SEATTLE — There is an ache in Rula’s heart that won’t go away.
A Palestinian American, she is watching the unfolding violence and destruction in Gaza from her King County home in helpless grief and unending fear.
The last she heard, her loved ones are sheltering in a United Nations school in northern Gaza with about 1,000 other families. The text messages have been sporadic these last few weeks, with dwindling electricity and choppy internet. There is no clean water and they have only flour and milk for food, said Rula, who asked to be identified by her first name due to safety concerns. The carnage is beyond description, they tell her, like “you’re walking through a nightmare.”
How can she keep on living her daily life as normal, knowing her loved ones could die at any moment, she wonders. “How can you reconcile these two facts?”
“How can I go to the grocery store and buy as much food as I want, knowing they’re dying for a piece of bread?” she said through tears. “How can I sleep at night and put my head on the pillow and know there’s nothing that’s going to crash down on me and kill me?”
Palestinians throughout the Seattle region are experiencing guilt, anguish and torment thousands of miles from Gaza.
Sprawling group chats with relatives and friends and neighbors have become a morbid game of telephone, a way to take stock of who’s still alive and who’s been killed. Many obsessively follow social media for images and videos for clues about their loved ones’ whereabouts and well-being. Every text message sent ends with final goodbyes.
On Oct. 7, Hamas, the group that controls the Gaza Strip, carried out the deadliest-ever attack on Israel since its founding in 1948, killing more than 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 240 hostages.
Since then, Israel has begun ground operations in northern Gaza and imposed an intense siege on the densely populated strip, cutting off electricity and limiting telecommunication and internet services. Airstrikes by Israel have killed more than 9,700 people as of Sunday, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and humanitarian aid has been severely obstructed.
Rula’s heart breaks for the Israeli citizens killed by Hamas, she said, and her heart breaks over the unending wave of death in Gaza in the weeks since.
“For someone to say, well, you asked for it, it hurts so bad,” she said.
She prays for an end to the siege and blockade in Gaza, and for an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Rula said she prays for dignity, empathy and freedom.
Here in the Seattle region, Palestinians are piecing together the apocalyptic situation unfurling in Gaza, where more than 2 million people, roughly half of whom are children, live.
Babies scream at night when the bombardment is heaviest, loved ones tell them. Mothers write their children’s names on their arms, so orphaned or killed kids can be identified. Food and medicine are scarce, clean water even more so. Injuries fester. Nowhere is safe.
For Sarah Davis, a Seattle-area resident whose extended family lives in Gaza, the last four weeks have been an unending horror. Soon after the Oct. 7 attacks, a group of family members in northern Gaza texted the family group chat that they were fleeing south after receiving evacuation notices from the Israeli government.
For days, Davis heard nothing from them. Eventually, her family learned that 12 relatives had been crushed during an airstrike while sheltering in a building in southern Gaza.
Then came the latest horror. A video was posted in the family group chat. Taken by a neighbor, it showed an obliterated building, gray limbs protruding between concrete and rebar. In the video, a young girl’s body is seen pulled from the ruins by volunteers. She was Davis’ cousin.
That’s how they learned more than 30 family members had been killed overnight in a single airstrike. One of the only surviving members, an orphaned child, has become speechless with shock.
“My family is being killed, they’re suffering, they’re scared, they can’t find clean water,” Davis said. If not from the bombings, “they’re going to die from dehydration, fear, starvation. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around why this is OK.”
The violence has driven some Palestinians in Washington state to find ways to help in any way, raising funds for charities in Gaza and attending protests to call for a cease-fire. Ahmad Hamdan, a Palestinian American who lives in Redmond, said he’s been to nearly every pro-Palestine rally in the region, and has reached out to elected officials repeatedly.
Watching the U.S. government’s military support for and defense of Israeli forces has been painful, he said. “It seems like the government picks and chooses who to care about.”
Some Palestinians in the Seattle region said they have tried to hide their identity, fearing they may be targeted and physically harmed or lose their jobs for speaking out publicly.
Local Muslim and Arab community leaders have raised the alarm that the war could fuel a rise in anti-Muslim and anti-Arab attacks. Between Oct. 7 and Oct. 31, the Washington state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations received 14 formal requests for legal services regarding anti-Muslim incidents, at least nine of which were specifically related to the current war. In contrast, the group received three requests during the same period last year. Jewish community leaders also say antisemitic attacks have dramatically increased in recent weeks.
“The level of rhetoric and dehumanization that is being espoused by many officials and commentators in some ways exceeds the post-9/11 climate, which is highly concerning,” executive director Imraan Siddiqi said in a statement. “In our experiences, this kind of rhetoric has a direct impact and as a result, our communities see higher levels of hate and harassment.”
For many Palestinians, Israel’s call for people in Gaza to relocate south invokes the trauma of 1948, when an estimated 700,000 people were displaced from what is now Israel. Some fled to Jordan or Lebanon, or to refugee camps in Gaza. Many call this period the Nakba, or catastrophe.
Decades later, some still carry with them the keys to their old homes. In Gaza, the vast majority of the population are these Palestinian refugees and their descendants. For 16 years, Gaza residents have lived under a strict blockade imposed by the Israeli government with help from Egypt. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International say the blockade breaks international human rights law, which Israeli officials have denied.
Among these residents are the relatives of Zarefah Baroud, another Seattle-area Palestinian American. Her father’s grandparents and family were forced to leave their village near Tel Aviv in 1948 for refugee camps in Gaza. They thought they would return in a few days. Instead, much of Baroud’s extended family never left Gaza.
The devastation in Gaza has been breathtaking in its inhumanity, she said. “It feels like since Oct. 7, it feels like it’s been one long day,” Baroud said.
At least 26 family members — aunts, uncles, cousins and their children — have been killed over the last four weeks, as well as several friends, Baroud said. The bodies of 11 family members remain trapped in the rumble of a building hit in an airstrike.
“We don’t know if they suffered, or if they suffocated. We don’t know if it was fast,” she said. Not knowing has been its own kind of torture.
Among the dead is her cousin Wala, Wala’s husband and one of their sons. Wala’s surviving son, 10 years old, was chemically burned and had to have part of his foot amputated, Baroud said.
Still, Baroud fights on.
“I don’t want people to feel hopeless, because the people of Gaza aren’t hopeless,” she said. “I don’t want my sadness to come across as defeat.”
Palestinian Americans who don’t have family and friends in Gaza fear what an escalating war might mean for their loved ones in the West Bank or in nearby countries.
Sabrene Odeh, a Seattle resident who has family in the West Bank, said her cousins, aunts and uncles have been sheltering in place, fearful of leaving their homes to attend university or go to work. Checkpoints and roads where Israeli forces and settlers were already hostile to Palestinians have become even more dangerous, or closed altogether, she said. The United Nations and most of the international community consider Israeli settlements illegal, a view Israeli officials dispute, citing historical ties to the land.
“It’s so extremely devastating that they’ve had to be resilient in the face of an occupying power with no regard for life,” Odeh said.
Rula has been inconsolable over the fate of her close family friend Hussam and his family. She met him about a decade ago, when he was a young organizer helping distribute money, food and supplies to schoolchildren in Gaza with money she had helped raise back in the U.S.
Over the years, he and his family have become like her own, Rula said. Now Hussam is married and has three children. One of his children, a 2-year-old girl named Lulu, has a heart defect that requires extensive medical treatment.
The days that pass without word from Hussam stretch like black voids, Rula said.
At one point, Hussam told Rula he was going to go to a hospital in northern Gaza to beg for an oxygen tank for his daughter. The next day news broke of an explosion at the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, and for three days, Rula waited to hear of news, horrified by the thought that he had been killed.
Hussam was still alive. But then a new wave of fear. An Israeli airstrike on Tuesday hit the Jabalia refugee camp where his family is staying, flattening housing blocks. At least 195 people have been killed in strikes at the camp, according to a Hamas-run government media office, and nearly 800 injured.
On Wednesday morning, Rula got a phone call from Hussam and his wife. He had managed to charge his phone for a couple of minutes at a nearby hospital. The family had survived, but barely, and are traumatized beyond belief, Rula said. They are still at the camp trying to find a safe place to shelter or a way out, but the airstrikes have made it impossible, they told her.
They sounded so tired.
