Mohamed Zedia might count as one of the lucky ones in Gaza. “Blessing” is the word he uses.
After two years of war, Gaza became abandoned. Thousands have been killed. Many more have evacuated and are malnourished. Zedia finds shelter in a small, crowded room that she shares with her family of eight. He can cook lunch on a fire that opens every day. Once a week, he fills a bottle of water from a nearby joint water supply.
The sh shotguns flew at them from all directions when a mosque across the street from the house where he was fighting 44 members of his extended family was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike. No one was seriously injured. Zedia bid farewell to 10 friends, but not to her immediate family. He knows he is an outlier.
“We have always had to adapt to strange and difficult lives,” the graphic designer said in a WhatsApp message sent from the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza in early October. Zedia, 25, is from the northern city of Gaza, and Israel launched a ground attack aimed at defeating what was called Hamas’ “last hub” in the Palestinian enclave. He had difficulty avoiding multiple across the strip. His father’s friend hosts him in Nusairat.
“Ghosts Running from Bombs and Destruction” also includes himself the way he describes Gaza civilians.
According to the Israeli government, the Hamas Fighters invaded southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing at least 1,200 people and lured another 251.
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Two years later, the size of Philadelphia or Detroit – a 7.5-mile stretch of 25 miles long in the coastal region of Palestine – is unrecognizable.
In late September, the White House and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced an ambitious 20-point plan to end the war and bring all the remaining hostages home. Having lost most of his senior leadership and military organizations, Hamas agreed to some of his peace plans, but did not accept all of the terms.
For two years, Israel has not granted independent access to Gaza and has challenged many claims about the terms there. But aid groups, humanitarian organisations, visiting doctors and local journalists, Gazan himself says that the majority of civilians on the besieged strip face daily struggles to find food, medicines and hygiene products due to shortages in supply, breakdowns of law and order, and surges in prices. The fuel is rare. The same goes for water. There is no electricity. The hygiene and health systems have collapsed.
Since the conflict began, agriculture in Gaza has suffered major damage. It effectively wipes out land and infrastructure essential to food production, such as olive orchards, fruit orchards and fields for growing vegetables. His satellite analysis, led by Kent State University, has caused significant damage to farmland, particularly in the northern half of Gaza.
The analysis revealed that approximately 91.7% of Gaza’s total farmland had been damaged by August 10, 2025. The latest findings were included in the second assessment of the UN Environmental Programme on Environmental Damage to Gaza, published in September.
Jan Egland is the executive director of the Norwegian Refugee Council, an aid group. He said that in Gaza, Zedia’s hometown, hundreds of thousands are surrounded by Israeli artillery fire, drones and troops. Egland said civilians were ordered to leave the area without access to aid and without ensuring safe passage.
“Life has been reduced to a fight for water and bread,” he said.
Crossing the wider enclave, the UN estimates that over 90% of the homes have been damaged or destroyed. Overcrowded shelters mean that many Gazans are sleeping in the rest of the bombed building, on the streets, or on the rest of the walls and ceilings. The park is covered in green debris and dust.
Over two million Palestinians are said to have to go from the Israeli military to Almawasi, the main designated “safe zone” of the strip. The area accounts for only 3% of Gaza’s land area, and many people can’t afford to pay a high cost to travel there, not to mention the tents they sleep in.
The situation appears particularly disastrous for sick people, injured people, elderly people, and those in need of obstetric services and other forms of professionals and trauma care. According to doctors without Borders, an independent humanitarian and health crisis group, 36 hospitals in Gaza are not fully functional, half of which provide services, and the number of partially open people only offers a limited number of services.
“When winter comes, we hope that it doesn’t turn out like this yet,” said 35-year-old Rana Hezi.
She is 9 months pregnant. Her husband has a neuropathy. In early October, one of her two young girls became enthusiastic and suffered a seizure from illness. The family is sleeping in tents on the grounds of a destroyed residential project in Deial Rose in central Gaza. The tent is made from scrap wood. They don’t get enough food.
“We went from danger to danger,” Heji said, explaining the story of multiple displacements in her family.
The Israeli military says it has put a considerable effort into avoiding the deaths and harm of civilians in Gaza. It is likely that the war in Gaza is consistent with the characteristics of genocide, vehemently rejecting the mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions and displacements deliberately imposed on Palestinians and preliminary findings from the United Nations.
Israeli political leaders say the military operations are aimed at defeating Hamas and ensuring the release of the hostages Hamas holds. Forty-eight people are still detained by extremist groups, and it is estimated that only 20 of them are alive.
But nonetheless, war has cost a great deal of human life in Gaza.
More than 66,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Hamasran Health Ministry. And it concluded that at least 30% of Palestinians, another continuing Palestinian enclave based in Ramallah on the West Bank, at least 30% of Palestinians who have been killed in the past two years are under the age of 18. Human rights organization B’tselem.
At least 1,400 Palestinian families have been wiped out in the enclave in the past two years, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. That is, every member of the family was killed. A New York-based committee to protect journalists says at least 189 journalists have been killed in Gaza. Over 900 Israeli soldiers fought in the war and died.
Becky Ryan is Gaza Response Director, an aid group running Deir Al-Balah’s hygiene clinic. She said that as the war in Gaza enters its third winter, there are few indications that Gaza civilians will improve even in a ceasefire.
Care clinics can treat 200 people a day, but an estimated 400 people appear per day. There are still very few types of meat available to buy on the market. A few pounds of onions can cost up to $40. The tent costs $1,500. October will begin its third year where children will not be able to access school.
“We can see the changes in people’s mental attitudes,” Ryan said. “In the past, war was intensive, difficult, and truly heartbreaking. Now there’s just a lack of hope and energy. We’re looking at generations of traumatized people.”
Sources and Methodology: The death toll data comes from the National Security Institute, the Israel National Security Policy Institute, and the World Health Organization.‘s The Gaza emergency report relies on data provided by the Gaza Health Ministry run by the Israeli Defense Force, Hamas, Palestinian Ministry of Health, and other organizations. Damage analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher from Cuny Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek from Oregon State University. 3-M Planetscope Imagery Analysis ©2025 Planet Labs PBC was conducted by Dr. Yin of Kent State University based on research published in Science at Remote Sensing. Satellite Image ©2025 Vantor.
