Around midday on Friday, October 20, residents of the wealthy Gaza neighborhood of al-Zahra stood in front of the rubble and dust that were once their homes. Overnight, Israeli bombs had leveled 25 apartment blocks, housing hundreds of people. Israel had been bombing Gaza for days in response to the October 7 Hamas attacks, but al-Zahra had not been affected until now.
Some of those who managed to live - among them doctors, lawyers, academics, designers and entrepreneurs - tried to stay and survive in the rubble, but most were scattered throughout the Gaza Strip.
Hana Hussen, who grew up in al-Zahra, watched the news in horror from hundreds of miles away in Turkey, where she had moved two years ago. In a hurried phone call that day, she called her family to check they were safe. She told them she loved them so much and then the line went dead.
For Nashwa Rezeq, who had lived in al-Zahra for 18 years, it was "the greatest city of all". Heavily involved in neighborhood committees and a local youth council, Nashwa has also been one of the maintainers of a community Facebook group for over a decade. If you ask him about a certain resident, he will likely recognize him. The Facebook page has about 10,000 followers.
On the eve of the war there were posts about a pool tournament in a cafe and a congratulatory message to a graduating student. Now the Facebook group is where they share updates on the destruction of their neighborhood and mark the deaths of residents.
Residents of the destroyed apartment blocks had taken shelter from the bombs at a nearby university, thanks to the efforts of local dentist Mahmoud Shaheen, who led a mass evacuation of his neighbors. The BBC told the story earlier this week of how he received a dawn call from an Israeli intelligence agent warning him that the blocks would be bombed.
The Gaza Strip is heavily populated, with high levels of poverty and strict entry and exit controls. But al-Zahra was a neighborhood of villas and bright spaces, of almond and fig trees, sports grounds and parks.
Al-Zahra was established in the 1990s by the late Palestinian Authority (PA) president Yasser Arafat as a place for staff and supporters. Locals say she still had strong ties to the PA, which is based in the occupied West Bank and is a fierce rival of Hamas. It is located north of the Wadi Gaza River - a point Israel ordered civilians to move south on 13 October. (A2 Televizion)
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