December 23, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST
Others panicked, however Momen, 50, clung to the assumption that his household might trip out the battle as that they had earlier eruptions, by stockpiling provides and huddling indoors till the bombs stopped.
His miscalculation quickly turned clear. Their lives unraveled with lightning pace.
Momen noticed outdated mates useless within the rubble of his neighborhood. His spouse, Rania, was engulfed with grief over the lack of a beloved sister. Their teenage daughters started shaking in terror from the relentless explosions.
“Baba,” the ladies pleaded with him, “it’s time to go.”
The household would set out on the identical determined seek for security as a whole lot of 1000’s of different Gaza residents. However Momen possessed a slim blue American passport that meant, in contrast to most of these fleeing, his household might need a approach out.
Their vacation spot was the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.
In regular occasions, the journey is an hour by automotive. However Momen’s household would face a 10-day trek by means of a post-apocalyptic panorama of tanks, smoldering buildings and rotting corpses, their hearts breaking with every step that carried them farther from house.
The household of 4 recounted their expertise by means of in depth interviews, and offered emails, paperwork, images and movies of their journey — and the life they left behind.
“It’s very scary,” Momen stated. “You’re going into the unknown.”
Momen grew up in a home on Mohamed al-Aswad Road, a four-story constructing the place members of his prolonged household had flats on totally different flooring, the customized in close-knit Gaza. He left in 1993 to review in North Carolina, touring backwards and forwards for greater than a decade earlier than returning for good to be together with his ailing dad and mom of their closing years.
After they handed, Momen, Rania and their daughters continued to reside within the third-floor unit, which he renovated in 2010. He knew nicely the volatility of the battle, the inevitability of Israeli airstrikes. Nonetheless, he changed a wall with massive home windows and arrange what he calls “my station,” a breezy perch the place he might look out over the neighborhood as he loved his morning espresso and cigarettes.
Momen was at his station when information broke of the Hamas assault. He checked his telephone consistently, becoming a member of neighbors within the rush to purchase bread and canned items. All of them knew what was coming.
The primary strikes in his space arrived earlier than daybreak the following morning, he stated, concentrating on a Hamas chief who lived close by. Momen’s daughters — Malak, 15, and Noreen, 13 — shrieked when the blast shook their home and a vibrant flash illuminated the darkish sky.
“Settle down; it’s not us. Don’t fear,” he recalled telling them. “Nothing will occur to us. They’re going to hit Hamas folks, Hamas locations.”
However the strikes didn’t cease, they usually weren’t confined to recognized Hamas areas. The bombing was most intense at night time, so Momen organized a spot for the household to sleep with a good friend who lived down the road — in a home with a basement, a rarity in Gaza.
They spent the daytime in their very own house, the ladies typically sheltering in a closet the place they didn’t really feel the tremors as a lot. They pestered Momen to register with the State Division, on a listing of U.S. residents looking for evacuation. He did, simply in case, although he was privately uncertain he might get all of them out on a single U.S. passport. And he would by no means go away them behind.
At night time, they retreated to the neighbor’s basement with different households. They laid out skinny mattresses and tried to sleep, however the adrenaline and explosions made it virtually unattainable. Momen’s daughters stopped consuming. Generally they cried and complained. It was worse, he stated, to see them fall silent, eyes extensive and arms trembling.
On Nov. 1, throughout a daytime lull, Momen’s youthful daughter, Noreen, noticed the children subsequent door waving to them from throughout the alleyway. She grabbed her telephone and commenced filming. The nine-second clip reveals two little faces peeking out of a window. One smiles when she sees Noreen, who waves again. Rania reminded her daughters to steer clear of the home windows.
By dawn the following morning, the kids subsequent door had been useless.
The strike that killed them occurred after midnight, Momen recalled. He joined the lads who ran out to assist, nevertheless it was pitch-black and treacherous.
They started digging with their naked arms. There have been eight folks below the collapsed constructing, they believed, however they solely managed to recuperate two our bodies.
To retrieve the others, they’d have to attend till dawn, an agonizing prospect as they listened to the wails of the kids’s grandmother.
“Come assist us!” she begged, Momen recalled.
The useless weren’t strangers. They had been his neighbors of 40 years, individuals who wished him nicely when he left for America and welcomed him again when he returned. When day broke, Momen noticed certainly one of them “in items.”
“It stayed in my head three or 4 days, simply interested by it,” he stated. “However as a result of we’ve got so many tales, so many incidents, you begin forgetting.”
The blast subsequent door had broken Momen’s own residence so badly that the household had been pressured to maneuver into their neighbor’s basement. He was resourceful, Momen stated, and ran strains from one other neighbor’s photo voltaic panels to supply electrical energy for the rising variety of folks hiding out in his basement.
However they started operating low on meals. Everybody ate only one meal a day. Rania and the ladies had been mates with the neighbor’s spouse, so they might spend their days upstairs, having tea and comforting each other earlier than it was time to return underground after the final name to prayer.
Round 9 every night time it was “get together time,” Momen stated with a dry chortle. The flash from a strike would arrive earlier than the sound, a terrifying split-second.
“You see the sunshine is coming however you don’t see who’s going to get hit,” Momen stated. “Is it us or not?”
Momen weighed their greatest probabilities for survival. Strikes had turned a lot of their district right into a moonscape of knee-high rubble and tangled wires. Electrical energy was almost gone. Momen, who has diabetes, saved taking insulin although it might now not be refrigerated.
Throughout this stretch, when cell service flickered on for a couple of minutes, Rania acquired information that her sister Rana had been killed in a strike in one other a part of Gaza alongside along with her 3-year-old son Ahmed and 5-year-old daughter Nisreen.
Rania had adored her niece and nephew. A video of Nisreen from earlier than the battle confirmed her dancing at a household celebration. Ahmed, whose brief life had entailed surgical procedures for a coronary heart situation, had been blown aside.
“First, they discovered his leg,” Rania recounted, sobbing.
She frightened consistently about the remainder of her household, scattered and unreachable. Rania had virtually no information of her dad and mom or eight surviving siblings. Final she heard, her 73-year-old father, too sick to flee with the others, was below bombardment at a U.N.-run clinic within the north. He instructed her he might see Israeli tanks from the window.
“I name him 200 occasions for it to attach even as soon as,” she stated. “Simply to listen to his voice.”
From the basement, the strikes seemed like they had been getting nearer, although the household stated they by no means acquired a warning name from the Israeli navy. Generally a “weak” one hit first — a warning earlier than a heavier blast. Their resolve to remain put was wavering. The neighbor’s spouse packed up her kids and left. Her husband stayed.
Their departure could have saved lives. Within the early night of Nov. 2, across the time Rania and the ladies had been normally aboveground having tea, a strike hit the home.
A deafening blast shook their hideout. The shock wave, they stated, rattled their bones. Smoke poured into the basement, together with water from a burst tank upstairs. Noreen and Malak ran to their dad and mom and clung to them as they placed on masks and wheezed within the darkness.
“We couldn’t breathe,” Momen recalled.
Escaping wasn’t an possibility till dawn. They tried not to think about the worst-case state of affairs: that their exit could be blocked by the pancaked home above them. Their sanctuary, they feared, would change into their tomb.
At daybreak on Nov. 3, the proprietor, Momen and one other neighbor made their approach upstairs and felt the morning air hit their faces. The bomb had ripped by means of the partitions, and the higher flooring had collapsed.
“We checked out one another — me and the proprietor of the home and the opposite man,” Momen recalled. “I instructed them, ‘I believe it’s time to go away.’”
The household scrambled to fill backpacks with necessities for his or her escape: a pair modifications of garments, two sleeping mats, a pillow, their ID playing cards and, most significantly, the U.S. passport.
The one private results Momen took had been his assortment of prayer beads and a skinny stack of images from his time in America — snapshots of him lounging by the water on the Outer Banks, as a fresh-faced faculty graduate in cap and robe, on the diner he opened with the hopeful title New Daybreak. He was proud to change into a U.S. citizen in 2007.
These reminiscences appeared to belong to a distinct particular person, he stated, reasonably than the sleepless, chain-smoking man who stuffed them right into a bag, steeling himself for an unsure journey.
“You’re taking it step-by-step and also you don’t know something,” Momen stated. “The place are you going? What would be the subsequent place?”
Like 1000’s of different Palestinians searching for a haven in Gaza, the household determined their first cease can be al-Shifa Hospital, the sprawling medical advanced that had change into a point of interest of the battle. A hospital administrator, a nephew of Momen’s, had pledged to take care of them.
The household piled right into a neighbor’s sedan for the brief drive to the hospital. For the primary time, they noticed the seemingly infinite destruction of their metropolis. Favourite cafes and retailers had been obliterated. Dazed survivors picked by means of particles.
They made it to al-Shifa round midday and lingered within the courtyard till they might observe down Momen’s nephew. Displaced folks had been sleeping in tents, in stairwells, in any patch of area.
Wounded folks arrived by automotive and by donkey cart. Their our bodies had been shredded, bloodied, burned. The morgue was overflowing. A refrigerated ice cream truck had been repurposed to retailer our bodies; Rania was horrified to see a person place his useless youngster inside.
About two hours after they arrived, an Israeli strike hit an ambulance simply outdoors the gates of the hospital. At the least 15 folks had been killed.
“I used to be fortunate,” Momen stated. “I used to be going to get espresso, however I didn’t go to that door. I went to the opposite door.”
He had managed, as soon as once more, to remain a step forward of dying.
Momen and his household spent the following week on the hospital. His nephew had secured Rania and the ladies a coveted spot within the medical library, already filled with displaced folks. Momen slept in his nephew’s workplace within the administration constructing.
They survived totally on dates. One man arrange a makeshift stand promoting fava beans and falafel — with out bread — however most households didn’t have cash for that.
The constructing they had been in had potable water for about half an hour a day. “It’s important to hurry and refill in these minutes,” Rania stated.
She handed the time by visiting a wounded household good friend within the a part of the compound that was nonetheless functioning, barely, as an emergency room. To get there, she walked previous injured folks mendacity in ache on the ground, heard the screams of sufferers present process surgical procedures with out anesthesia, watched medical workers carry physique elements wrapped in material.
“All you see are useless folks,” she stated. “After which their households come and begin screaming and shouting. A few of them, they misplaced everyone.”
Of their first days there, strikes hit a close-by Italian restaurant and a grocery store parking zone. Shrapnel flew into the compound. After darkish, the strikes grew louder, nearer. The household stated they had been glad in the event that they managed to get an hour of sleep every night time.
“We had been scared,” Momen stated. “We knew one thing was going to occur.”
Their subsequent objective was to make it throughout Wadi Gaza, the gateway to the southern a part of the Strip, one step nearer to the Egyptian border. Possibly there, Momen figured, they’d have cell reception and will see if the embassy had written with new directions.
They had been following the route Israel had ordered them to journey, however in addition they knew the south had not been spared from strikes. Momen and Rania tried to remain optimistic for the ladies. Pack mild, Momen instructed them, only a backpack every. They would go away the whole lot else on the hospital.
No automobiles had been out there, so that they set off on foot to the house of Rania’s aunt within the Shabiya district. From there, they took a automotive to a approach station, then a horse-drawn cart to al-Kuwait Sq., the place to begin for probably the most treacherous a part of the route: Salah al-Din Street, Gaza’s important north-south artery.
Males weren’t allowed to hold baggage; Momen was to stroll together with his arms up and eyes down.
Different fleeing households had provided ideas for survival: Don’t drop something. Don’t assist others. Don’t discuss.
No meals or rest room breaks for the complete four-mile gantlet. No matter you do, they had been instructed, don’t cease.
They stepped out onto the highway and joined a stream of the displaced; tens of 1000’s of households would stroll the identical path. The picture alone was crushing, Momen stated, paying homage to black-and-white images from the Nakba, or “disaster,” the phrase Arabs use for the pressured displacement of Palestinians throughout Israel’s creation in 1948.
“The scene was stunning, how they humiliated us,” Momen stated. “You are feeling such as you’re leaving your own home, and who is aware of whenever you’ll be again.”
Inside minutes, they reached a cluster of tanks and Israeli forces. At gunpoint, Momen’s daughters noticed Israeli troopers for the primary time of their lives. The forces barked orders on the households.
“Noreen was very shaky,” Rania stated of her youthful daughter. “I held her hand and tried to consolation her.”
The household saved their eyes down nevertheless it was unattainable to not see the folks in wheelchairs struggling to maneuver over the uneven, bombed-out path. The mom strolling with two younger kids on her again. A person carrying his aged father.
They flinched on the sound of strikes and tried to not gag on the stench of dying.
“Think about the highway,” Momen whispered to his horrified daughters.
At one level, a younger man strolling close to them was plucked from the gang and made to strip bare in entrance of the Israeli troopers.
“They need to present that, ‘We’re going to make you nothing,’” Momen stated.
The household hadn’t been capable of bathe or change garments in over every week. They’d barely eaten. Exhausted and hungry, the ladies requested if they might sit, only for a couple of moments. However they needed to preserve going.
Lastly, they reached Wadi Gaza, the wetlands that bisect the Strip.
Crossing into the south had been simple earlier than the battle. Folks got here and went on a regular basis. However that day, Momen stated, he felt as if we was getting into into one other life.
One line saved flashing by means of his thoughts: “We’re dropping Gaza.”
The household rested briefly and picked up their ideas. A horse cart took them to a good friend of Rania’s father within the metropolis of Deir al-Balah.
Warplanes buzzed overhead however, for the primary time in weeks, Momen stated, they felt a measure of security. Now he simply needed to get his household throughout the border. He had been authorized for entry whereas they had been caught on the hospital and wasn’t certain he was nonetheless eligible. Then phrase got here from the U.S. Embassy: Anybody on a listing since Nov. 1 might go away.
This was their probability. The following morning, Momen, Rania and their daughters stated tearful goodbyes to their host and left for the border.
Momen’s abdomen was in knots: “I used to be pondering, ‘How are we going to undergo?’”
The battle has difficult his id as an American, Momen stated. A number of the bombs that fell round him had been U.S.-made; he was pained by the Biden administration’s refusal to affix worldwide requires a cease-fire. Neighbors, livid after airstrikes, cursed Washington for his or her distress.
“Generally they inform me, ‘Look what the Individuals are doing to us,’” Momen stated. “What am I going to say?”
On the Rafah checkpoint, the household moved between the Palestinian Authority workplace and U.S. personnel, whom Momen described as useful and pleasant as they rushed to get Rania and the ladies purple emergency journey passports.
After about seven hours, the household was authorized to enter Egypt. All of them.
It was bittersweet, Momen stated. Solely Noreen and Malak had been glad. Rania mourned her sister and was distraught on the considered leaving her father.
As they boarded the bus for the ultimate crossing, Momen swallowed laborious and took one final look behind him. He felt like he was being divided in half. He stated a prayer for many who couldn’t make it out.
“I used to be saying, ‘Bye, Gaza,’ in my head,” he stated. “And I hope to return again at some point.”
Heba Farouk Mahfouz contributed to this report.