STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We are marking one year of war in the Middle East by listening to the people affected. Earlier this hour, we heard voices of Israeli survivors of the Hamas attacks on October 7, one year ago. NPR international correspondent Aya Batrawy has spent the past year talking with people in Gaza, and she is on the line. Hi there, Aya.
AYA BATRAWY, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: What stands out to you about this past year?
BATRAWY: Steve, I think it's probably the speed and intensity at which the entire Gaza Strip's been obliterated. You know, people have lost everything. Entire families have been wiped out, and no one is safe from these Israeli airstrikes. But I think also the toll on children - you know, more than 11,000 children have been identified as killed in this war. And to think that half of Gaza's population experiencing this past year are children, and they're often the sole survivors of their family - you know, the U.N. says thousands have lost one or more limbs and have been orphaned.
And the territory is just a wasteland of people huddled in tents and hungry, without electricity or water. It's really difficult, Steve, to describe or explain the suffering people have gone through this past year. But I could already hear it in Eman Abusaeid's voice when I reached her just two days into the war.
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BATRAWY: Drones and airstrikes have been a constant for people in Gaza over the past year, ever since the Hamas attack on Israel October 7, in which 1,200 people were killed and around 250 taken hostage. Eman's 12-year-old daughter, Joudi, and 11-year-old son, Ziyad, were scared those early days. Each time an Israeli fighter jet roared overhead, dropping another bomb - including on the house next to theirs - they'd run and hide under the couch.
EMAN ABUSAEID: Because they think it's the safest - and I told them it's the safest place here in the house, to be a little bit away from the walls that - looking outside the street.
BATRAWY: A few days after we spoke, Israel's military ordered more than a million people in Gaza City and northern Gaza to evacuate. Leaflets dropped from Israeli warplanes told them where to flee to for safety, but there is no safe place in Gaza.
ABUSAEID: You know, there are things that happen in Gaza that you can't know from news. You need to live them to understand them.
BATRAWY: Gaza's now a dystopian moonscape of debris and wreckage.
(CROSSTALK)
BATRAWY: Eman and her kids heeded Israel's evacuation orders that first week, sheltering in her parents' home in Nuseirat in central Gaza. The three-bedroom apartment was crammed with 24 people, half of them kids. Then on October 31 at 2:30 p.m., a Human Rights Watch investigation says this happened.
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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: Without warning, four munitions struck the building in the space of 10 seconds. The airstrike demolished the building and killed at least 106 people, including 54 children.
BATRAWY: Eman and 22 people in her family, including her children, were among those killed. Her husband and son are among many never recovered from under the rubble.
GERRY SIMPSON: It was a targeted attack on that building.
BATRAWY: Gerry Simpson is the lead researcher in Human Rights Watch's investigation. The overall death toll from that attack is likely to be higher. More than 350 people had been sheltering in the building. It wasn't the only attack on this scale that day. Israel says Hamas fighters endanger civilians by embedding among the population in Gaza. Human Rights Watch, however, found there was no military target in this attack and determined the Israeli airstrike violated the laws of war.
SIMPSON: If you attack a building where there is no military target and you kill this number of people, it's automatically very likely a war crime.
BATRAWY: NPR reached out to Israel's military multiple times to ask why the building was hit. The military did not respond to NPR's questions. Simpson says Human Rights Watch also heard nothing back. But there was one survivor in that apartment - Eman's sister, Taqwa. I reach her in Gaza City 11 months after the airstrike.
TAQWA: (Non-English language spoken).
BATRAWY: Over a crackling phone line, she tells me faintly that when she came to consciousness, she was in a hospital. The last thing she remembers is sitting in her parents' living room under the window, with her baby, Ibrahim, just 4 months old, in her lap. He was the youngest of her six children in the apartment that day. The oldest, Somaya, was 12.
TAQWA: (Non-English language spoken).
BATRAWY: She remembers fading in and out of consciousness at the hospital for weeks and asking her husband, who wasn't with her at the time of the attack, if their kids had warm clothes, if Ibrahim had any milk. A month later, her family would tell her the truth, that all six of her children were killed in the October 31 airstrike that she alone survived. I check the names and ages of each child with her over the phone.
(Non-English language spoken).
TAQWA: (Non-English language spoken).
BATRAWY: Taqwa suffered serious injuries in the attack, but it all pales next to the loss of her children. Her phone was destroyed and with it, nearly all her kids' photos and videos.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #1: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #2: (Non-English language spoken).
BATRAWY: But she clings to a handful of images and just a few seconds of this video of her kids on an orange raft in a pool.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #1: (Non-English language spoken).
BATRAWY: When people in Gaza heard that Hamas had agreed to a cease-fire back in May, they celebrated the news - prematurely, it would turn out - but not Taqwa.
TAQWA: (Non-English language spoken).
BATRAWY: She says she distanced herself from those cheering and cried because she had no reason to celebrate and no one to celebrate with.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Chanting in non-English language).
BATRAWY: In Gaza City, the call to prayer punctuates my call with Taqwa. These are the words Muslims recite daily and whisper into the ears of newborns. I ask Taqwa what she prays for in these moments.
TAQWA: (Non-English language spoken).
BATRAWY: She tells me she prays to be reunited with her kids and parents.
TAQWA: (Non-English language spoken).
BATRAWY: And that many times a day, she asks God to bring her death, what people there call martyrdom. Life in Gaza is hard to measure. This is how her sister Eman described it to me before she was killed.
ABUSAEID: Here in Gaza, seconds, seconds between life and death - you can't expect when, how long will you live.
BATRAWY: And Steve, just two weeks after I spoke with Taqwa, an Israeli airstrike targeted the school she was sheltering in in Gaza City. She survived, but she and her husband are on the move again, just trying to stay alive one more day.
INSKEEP: Amid all of those - all of that destruction, somehow it's the little details that get you, like the woman who lost all of her family photos. Hard to hear, Aya, but thanks so much for bringing it to us. Appreciate it.
BATRAWY: Thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: NPR's Aya Batrawy. You can listen to more stories on this October 7 throughout today's program and at npr.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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