Ziyad Rihan

A 42-year-old father of four from Jabalya R.C., Ziyad recounted how his 13-year-old son was killed by a missile at the start of the war, he and another son were injured by a missile a year later, and the family is surviving displacement, hunger and constant fear:

Before the war I lived with my wife and our four children, Rami, 23, Hamudah, 21, Ahmad, 16, and Muhammad, 13, in a three-story home in the a-Saftawi neighborhood in western Jabalya Refugee Camp. I worked for many years as a construction laborer and we led a quiet, peaceful life.

When the war began, the military immediately started bombing homes and mosques in our area without any warning. Homes were destroyed with the inhabitants inside, men, women and children indiscriminately. We didn’t understand what was happening and didn’t know what to do. At first, we didn’t want to leave. We felt safest in our own home. But the bombings grew stronger and more brutal every day, and more and more people were killed. Every hour, we heard reports of civilian deaths. Planes began dropping leaflets ordering us to evacuate to the south, claiming it would be safe there, but we knew it wasn’t safe at all either.

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After two weeks, tanks began to invade the northern Gaza Strip, Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya. The strikes on our area intensified and included artillery. Shells fell all around us. Thousands of people began fleeing and we left too, my wife and I with the children, taking almost nothing with us.

We went to a-Shati Refugee Camp, hoping to find safety there away from the airstrikes and shelling. We found shelter in an UNRWA clinic, but conditions there weren’t good either. Soon after we arrived, the Israeli military dropped threatening leaflets ordering the evacuation of a-Shati as well. The artillery fire increased, and quadcopters started shooting at IDPs in schools and in the streets. Entire blocks of the camp were bombed.

On 10 November 2023, tanks came towards us. We heard them rumbling. The invasion of the camp started from the north. We immediately fled from the clinic to New Gaza School on a-Nasser Street in Gaza City, near a-Shifaa Hospital. There was nowhere else to go. We stayed there only two days before we had to flee again, under bombardment and gunfire, because the school was on the route to a-Shifaa Hospital, and the army was advancing towards it and bombing houses and killing anyone who moved nearby. We were displaced again, and this time we went to my sister’s home in the a-Zarkaa area of Jabalya, hoping things would be calmer there.

On 20 November 2023, the first day of the first ceasefire, my youngest son Muhammad went to check on our home in a-Saftawi after we heard that Israeli troops had withdrawn from the area. But when he arrived, he was shot in the head and killed on the spot. His body lay there on the ground for a month. No one could reach him because the military fired at anyone who tried to go near. By the time it was possible to collect the body, it had completely decomposed.

At one point, the army bombed an entire residential block of six buildings in Jabalya, near my sister’s house where we were staying. Everyone inside was killed. No one survived. Body parts of women and children scattered everywhere, in the streets and on rooftops. The human mind can’t wrap itself around such a thing. I witnessed this horrific massacre of a huge number of people who posed no threat to anyone. They were murdered in cold blood as they sat in their homes, terrified of the bombings and killings all around them.

After the massacre, we moved to an IDP shelter in the Abu Hussein School in Jabalya Refugee Camp and stayed there for nearly two weeks, until Israeli fighter jets suddenly fired a missile into the schoolyard. Bodies scattered the compound, and we fled. More than 15 people were killed in that attack, most of them women.

We moved to Suleiman Sultan School, near Palestine Stadium in the a-Nasser neighborhood. We slept on the floor in the hallways. After that, we kept fleeing from place to place, from one school to another, running from missiles, sniper fire and explosives dropped on us from quadcopters. Every time we fled for our lives, we left behind our belongings, blankets, clothes, and such. We couldn’t take anything with us in the panic and chaos of the bombardments.

We also suffered terribly from the poverty and hunger that the occupying forces imposed on the northern Gaza Strip. They cut us off from all sources of life, food and water. We were in a battle for survival. My children ran around trying to collect whatever they could from the few aid packages and cans that were airdropped. People risked their lives for a piece of bread; some were crushed to death in the crowds as masses of people tried to reach the food packages falling from the sky.

On 18 March 2024, while we were staying at a school near a-Shifaa Hospital, the military surrounded the hospital from all directions and raided it. Tanks encircled the school, and warplanes hovered overhead. We were under siege for 14 days. No food or water reached us. Around us, we heard houses exploding, and blasts from the hospital itself. It felt like earthquakes.

When the army withdrew, after sewing destruction, burning, blowing up, and flattening homes, we returned to New Gaza School on a-Nasser Street, where we suffered from severe shortages.

On 7 November 2024, in the morning, my son Hamudah and I were standing near the school gate, about to go out to look for food, when a drone fired a missile directly at us. We were both seriously wounded. We lay on the ground for two hours, and no ambulance could reach us because of the ongoing bombardment and the difficulty moving around the area. After two hours, by some miracle, we were evacuated on a tuk-tuk motorcycle to al-Ahli al-‘Arabi Hospital.

The hospital was full of wounded people, so we waited a long time before receiving any care. When doctors finally examined me, they said a piece of shrapnel had struck my back, and fractured the 11th and 12th vertebrae, that it was pressing on my spinal cord and that any movement I made could sever it and leave me paralyzed. My son was also injured in the back, and the tendons in his right hand ruptured.

I was hospitalized for a week. That whole time, my family searched for a place where I could get surgery, because the hospital had no medicines or MRI machines. There was a severe shortage of medical equipment, and no real way of treating the wounded. The doctors told me there was no chance of getting treatment inside the Gaza Strip and that I needed urgent surgery outside it, otherwise I risked total paralysis.

After the ceasefire was declared on 19 January 2025, I was brought before several international delegations, and they all confirmed that Gaza lacked the necessary equipment and facilities for my surgery, because Israel had deliberately destroyed hospitals during the war.

During the ceasefire, we moved to Ousama Bin Zeid School near our home. To our misfortune, the Israeli military had blown up our house during the war with explosives planted inside it. Nothing remained of it. I can’t move at all, and I have been appealing to every possible organization to help me leave Gaza for the surgery, so I can get back on my feet. I suffer from severe pain and need diapers, which are not always available here. I feel terrible injustice over my condition. I am gravely wounded, unemployed, homeless, and desperate for medical treatment.

Now that the crossings are closed again and no food is entering Gaza, I can’t do anything to help my family. My children have to go out and search for food so that we can survive. We spent Ramadan in this terrible want. All we ate during Ramadan was bread and canned food, just like throughout the war. We’re all malnourished, emaciated, and sick from this poor diet.

Beyond the hunger, we’re all traumatized by the horrors we’ve endured during the war. My children, of course, haven’t studied since it began. There’s no electricity, no internet, and we don’t have phones or tablets for them to learn with. In any case, the bombings never stop. We live in constant fear of what the coming days will bring.

* Ziyad Rihan gave his testimony to B’Tselem field researcher Muhammad Sabah on 11 March 2025. A few days later, he managed to leave Gaza and travel to Egypt, but the hospital he was taken to was unable to provide the treatment he needed. As of 3 June 2025, he still has not undergone surgery.