From the outside, it is hard to comprehend the depth of suffering experienced by civilians in Gaza.
On Monday 21 October, a video emerged from Jabalia that gave an unusually detailed insight into the pressure and the horror imposed on civilians by Israel’s current offensive in northern Gaza. Watching it, you feel almost like an eyewitness.
Every day, like many journalists who are forced to report the war from outside Gaza because Israel will not let us in, I watch many videos that emerge online, harrowing scenes of wounded, dying and bereaved people in hospitals, of men in the rubble rescuing survivors and digging out bodies, and civilians forced to move by the Israelis, walking through thick sand where roads used to be, past the unrecognisable ruins.
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They are all horrible to see, and so was the one that came from the attack in Jabalia on Monday morning. But for me it was unusual because it showed the pain, grief, chaos, panic and hopelessness in the seconds and minutes immediately after an attack.
The moment is so extreme that taking out a phone to film it is the last thing most people do. Over many years as a reporter in wars, I have seen and experienced the same disbelief and shock. It takes time for the brain to catch up with the utterly changed reality that your eyes are seeing.
The Jabalia Boys Elementary school was attacked just after 09:00 in the morning, on 21 October. It was no longer a place of learning but had been turned into a shelter for displaced civilians, like many schools in Gaza run by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. All the ones still standing, that is.
In the video, a paramedic called Nevine al Dawawi, increasingly panic-stricken, runs between dead and dying civilians, using her phone to document what is happening (when I reported this first, on the day of the strike, she was misidentified as Nabila.)
We managed to track down Nevine in Gaza City. She was able to give us her own account of what happened on Monday morning. She answered questions, and much more composed now, she played back the video.
In it, she is agitated and scared, running between civilians lying in their own blood, next to dead bodies.
This story contains some distressing details from this point
‘I don’t have anything to stop the bleeding’
“Calm down,” she screams at a badly hurt woman sitting in a pool of blood.
“I swear I don’t have anything to stop the bleeding.”
She runs down a passage pockmarked by shrapnel. On a stairwell she sees more casualties, turns away in horror, picks up a bag and says “let’s go, so no-one else gets killed”.
A man’s voice on the video says, “stay with us Nevine.” Grabbing the bag, which is full of wound dressings, she goes back to the stairwell that is running with blood. A child’s voice says, please help, my sister is dying, please help me.
A woman says my children are gone. Nevine asked how she knew.
“Look at them,” the woman says. One is very still, the other has a severe head wound and is either dead or dying.
Nevine hands over dressings, even though it is too late. They are all she has, and she is the only paramedic there.
Nevine told us that the woman on the stairs whose children were killed was Lina Ibrahim Abu Namos. Journalists working for the BBC found her in Kamal Adwan hospital in Jabalia where she is being treated for shrapnel injuries. Two of Lina’s seven children were killed, her eldest daughter and her only son.
Her husband wasn’t with them when the attack happened, as he was already being treated for wounds sustained in an earlier attack.
“I saw my daughter dying, with my own eyes. She was dying in front of me. I couldn’t stop it, and she was my eldest, my whole life, honestly, my entire life. When your eldest dies in front of you…”
“I couldn’t save her, and I was also wounded. I couldn’t handle myself, I found myself falling on the ground. I started crawling towards her.”