'We're homeless now': Gaza orphanage director describes fleeing south amid Israeli bombings
Hazem and a group of children in Gaza on November 9th. (Source: Hazem Saeed Al-Naizi)
“I could hardly catch my breath because of the intense fatigue,” said Hazem Saeed Al-Naizi, a father of six and head of an orphanage in Gaza City that cares for dozens of children and teenagers, most of them with disabilities.
Like hundreds of thousands of Gazans, 35-year-old Al-Naizi fled south from Israeli bombings and describes “sadness and misery written on their faces.”
One of the orphans, eight-year-old Ayas, became so tired that “the whites of his eyes almost turned blue.”
Between November 2 and December 7, Al-Naizi sent written messages to CNN describing his forced expulsion from the orphanage to the Jabalya refugee camp and ultimately traveling to Rafah via Khan Younis. Due to Israeli attacks across the territory, the Palestinians experienced several communications outages and CNN has been unable to contact him directly since. Sarah Shennib, a United Arab Emirates-based lawyer who has supported the orphanage for years, told CNN on December 13 that he and the children were still alive.
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), nearly 1.9 million people, more than 85% of the enclave's total population, have been displaced since the war began – many more than once.
Al Naizi described the agony of trying to keep orphans alive as airstrikes, rampant shortages of food, fuel, water and medicine, and wintry weather conditions devastate Gaza.
“Imagine that a person reaches a point where he wants to be killed to get rid of this torment, this fear and this humiliation. This happened to us.”
When the seven-day ceasefire between Israel and Hamas ended on December 1, Al-Naizi once again worried about the safety of the children in his care. “Children’s lives are in grave danger and the likelihood of losing them in these circumstances is very high.”
The next day, Al-Naizi and the children fled Khan Younis towards the town of Al Mawasi in Rafah, one of the districts considered an “evacuation zone” by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). When he reached the south, he could not find a place to take refuge together.
“We are now homeless,” he wrote.
He spent $400 – the equivalent of a “month's salary” for families in Gaza – to build a tent for himself and some of the children. To charge his phone and connect with the world, he and other displaced Palestinians stand in line for hours outside a home that has electricity thanks to solar energy.
Even though he has fled to an evacuation zone, he and the children do not feel safer. “The bombing almost never stops and massacres occur constantly,” he wrote.
More than 18,600 people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry. CNN cannot independently confirm this number, but the IDF says it has attacked more than 22,000 targets in Gaza since the war began.
Reflecting on the war he had endured for more than two months, Al-Naizi wrote on December 7, “It is difficult to imagine that people's lives become a mere number mentioned on television.”
“These are the people who were murdered. Each person had a full life, ambitions, dreams, hopes and things they loved.”