Manal al Wakeel and her family of 30 thought they were going home.
Displaced from their home in Gaza City months ago, Ms. al-Wakeel and her relatives began packing their bags on Monday and preparing to dismantle their tent in Rafah, on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip.
Hamas had announced that it had accepted a ceasefire proposal from Qatar and Egypt, leaving many Gazans thinking a truce was imminent. His joy was short-lived; It soon became clear that Hamas was not talking about the same proposal endorsed days earlier by Israel, which said the two sides remained far apart.
Instead, Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets in eastern Rafah calling on people to flee and move to what Israel called a humanitarian zone to the north, while the Israeli army bombed the area. Gaza health officials say dozens have died since Israel’s incursion into parts of Rafah this week.
“That day we thought a ceasefire was possible,” said al-Wakeel, 48, who helped the aid group World Central Kitchen prepare hot meals.
She and her family had taken refuge near the Abu Yousef al-Najjar hospital, in an area hit by Israeli airstrikes and ground fighting. Hospital director Dr. Marwan al-Hams said Monday that he had received the bodies of 26 people killed by Israeli fire and had treated 50 who were wounded. The hospital was evacuated the next day.
So instead of returning home, on Tuesday night Ms. al-Wakeel, her husband, her 11 children and other relatives found a truck that would take them and their belongings, including suitcases with clothes, pots, pans and tents, for 2,500 shekels (about $670) in search of another place to stay.
They left Rafah around midnight and headed north along with hundreds of tuk-tuks, trucks, cars and donkey carts filled with other displaced families and their possessions.
“It was a scary night, the truck was moving slowly because of the heavy load it was carrying,” he said.
Once outside Rafah, they made frequent stops at schools and other buildings, desperately searching for some empty place to take shelter. But all the places were full.
Others could not find a place either, and Ms. al-Wakeel saw many people sleeping on the side of the road next to the belongings they had fled with.
At a UN school in Deir El-Balah, a young man suggested they stay in an empty concrete building – with no windows or doors – that belonged to the social development ministry of the Hamas-led government.
“It seemed like a dangerous place,” he said, adding that they had been told that a woman and her daughter had previously been killed in one of the building’s rooms by an Israeli missile.
But they were too afraid to continue wandering in the dark and decided to spend the night there and look for a safer place at dawn.
“I feel very sad and disappointed about what happened to Rafah, since we were stable there,” she said. “We have spent a lot of time having to arrange new places for ourselves again and we feel depressed and exhausted from repeating the same suffering.”
Saeda al-Nemnem, 42, had given birth to twins less than a month before Israel dropped the leaflets on their shelter in Rafah, ordering them to leave. Her family, also displaced from Gaza City, sent a relative to look for a truck that could transport them north, despite intense Israeli airstrikes at the time.
His relative, Mohammed al-Jojo, was killed by an Israeli attack on the tractor he was riding in, he said.
He “was killed when he was taking us out of that area to a safer place,” he said. “I feel like I caused his death.”
Despite the dangers along the way, staying where they were in Rafah was no safer.
Throughout the terrifying journey to the town of Khan Younis, where she and her family of eight found shelter in a room attached to the main building of Al Aqsa University, they could hear what sounded like explosions from Israeli bombs, missiles and artillery, said.
“My children’s heartbeats were so high I could feel them,” she said. It was the most intense bombardment she had ever heard, she said, “so close and so terrifying for me and my children.”