by Donya Abu Sitta at Drop Site
On May 19, a wave of sorrow swept through the city of Khan Younis. Residents were awakened at 6:30 a.m. to the sounds of low-flying warplanes and explosions nearby. My younger brothers—Kareem, 18, and Salman, 14—had gone out a few minutes earlier to gather firewood to boil water for our unsweetened tea.
My older brother, Hassan, went out to look for Kareem and Salman and found them standing frozen in the street. They were paralyzed with fear. Hassan brought them home, and I went out on the balcony of our fifth-floor apartment to try and see what was happening around us.
I saw F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters flying very close by—so close, I felt like I could reach out and touch them. It was the first time I ever witnessed a missile fired from a warplane. I saw the massive orange fireball unleashed as the bomb exploded not far away.
The buzzing of the drones overhead was deafening, but the sound of people’s screams and wails were even louder. Everyone in the street was scattering hysterically, running for their lives. We live on a block with apartment complexes around a central courtyard, and I saw my neighbors standing by the windows trying to comprehend what was happening. Thick black smoke filled the air. Even though we had endured nearly 600 days of this war of extermination, I didn’t believe we would survive this day. It was a living nightmare…
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