Nourdine Shnino
Jamal Shnino sits in his eldest son’s partly destroyed house in western Gaza.
My father, sixty-five-year-old Jamal Shnino, used to start each morning drinking a cup of tea in the backyard of his home in eastern Gaza. He lived a quiet life, enjoying good health and simple pleasures. Now, Jamal sits quietly in the corner of his eldest son’s partly destroyed house in western Gaza, his eyes sunken with exhaustion and a grief too deep to put into words. His life, like so many others in Gaza, has been fractured by war. Once a proud father and a steady provider for his family, Jamal is now displaced, heartbroken, and worn down by both physical pain and emotional devastation—and there’s no relief in sight.
Gaza has been under a total Israeli blockade since October of 2023—with two brief instances of limited humanitarian aid allowed through during ceasefires in November 2023 and January 2025—which has forcefully starved the people of Gaza. According to the Health Ministry, 193 people have died of malnutrition since the conflict began in October 2023. As of July 29, the United Nations-backed report indicates that Gaza has entered what the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification has called a “worst case” famine scenario.
As Palestinians in Gaza continue to bear the brunt of Israel’s genocide, its most vulnerable people continue to suffer. For elderly Palestinians like Jamal, the weight of survival is physical, emotional, spiritual, and unrelenting. With critical medications out of reach, safe shelter disappearing, and hope growing dimmer by the day, Jamal’s story is not just one of hardship. It is a quiet testimony of resilience in the face of unthinkable despair.
In March 2024, five months into Israel’s war on Gaza, Israeli snipers shot and killed Jamal’s eldest son, Anwar. The forty-five-year-old had been seeking refuge with his children at the al-Amal Hospital in Khan Yunis. Anwar’s murder left behind a gaping void—and his one-year-old daughter, Sedra, was left in Jamal’s care, though her daily needs have become difficult for Jamal to attend to as his strength declines.
“Since then, I’ve been moving from one place to another, running from the bombs,” Jamal says, his voice barely louder than a whisper. “There is no peace—no place to rest my head.”
In 2021, after nearly two decades of living abroad and obtaining Swedish citizenship, Anwar had returned to Gaza. He told his father he came back because he wanted to reconnect with his homeland, believing it was time to return.
“It’s like fate brought him back just to die where he was born,” Jamal says, his eyes welling with tears. “After all that time away . . .this was how it ended.”
In May 2024, Israeli forces issued evacuation orders for the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, forcing Jamal to flee with his wife, children, and granddaughter to the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.
A few months after Anwar’s death, Jamal began suffering from debilitating fatigue, relentless headaches, and waves of dizziness that left him barely able to stand. Desperate for relief, he visited a United Nations medical point, where a doctor told him he was suffering from both severe stress and spinal issues. He was given no treatment, no medicine, and no follow-up appointment. At around the same time, the physical toll of displacement caught up with Jamal. A slipped disc in his back left him bedridden for weeks in July 2024, unable to move without pain. Flat on his back, he relied on injections and ointments from al-Awda Hospital just to get through each day.
That chapter at the Nuseirat camp taught him endurance, but without access to proper medical care or relief, Jamal became one among the thousands of elderly people in Gaza’s growing sea of silent pain. For Gaza’s elderly, survival has become a daily battle—not just against war, but against invisibility. Throughout the genocide, government leaders and news organizations have emphasized the specific atrocity of children in Gaza suffering from violence and starvation, while the needs of older people who are also living and dying under these conditions have received less coverage and acknowledgement.
In late January, after being displaced for more than a year, people began returning to Gaza City from southern Gaza—only to be met with scenes of widespread devastation. Israeli bombing reduced Palestinian homes to rubble, leaving their Gazan neighborhoods unrecognizable. Amid the destruction, Jamal was overcome with gratitude when he discovered that his house in eastern Gaza was still standing.
But within weeks, a new struggle emerged: His vision began to deteriorate. “Everything became blurry,” he recalls. “I couldn’t see faces clearly anymore.”
He visited Gaza’s only functioning eye hospital, desperate for answers and help. The doctor examined him and delivered yet another blow: Jamal had developed cataracts—known locally as “white water”—in both eyes. He urgently needed surgery to prevent further deterioration. Jamal tried to schedule the operation, but when he arrived at the booking desk, he was told that dozens of patients had already been waiting for operations for months. The hospital, overwhelmed and under-resourced, had not been able to schedule a single one of them.
“There are so many of us waiting,” he says. “They told me I might have to wait many more months—maybe longer. They just don’t have the capacity.”
For Jamal, the loss of his eldest son, the constant displacement and forced evacuations, and the ever-present fear of losing another son during the war have all taken a deep toll. These emotional burdens, combined with the physical pain caused by his spinal condition, have left him in a state of overwhelming exhaustion—both mentally and physically. Still, each morning, despite his frail frame and aching joints, Jamal rises to gather firewood, fetch water, and walk long distances to find food. He shoulders the survival of his shattered family. Even when his legs tremble and his back screams in protest, he pushes forward, refusing to let hunger or despair claim his granddaughter’s future.
In Gaza, being elderly under blockade means watching your body fail without access to doctors, surgery, or even pain relief. It means carrying grief, trauma, and chronic illness while the healthcare system around you is systematically destroyed.
“I’ve lived through many wars, but this one has broken me,” Jamal says. “We’re not just dying from airstrikes—we’re dying slowly from neglect.”