When Israeli forces launched a ground invasion in December 2023 into the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, forty-one-year-old Nesma Al-Gharabli and her family fled westward on foot toward Salah al-Din Street, the main highway in Gaza. After great difficulty, they managed to get a ride to the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza; there, they found shelter in a small house that had two bedrooms, one bathroom, and one common living area, which they shared with thirty-seven other displaced people.
Though the overcrowding made even basic daily tasks unbearable, Nesma, her husband, and their four children managed. But after being warned by Israeli forces that a nearby house was going to be bombed, the family was forced to flee again, this time to al-Masdar, an area south of Nuseirat in Deir al-Balah. The camp was crowded with families displaced from all parts of the enclave, but living conditions were slightly better than in Nuseirat. They stayed there for nearly seven months.
The available resources and space were limited in al-Masdar, so Nesma’s extended family could only set up two tents—not enough to accommodate each nuclear family separately. The family was divided into separate tents: one for wives and children and another for husbands, in accordance with the practice of having unrelated men and women live separately. Nesma lived in a tent with three other women, her sisters-in-law, and all their children. “Each wife was kept away from her husband,” she recalls.
This separation was especially hard on the Al-Gharabli family: Nesma is the primary caregiver for both her children, one of whom suffers from severe anemia, and her husband, who was born with a developmental disability and relies on sedatives because of his condition. She moved between their tents during the day to check on her husband, prepare him food, and help him with basic daily tasks. Nesma says people in the camp noticed that he would sometimes begin screaming loudly for no apparent reason; she had no choice but to be patient, holding him, staying beside him, and reacting with silence rather than fighting him back.
Today, there is no medication available to calm him. “All I can do is stay next to him when he starts screaming,” she says.
When I met Nesma inside a deteriorating camp in Gaza City, where the family now lives, her hand was broken. She had injured it two days prior when she suddenly collapsed after feeling dizzy. Nesma explained that she has a thyroid disorder that causes instability and loss of balance. When she fell, she lost consciousness; a blood test at the time showed that her hemoglobin level was seven grams per deciliter—normal levels for women range from twelve to 15.5 grams per deciliter.
One of Nesma’s children, Mohammed, was just two and a half years old when the war began. Mohammed was born prematurely in the seventh month of pregnancy, and weighed only 3.3 pounds. The famine in Gaza has exacerbated his anemia and he is suffering from malnutrition, barely able to eat or drink. For more than a year, Mohammed did not eat bread at all. Because of the anemia, his hemoglobin level at one point dropped to six grams per deciliter; a normal hemoglobin level for a toddler is between eleven and fourteen.
This winter has brought the family another layer of suffering. Their tent offers little protection from the rain, wind, and cold—they often wake up to the sound of water seeping beneath their mattresses, flooding the tent. Because it is poorly secured, rainwater soaked their blankets and mattresses. In the mornings, they rush to sweep the water out and spread the wet bedding under the sun to dry.
“My family and I spend an entire day just repairing the tent and drying the blankets,” Nesma says.
She describes how these repeated experiences have exhausted her and her family, both physically and psychologically. Each time a winter storm hits, she feels crushed by despair and by the absence of a concrete home that could protect her children from the cold and rain.
“Every time there is a storm and I see my children suffering, I remember our old home in Shuja’iyya,” she says. “I remember how my children used to play without any of this pain.”
For Nesma, survival is not only about staying alive—it is about carrying an entire family through war, displacement, illness, hunger, and grief, all while her own body grows weaker.
Nesma’s harsh reality lays bare the quiet, relentless weight borne by mothers who are expected to endure everything, even when they are already worn down themselves.