Gaza Stories are often written in rubble and silence, not in classrooms. For Yahya Al Agha, they began with a promise of study and ended with survival. At nineteen, he was a first-year Data and AI student in Gaza, commuting from Tel al-Hawa with a backpack full of ordinary hopes. He still remembers his third lecture—it was also his last. By the fourth morning, there were no lectures—only lists: water, bread, fuel, a safe route, a place to sleep.
“On October 7, we woke up not knowing if it was Judgment Day. By October 10, the sky over the Islamic University and the Finance Square was red all night. We prepared either to evacuate—or to recite the shahada.”
In Gaza Stories, the pivot from ordinary to unimaginable is cruelly fast. Yahya’s family had ridden out past escalations. Not this one. By October 14, the day of displacement, the order came to move south. Bedrooms turned into triage centers of memory—books or clothes, toys or tools? He remembers his mother telling him, “two days and we’ll return,” words echoing what their grandparents once said after the Nakba. “Two days” became weeks. Weeks became the call at 11 p.m.: “May God compensate you for the house.” It was gone.
Thirst, Hunger, Survival in Gaza
There is a drumbeat to famine: lines, rumors, ration, repeat. Yahya learned the new vocabulary of survival—collecting kindling, hauling brackish water, cooking over scraps.
“We forgot the taste of fresh water. We ate what there was—canned beans past date. When there was no flour, my mother milled lentils and pasta to make ‘bread.’ I lost thirty-five kilos.”
Displacement multiplied. Khan Younis, al-Mawasi, a classroom turned shelter. He walked three kilometers daily to fill jerrycans. He stood seven hours in a gas line where a quadcopter round cut down the boy two meters away.
“Will I forget the blood? No. In Turkey I’ve had three breakdowns.”
These Gaza stories are Eyewitness Testimonies—human records that later become data points in Civilian Casualty Mapping, threads inside Civilian Impact Reports, and entries for Genocide Evidence Files or a Digital Evidence Archive. Yahya doesn’t speak like a lawyer, but even he now knows the language of International Humanitarian Law, war crime indicators, and the hope that the ICC and ICJ will one day read what survivors wrote by candle and phone light.
“Two Days and We’ll Return”
Tel al-Hawa’s towers magnified each strike. A neighbor was hit; Yahya’s father carried the wounded to a hospital already breaking under weight. On day 45, their own home joined the rubble. That was the last time they saw what they had been building: a just-renovated apartment to celebrate Yahya’s Tawjihi results, his sister’s expensive dental instruments for final year.
“Money goes. But our memories? We left with our bodies; our hearts are still there.”
It sounds poetic; it’s logistics. IDF orders could come at any hour. The family slept in shifts. When drones dove low to flood houses with flare light, they packed in minutes: oxygen cylinders for his grandfather (electric machines are useless without power), one bag, move again. In Gaza, even carrying metal is a hazard—your outline on a screen can look like something else. Yahya says, at any moment while carrying them, I could be bombed because they’re metal and appear to the aircraft that I’m carrying something metal, suspicious. People used to walk around me and scatter away from me.
Bomb Next Door: “Mom, I’m Alive”
One fragment is burned into Yahya’s memory. In Khan Younis, he had just stepped outside to bring things in from the courtyard.
“The strike hit the house three meters away. I flew backward twelve, maybe fifteen meters. My parents thought I was dead—they saw me in the air. I ran in the back door shouting, ‘Mom, I’m alive!’ In Gaza, every day you see a new life.”
He started writing—eighteen pages, then 179. He lists what outsiders skip past: the taste of salt in the tap, the one-kilometer walk to a filthy shared bathroom, the way a market item triggers a memory and an ache. His book is not literature; it’s inventory. And that, too, is War Crimes Documentation.
Gaza’s AlAgha Clan: 275 Martyrs
The AlAgha clan is large in Khan Younis. Large families mean large casualty lists. Yahya keeps a running count—approximately 275 martyrs. One father and son bombed while filling water. An entire tented family erased: a young couple and their two infants. He remembers the first mass killing that hit his own branch on October 8. They “had no relation to anything,” he says—the phrase Gazans use when they want you to understand these were not combatants, not armed, not even political.
This is where Gaza Tribunal ideas take root. Survivors like Yahya ask whether Gaza Tribunal evidence and Gaza Tribunal Reports—along with Russell Tribunal precedents—can converge with UN mechanisms, ICC indictments, ICJ findings, Forensic Investigations, and social-media-driven Witness Eye projects. They wonder how future courts will classify the use of certain munitions, the pattern of strikes on homes, shelters, universities, and hospitals. They ask whether terms like ethnic cleansing or genocide will survive legal scrutiny, and how those words sit in a world still haunted by the Holocaust.
It’s not armchair geopolitics—Israel, Netanyahu, IDF, October 7, Hamas, UN, ICC, ICJ, Trump—these keywords aren’t clickbait for Yahya; they are the architecture of his uncertainty. His plea is simpler: “Just read our files.”
Queues and Shortages Define Gaza’s Hunger
Between displacements, Yahya volunteered. Soup kitchens, ladling whatever could be stretched. He’ll never forget the boys with bowls:
“They’d say, ‘I have nothing to eat—put anything for me, even a little.’ There was never enough. We left with black faces because we had to say, ‘It’s finished.’”
And the market math makes cruelty concrete: lentils are “available,” but at astronomical prices. Famine warps time: you plan the day around queues, then around rumors, then around whether you can sleep through the noise of other people’s hunger.
Education on Pause, Futures on Hold
Before the war, Yahya had a plan stitched together by talent and hustle—editing jobs, marketing freelance, a professor’s promise of training across Canada. On October 5, the doctor told me, ‘I’ll train you in my three companies.’
On October 7, that future was canceled.”
His sister’s future, too. She was in fourth-year dentistry at Al-Azhar—supplies worth $3,000 sitting in a room they were told to leave “for two days.” Now she lights cotton to start cooking fires. Passion curdles when practice rooms become rubble.
Study online? With what electricity? What internet? Even the students who escaped face tuition, rent, residency, clothes, dental care. Families who once supported them now need support from them. In lectures in Istanbul, Yahya looks at slides but sees home.
“I’m physically in Turkey, but every ping from Gaza freezes me. I count rings and wonder if this is the call that says my family is gone.”
The Cost of Leaving, the Price of Staying
Getting out wasn’t a choice; it was a calculus. Rafah lists, midnight internet hunts, “security coordination” that might fail after you pay. Yahya saw people spend $5,000 to $19,000 to exit and still get stuck. Those who made it emptied savings to buy safety—then discovered safety has a monthly fee (rent, food, visas) with no family income behind them.
And still, most didn’t leave. Most couldn’t. For them, after the war will be harder than before: malnutrition, contaminated water, unmanaged chronic disease, a generation’s education shattered. Hospitals without beds, clinics without supplies, schools without buildings.
A Family in the Crosshairs of Ordinary Needs
The most painful stories are not the loudest. Yahya describes carrying his 70-year-old grandfather—down to 30 kilos—like a child to a hospital with no beds. They set him on the metal stairs to the ward. “Priorities,” the staff say; a phrase that slices cleanly through hope when resources are gone.
“In Gaza we stopped asking for safety. We asked for food and sweet water. Just those.”
International justice words feel far away when the lines are for bathrooms and bread. But witnesses like Yahya keep talking, because they know Social Media Evidence—geotagged clips, timestamped posts—will underpin Legal Accountability Cases, Gaza legal review, and Military Conduct Analysis later. It’s why journalists keep filming despite being hunted; why students write books by phone light; why mothers memorize dates they hope judges will one day read aloud.
Exile, Found Family, and the Work of Repair
In Türkiye, Yahya has learned another Gaza skill—building family from strangers. With other displaced students, they formed a circle under a student association. They share rent tips, pass around job leads, and carry one another through the bad calls.
Exile doesn’t mute responsibility; it amplifies it. Now he studies Software Engineering at Istanbul Atlas University, with a quiet vow to pivot into Artificial Intelligence for his master’s—to build tools that might help with Civilian Casualty Mapping, Forensic Investigations, or health triage in disasters.
“We die a thousand times a day. But we also invent. In Gaza, ‘nothing is impossible’—we make something from nothing. If that’s true, then I can take code and turn it into help.”
“We left with our bodies; our hearts are still there. Gaza Stories are not headlines—they’re instructions for the future.”
From Testimony to Tribunal: Gaza Survivors Demand Action
Yahya’s testimony belongs beside Zahra’s, Hossam’s, Laith’s—Stories of Survival that knit together a Gaza Tribunalrecord: Eyewitness Testimonies, Gaza testimonies, Crimes Against Humanity allegations, Destruction of Civilian Infrastructure patterns. He wants UN bodies to move beyond “expressing concern.” He wants the ICC to turn preliminary examinations into indictments, for the ICJ to enforce provisional measures with teeth, for independent Forensic Investigations to match satellite imagery with survivor timelines, and for an open Digital Evidence Archive to protect files from erasure. Ultimately, the call is to confront Israel’s crimes, to hold Netanyahu accountable, and to challenge the Trump-era shields that denied Palestinians justice.
But his most immediate ask is small and large at once: scholarships, rent stipends, mental-health care, and education bridges for the generation stuck mid-degree. He asks for family reunification corridors that allow companions during medical transfers. He asks donors to remember Gaza’s Missing and fund the unglamorous work of identification and return.
The Story of Yahya from Gaza: From Rubble to Records
Hope is not a theory for Yahya; it’s a practice. He folds it into routines: class, part-time work, calls home. He imagines returning with a specialty to help rebuild—labs wired, clinics supplied, a codebase that maps needs instead of grief. And he keeps writing—pages that might one day slot into Gaza Tribunal Reports or a city archive the next generation can visit.
“We used to talk about weather updates. Now we talk about ‘martyr updates.’ Still, I study. Because the after is coming—and after the war is harder than the war. Someone has to be ready.”
Gaza Stories are not simply tragedies; they are records of how to start again. If institutions do their part—international justice with timelines, legal accountability cases with consequences—then Yahya’s code, his sister’s clinic, his mother’s bread that isn’t bread can all move from improvisation back to ordinary life.
Yahya’s story reminds us that Gaza Stories are not mere chronicles of suffering but living testaments to a generation forced to trade classrooms for survival, futures for exile, and ordinary dreams for the language of war crimes—yet through hunger, rubble, and relentless displacement, they endure as both evidence for justice and proof of a resilience that demands the world recognize Gaza’s right to live with dignity and to rebuild with hope. Now, hear it directly from Yahya Al Agha.
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