“I could hardly catch my breath due to the severity of my fatigue,” said Hazem Saeed Al-Naizi, a father of six and the director of an orphanage in Gaza City caring for dozens of children and young people, most of whom are disabled.
Like hundreds of thousands of Gazans Al-Naizi, 35, fled south in the face of Israeli bombardment, describing “sadness and misery written on their faces.”
One of the orphans, 8-year-old Ayas, became so tired “the whites of his eyes became almost blue.”
From November 2 to December 7, Al-Naizi sent written messages to CNN describing his forced displacement from the orphanage to the Jabalya refugee camp, eventually traveling through Khan Younis to Rafah. Palestinians have faced several communications blackouts amid Israeli strikes across the territory and CNN has been unable to directly contact him since. Sarah Shennib, an attorney based in the UAE who has been supporting the orphanage for years, told CNN on December 13 that he and the children are still alive.
Almost 1.9 million people, more than 85% of the enclave’s total population, have been displaced since the beginning of the war – many more than once – according to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
Al Naizi described the torment of trying to keep the orphans alive as airstrikes, rampant food, fuel, water and drug shortages and winter weather conditions ravage Gaza.
Imagine that a person reaches a stage where he wishes to be killed and get rid of this torment, this anxiety, and this humiliation. This happened to us.”
When the seven-day truce between Israel and Hamas ended on December 1, Al-Naizi once again worried for the safety of the children under his care. “The lives of the children are in real danger, and the possibility of losing them in these circumstances is very high.”
The next day, Al-Naizi and the children fled Khan Younis for the town of Al Mawasi in Rafah, one of the districts deemed an “evacuation zone” by the IDF. Upon arriving in the south, he was unable to find anywhere for them to shelter together.
“We are homeless now,” he wrote.
He spent $400 – equivalent to “a monthly salary” for Gazan families — to build a tent for himself and some of the children. To charge his phone and connect with the world, he and other displaced Palestinians line up in a queue for hours at a home that has electricity through solar power.
Despite fleeing to an evacuation zone, he and the children did not feel safer. “The bombing almost never stops, and the massacres take place all the time,” he wrote.
More than 18,600 people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7, according to the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry in the strip. CNN cannot independently verify that number, but the IDF said it has struck more than 22,000 targets in Gaza since the beginning of the war.
Reflecting on the war he has now lived through for over two months, Al-Naizi wrote on December 7: “It is difficult to imagine that people’s lives become just a number mentioned on television.”
“These are the people who were killed. Every human being had a full life, ambitions, dreams, hopes, things he loved.”
