GAZA CITY: With booms from artillery and airstrikes keeping them awake, the 10 members of Lubna Karam’s family spent the night huddled in the hallway of their Gaza City home.
Earlier strikes had shattered the living room windows, letting cold air pour in. The Karams haven’t had electricity for a week and have run out of cooking gas.
They’ve been eating cold, canned beans.
“It’s war food,” said Karam, 28, a mother of three small children. “What else can we do?”
As Israel’s offensive moved from airstrikes to ground fighting and artillery shelling, Gaza’s civilians were increasingly exposed. Some two dozen civilians were killed within hours after the start of Israel’s ground invasion Saturday night.
While Israel said its airstrikes have targeted only Hamas installations and leaders, some of the bombs destroyed or damaged adjacent houses. Karam said she felt under threat at all times.
She said her family didn’t sleep. “We keep hearing the sounds of airplanes and we don’t know if we’ll live until tomorrow, or not,” she said.
Anas Mansour, 21, a resident of the Rafah refugee camp on the Gaza-Egypt border, said he and his family might try to leave the area later. Mansour said he was sleeping in his clothes, with his identification cards in his pocket in case he had to flee quickly.
He said he could see his neighbor loading a donkey cart with mattresses and blankets to leave, but hadn’t yet decided if he’d do the same. “Where can we go? It’s all the same,” Mansour said.
“When there was a siege, we kept taking about a catastrophe,” said Hatem Shurrab, 24, of Gaza City. “But then the airstrikes started, and now we don’t even know what word to use. There’s no word in the dictionary that can describe the situation we are in.”
