‘The survivor's guilt is overwhelming'

Israel-Gaza war One year on

- Kaamil Ahmed

A barrage of messages in the middle of the night broke the news to Ahmed Alnaouq that his family home in Deir al-Balah was not the safest place in Gaza - as he had once thought. It was on that autumn night almost a year ago that he learned that almost his entire family had been wiped out in a single Israeli airstrike.

Thousands of miles away in London, he had woken from his sleep suddenly feeling a deep unease, he says. Moments before, his father, siblings, their children and a cousin were killed - 21 relatives altogether.

“That bomb that day changed my life for ever. I live here [in London] but they're everything I care about,” says Alnaouq.

Only a cousin and their child survived the strike, which would have been even worse had it taken place a few days earlier. More than 50 relatives had been crowded into the house because of its perceived safety, right in the centre of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza - a long way from Gaza City, which had until then been the focus of Israeli operations. But many of those relatives left just before the strike on 22 October.

Alnaouq's experience of family members being killed in war predates the past year's conflict. In the 2014 war in Gaza his brother was also killed in an Israeli airstrike. The nature of his grief then, he says, was different. That time, he had only one brother to mourn, but this time he lost his entire family. Whenever he thought of one person, he felt his thoughts drift to another.