Let’s not pretend this isn’t obvious — Gaza’s homes no longer stand as shelters. They stand as graves. In the heart of Beach Camp, a family once filled a two-story home with laughter, evening prayers, and the smell of bread. That night, fifty people shared one roof, believing that displacement meant safety. By dawn, forty-three were gone. Among the seven survivors was Mr. Samer Al-Ghoul, now living with injuries that never really healed. He speaks from Ankara, carrying not only his scars but the silence of those who can’t speak anymore. His story now joins the living archive of Gaza Stories — the ongoing chronicle of people who still dare to remember.
“Fire carried me and threw me on the street”
Samer describes the night with painful clarity. He and his father had just prayed and talked before sleep when the bombing began. Communications in Gaza had gone dark; no one knew where the strikes would fall.
A flash. A roar. Then nothing. “The missiles came down,” he says. “I found myself flying 150 meters outside the house. Fire carried me and threw me on the street.”
He woke to see his father beside him, lifeless. The house no longer existed — only fragments, bodies scattered across rooftops and streets.
Every name he once called for dinner now lived in the rubble. The missiles erased generations in seconds. “They didn’t find a single body inside the house,” Samer says. “All of them were outside. On neighbors’ rooftops, in the market, in the street.”
Shifa Hospital: Where the Living Lay Beside the Dead
Rescuers carried Samer through the narrow alleys of Beach Camp. When he reached Al-Shifa Hospital, there were no beds left. He lay on the floor among dozens of others.
“The doctor said, ‘This one is alive, throw him on the ground.’ They stitched me on the floor.” For fourteen hours, he lay there, half-conscious, surrounded by cries and dust, waiting for news of his family. When relatives finally arrived, they hid the truth — but he overheard their whispers. He learned that his parents, four sisters, two brothers, their children, and their spouses had all been martyred. Forty-three in total.
“My sisters with their husbands and children. My brothers with their families. All gone,” he says quietly. “We, the living, are the ones being tortured.”
(You can revisit similar testimonies in Gaza’s Missing: Thousands Lost in the Shadow of War and Lost Over 90 Family Member: Story of Dr. Rinad Al-Majdalawi.)
Displacement, Disease, and the Weight of Survival
Samer tried to continue south, carrying his wounds and grief into the makeshift camps of Khan Younis. He stayed in tents built over sewage, with wind tearing through the fabric at night. “Sometimes I’d wake up shouting, ‘Get up, water has entered the tent!’ We’d crawl to another corner,” he recalls. He lost more relatives — not from bombs this time, but from infection and pollution. “They called it a shelter. I called it an epidemic.” He applied three times for medical evacuation but was rejected because of his age. Finally, in April 2024, he paid his way out through Rafah Crossing, one of the last to leave before it closed.
In Ankara, he now cares for ten-year-old Sileen, the only surviving child from one of his sisters’ families. “She lost everyone,” he says. “Her burns and fractures are healing, but her soul isn’t. She can’t accept that she’s alone.” Samer and his wife seek psychological help for her. “She wakes at night crying. Sometimes she shouts at us. The doctor says it’s anger — the only language she has left.”
Gaza’s Businessman Turned Witness
Before October 7th, Samer managed three optical stores — in Gaza City, Khan Younis, and Jabalia. “Everything is gone,” he says. “The shops, the stock, the company. Only memories remain.” Now, he lives on what little savings survived. “People ask me why I’m still alive. I tell them, God chose it. Maybe so I can tell this.” He still calls what happened by its name: genocide. “They didn’t target fighters,” he says. “They targeted families, children, traders, displaced people. The goal was destruction, genocide, and displacement.”
Between Loss and Duty
Stories like Samer’s are the spine of Gaza Stories. They remind us that every number we hear hides a name, a voice, a memory. Like in Gaza Stories: A Mother’s Last Words, A Family’s Goodbye, grief in Gaza isn’t silent — it speaks through the ones who lived. Samer’s final words echo what so many survivors feel: daha “We are martyrs who returned. We’re the ones who came back.”
When One House Held Fifty Souls
Let’s not pretend this isn’t obvious — Gaza’s homes no longer stand as shelters. They stand as graves. In the heart of Beach Camp, a family once filled a two-story home with laughter, evening prayers, and the smell of bread. That night, fifty people shared one roof, believing that displacement meant safety. By dawn, forty-three were gone.
Among the seven survivors was Mr. Samer Al-Ghoul, now living with injuries that never really healed. He speaks from Ankara, carrying not only his scars but the silence of those who can’t speak anymore. His story now joins the living archive of Gaza Stories — the ongoing chronicle of people who still dare to remember.
“Fire Carried Me and Threw Me on the Street”
Samer describes the night with painful clarity. He and his father had just prayed and talked before sleep when the bombing began. Communications in Gaza had gone dark; no one knew where the strikes would fall. A flash. A roar. Then nothing. “The missiles came down,” he says. “I found myself flying 150 meters outside the house. Fire carried me and threw me on the street.”
He woke to see his father beside him, lifeless. The house no longer existed — only fragments, bodies scattered across rooftops and streets. Every name he once called for dinner now lived in the rubble. The missiles erased generations in seconds. “They didn’t find a single body inside the house,” Samer says. “All of them were outside. On neighbors’ rooftops, in the market, in the street.”
Shifa Hospital: Where the Living Lay Beside the Dead
Rescuers carried Samer through the narrow alleys of Beach Camp. When he reached Al-Shifa Hospital, there were no beds left. He lay on the floor among dozens of others. “The doctor said, ‘This one is alive, throw him on the ground.’ They stitched me on the floor.”
For fourteen hours, he lay there, half-conscious, surrounded by cries and dust, waiting for news of his family. When relatives finally arrived, they hid the truth — but he overheard their whispers. He learned that his parents, four sisters, two brothers, their children, and their spouses had all been martyred. Forty-three in total. “My sisters with their husbands and children. My brothers with their families. All gone,” he says quietly. “We, the living, are the ones being tortured.”
(You can revisit similar testimonies in Gaza’s Missing: Thousands Lost in the Shadow of War and Lost Over 90 Family Member: Story of Dr. Rinad Al-Majdalawi.)
Displacement, Disease, and the Weight of Survival
Samer tried to continue south, carrying his wounds and grief into the makeshift camps of Khan Younis. He stayed in tents built over sewage, with wind tearing through the fabric at night. “Sometimes I’d wake up shouting, ‘Get up, water has entered the tent!’ We’d crawl to another corner,” he recalls. He lost more relatives — not from bombs this time, but from infection and pollution. “They called it a shelter. I called it an epidemic.”
He applied three times for medical evacuation but was rejected because of his age. Finally, in April 2024, he paid his way out through Rafah Crossing, one of the last to leave before it closed.
In Ankara, he now cares for ten-year-old Sileen, the only surviving child from one of his sisters’ families. “She lost everyone,” he says. “Her burns and fractures are healing, but her soul isn’t. She can’t accept that she’s alone.” Samer and his wife seek psychological help for her. “She wakes at night crying. Sometimes she shouts at us. The doctor says it’s anger — the only language she has left.”
Gaza’s Businessman Turned Witness
Before October 7th, Samer managed three optical stores — in Gaza City, Khan Younis, and Jabalia. “Everything is gone,” he says. “The shops, the stock, the company. Only memories remain.” Now, he lives on what little savings survived. “People ask me why I’m still alive. I tell them, God chose it. Maybe so I can tell this.” He still calls what happened by its name: genocide. “They didn’t target fighters,” he says. “They targeted families, children, traders, displaced people. The goal was destruction, genocide, and displacement.”
Between Loss and Duty
Stories like Samer’s are the spine of Gaza Stories. They remind us that every number we hear hides a name, a voice, a memory. Like in Gaza Stories: A Mother’s Last Words, A Family’s Goodbye, grief in Gaza isn’t silent — it speaks through the ones who lived. Samer’s final words echo what so many survivors feel: “We are martyrs who returned. We’re the ones who came back.”
The Exile That Doesn’t End
Samer often sits by the window in his small apartment in Ankara, watching the city lights fade into the horizon. He says he doesn’t sleep much. Night reminds him of that October evening — the silence that came before the fire. “When the night is quiet,” he admits, “I start to hear the sound again. The sound of the missiles. The sound of people calling for help.” Memory has no mercy. It doesn’t fade; it just waits in the dark.
Each morning, he walks to the nearby hospital with Sileen. The doctors there know their faces now. Sileen’s burns have started to heal, but her hand still trembles when she writes her name. She draws her family in colored pencils — her mother, her brothers, and the house in Beach Camp. “She draws the windows open,” Samer says, “maybe because she believes they’re still looking out.”
Rebuilding Through Memory
He remembers Gaza not only through destruction but through moments that made it alive — crowded markets, laughter during blackouts, the warmth of bread in his mother’s kitchen. “We had little, but we had everything,” he says. “Now we have everything around us, but nothing inside.” In exile, he carries a notebook where he wrote every name of his lost family. “When I wrote them down, I felt like I was counting stars,” he recalls. “But these stars had already fallen.” Sometimes he reads the list aloud before sleep. “I tell them good night. I tell them I didn’t forget.”
Among the Living Witnesses
On Fridays, he meets other Gaza survivors in a small café in Ankara. No one needs to explain their trembling hands or sudden silences. One man lost his wife and children; another carries the remains of his son’s toy in his pocket. “We talk about rebuilding,” Samer says. “But rebuilding isn’t about walls. It’s about hearts — learning how to live without a map.” He volunteers at a refugee center, helping newly arrived families. “Helping others keeps me from sinking,” he says. He hangs Sileen’s drawings on the wall — houses, trees, the sea. “Maybe someone will see her house and remember their own.”
The Meaning of Justice
When asked about justice, Samer doesn’t hesitate. “Justice isn’t revenge,” he says. “Justice means the world recognizes what happened — that our families weren’t numbers.” He follows the updates from the Gaza Tribunal Reports and War Crimes Documentation. “Every witness is a brick in the wall of truth,” he says. “Even if the world pretends not to see, truth remains.” At night, he watches old videos on his phone — his father laughing, his sisters talking over tea. “I replay it,” he says, “to remember that we once existed in joy, not just tragedy.”
The Hope That Refuses to Die
Samer says exile feels like floating — you survive but never land. “When you lose everyone, you stop belonging anywhere,” he says. Yet he dreams of returning to Gaza, not to rebuild the house but to plant a tree where it once stood. “Maybe a fig tree,” he says. “Something that grows roots where death once fell.”
He looks at Sileen as she sleeps, her small hand wrapped in bandages. “She is Gaza,” he says. “Wounded, scarred, but still alive. Still beautiful.” Then he whispers, “Maybe that’s what survival means — to carry the dead within you, and still teach the living how to dream.”
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