our GI tracts, I now credit my iron gut to this microbial education. I scarcely ever get traveler's diarrhea. We had a menagerie of parasites when we got our checkups, but this put us in good company.

A few years into our time in Gaza, the tap water became unsafe to drink; people were getting sick. Hazarding trips to a clean tap across town, for "maya helwa"—sweet water—became another task of survival.

Nevertheless, we got dysentery. The cachet of a disease we knew from Oregon Trail was dimmed by the shocking taste of Flagyl, the aches of high fevers, and the incontinence.

My dad, who managed payroll at the nursing school, traveled to Israel monthly to retrieve cash for employee salaries, and to get any mail for our team from the Ashkelon post office. Sometimes we made these trips as a family.

The crossing—both out of and back into Gaza—was scary and unpredictable. The border might be closed, or the wait long, and the good-cop-bad-cop routine was tense at best.

Jittery though we were, we girls learned to smile charmingly through the car window. It often seemed to help.

To this day I reflexively beam at security guards, police, and soldiers if they are close enough that I can't avoid eye contact. To us kids, the stress was worth it. Ashkelon meant going to a real grocery store, strolling a beautifully paved shopping district and, during Purim, taking in all the festive costumes and holiday treats for sale.

Public jubilation was dangerous in Gaza, due both to IDF patrols and to a Hamas stance that in this time of mourning, celebration was inappropriate. Weddings, holidays, and graduations were held indoors, everyone's mind split between revelry, and hyper attention to any sign of unrest outside.

I was about 8 years old when a sudden chill came over a wedding we were attending in a second-floor apartment. Wedding music mixed with shouts.

I watched over the balcony edge as armed men in black poured out of vehicles and into the first floor. We got home safe, but the groom was not so lucky.

In another instance of Hamas' cultural control, a neighbor was pulled into the street and beaten until all his limbs were broken. His offense was selling contraband pornography videos.

The residue of this brutal reality was enmeshed in our daily lives. It foiled our childhood plots to run away from unappetizing suppers as we admitted, "the army men would get us", and that we should take our chances with our mother's cooking after all.

It made us flatten our bodies and walk sideways along the wall leading to our colleague's door as their vicious dog lunged and barked ferociously. I was older before I learned the reason for his dog.

As a surgeon, he had been warned not to provide medical care to certain individuals connected to Hamas and other resistance groups. Of course, he provided the care regardless. Following one such event, the dog was poisoned.

What often surprises people is the relative relational security we had in Gaza. The Baptist nursing school enjoyed a good reputation. But even strangers, who didn't know our Baptist affiliation, regularly invited us in for tea or a meal.

We spent countless hours in Gazan homes, the grownups visiting, while we kids ran rampant with games, practical jokes, trips to the roof to see the pigeon coops. My sisters and I walked alone to the corner store and traipsed in and out of friends' houses from a very young age.

When I was ten, my pre-teen sister and I walked an hour across Gaza every Saturday to study at the tiny French cultural center. Not once were we bothered.

As Americans, we don't believe that people can live indefinitely without rights–without representation, freedom of movement, or reliable means to secure their infrastructure and economy.

I don't believe, either, that the security of Israel can be achieved only—or at all—by the removal and disenfranchisement of Palestinian people.

After all, we have seen repeatedly, across the globe, that the chronic withholding of rights, due process, and infrastructure sets the perfect stage for grassroots humanitarian groups to evolve into culturally repressive terrorist organizations.

In fact, I don't think many Americans believe this either. But I also think Americans don't understand just how impossible the reality of being Gazan truly is.

Liberating Gazans from the control of Hamas or any other extremist group cannot be achieved without creating real access to fundamental freedoms.

It has never been too late to begin, and it has never been more urgent than now.

Rebecca Peterson Zeccola is a physical therapist and lives in Denver, CO with her husband and two sons.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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