Gaza City – On the first day of Eid al-Adha, Widad Al-Husari, 31, sat with her husband, children, and extended family on a rooftop in Gaza City, trying to create a sense of holiday spirit amid an ongoing war and displacement.
The family had dinner, then shared sweets, while the children, dressed in new clothes, played in their tent erected on the terrace until an explosion shattered the evening silence.
Widad rushed to the tent and picked up her three-year-old son, Rafiq, but in the panic, they plummeted through a hole caused by a missile that had penetrated the building.
The rest of the family followed her screams and found Widad clinging to her child and hanging from metal rods protruding from masonry several floors below. Underneath them, a fire raged, caused by a warhead that had detonated just seconds earlier.
“I didn’t notice the openings… It was dark everywhere and smoke filled the place. I was only holding my child when I suddenly fell with him into an opening,” Widad told Al Jazeera.
Widad points to three holes in the middle of the terrace, where the missiles struck, one of them the gap she had fallen through.
“I could feel the heat of the fire beneath me… Everyone was screaming, smoke filled the place, and I was hanging (from the metal rods) until my husband and brothers managed to pull me out with my child,” she said.
“When they (pulled) the iron rods cut my body, my legs, and my back. I lived through moments of hell, like a horror movie, and I still suffer from severe pain and fear to this moment. We were sitting eating Eid sweets, then suddenly everything turned into screams.”
The strike killed seven people, including two children and two women. Eighteen were injured, including her four-year-old niece, Sara al-Khalout, who was thrown by the blast onto the courtyard below. She was seriously injured and is still being treated in an intensive care unit.
Sixty-year-old Zuhdia Azzam, who lived in one of the lower floors of the building, was with her family receiving guests for Eid when a missile struck.
In a single moment, her 12-year-old granddaughter, Sidra, was killed, and another granddaughter, Sham, 11, had her leg amputated.
“The situation was completely calm until we heard a huge explosion… We all rushed to the upper floor where both granddaughters had gone just moments earlier,” Azzam told Al Jazeera.
“We found one of them killed and the other holding her leg that had been cut off. She was crawling. It does not matter to Israel whether it is Eid, an occasion, or a densely populated civilian area – suddenly (a missile) is above your head.”
‘No safe place’
The family’s experiences are similar to those of thousands of others in Gaza, who escaped one war zone for another during the 31-month genocide, with drones and warplanes appearing to stalk their every movement.
Widad and her family once lived in a comfortable home in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of eastern Gaza City, until it was destroyed in November 2023, a month into Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
With their relatives’ homes already teeming with other displaced families, the only refuge Widad could find was the rooftop of a building rented by her brother.
She and her husband had hoped their new rooftop home would provide a haven for her children. That was until the Israeli warplanes struck again.
“I never imagined in my life that we would be bombed in this way. What if the missile had landed on me or one of my children before piercing the roof? Just thinking about it is terrifying,” she said.
“Anyone who says the war has ended is lying. The ceasefire is a big lie, we live in daily fear, and there is no safe place.”
No ceasefire
Although a ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas has been in effect since October 2025, about 930 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2,800 injured in continued Israeli attacks during this period.
Apartment blocks, markets, vehicles, and cafes are still hit without warning, leaving widespread destruction and trauma among civilians.
Some families are given forced displacement orders by the Israeli military just minutes before their homes are turned into rubble. It is never enough time to save their belongings, and even if they survive, they are among the hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians searching for a new home in a devastated landscape.
In the Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City, 55-year-old Imad Khroub was sitting with his family in their home, celebrating the second day of Eid al-Adha, when his son, Saad, 31, received a phone call from the Israeli military intelligence. The voice ordered them and other residents to leave the apartment block, and 15 minutes later, an air strike levelled the building.
“We were living happy moments, but suddenly everyone was crying, screaming, and running… It was extremely terrifying,” he told Al Jazeera.
“How could anyone manage? We took nothing. We left with only the clothes we were wearing.”
Inspecting the debris of his home, Saad saw that the years of hard work and savings to prepare his apartment for his upcoming wedding had been reduced to nothing.
“It never occurred to me, even 1 percent, that our house would be hit,” Saad said.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights warned that Israel’s continued attacks on Gaza’s remaining residential blocks are creating an environment incompatible with human existence or dignity.
An area that has been the focus of Israeli air raids in recent months has been central Gaza, which has been less heavily damaged during the genocide than other parts of the enclave, and so offers the most targets.
The centre said “evacuation warnings” do not give Israel legal justification for the destruction of homes, nor remove the protections afforded to civilians under international humanitarian law.
Amid repeated forced displacement orders and bombings of homes, Khroub says the war continues to follow him everywhere, despite the ceasefire.
“We thought we were lucky and had survived and that our home was still intact… but now we are back to square one,” he said. “The war is still raging fiercely, only in a quieter form… and no one is paying attention to us.”