The day that turned their lives to rubble: The escape of three families from Gaza

On October 7 last year, life as Karam Ismail knew it was obliterated. After working late the night before, he got home exhausted, wolfed down some dinner and hit his pillow about 4am.

Three hours later, his wife woke him. She’d been sleeping in another bedroom with their five-week-old son, Oday.

“I opened the window and saw the sky was full of rockets and a lot of scary noise,” Ismail says. “I did not imagine what could happen after.”

Yasmin Sabawi (left), Smaher Alalawi and Karam Ismail are Gazans now living in Melbourne.Credit: Simon Schluter

Like many Gazans, Ismail’s life has been a cycle of wars. Speaking from Melbourne’s northern suburbs in his home of six months – a simply furnished townhouse with Oday bouncing around in a baby walker – 31-year-old Ismail effortlessly reels off the many conflicts he has lived through.

He remembers being 10 years old during the Second Intifada, an uprising by Palestinians against Israeli occupation. His school was hit and two of his teachers were killed.

“We just know that every year or two, there’s going to be a war. That’s just the pattern.”

His family’s story in the refugee camp of Khan Younis began during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

His grandparents were forced to leave their home town of Ibdis, a village about 30 kilometres north-east of Gaza City, before the area was seized by Israel’s forces and folded into its borders. They were thrown into a life of poverty.

Karam Ismail with his son, Oday, outside their suburban Melbourne townhouse.Credit: Simon Schluter

Tents in the camp eventually became simple buildings, initially just two bedrooms and a living space constructed with asbestos and mud. Then, in 2004, Ismail’s family added a new floor on top, with nylon sheets draping the windows in place of glass.

Ismail’s mother died of breast cancer when he was 14. The loss shook him, and he was raised by his aunts along with his brother and sister.

Over the following years, his life began to shift. He went to university to study telecommunication engineering and earned good money doing programming jobs for a business owner in Bahrain.

He then started his own successful business providing internet and solar power to the residents of Khan Younis to help curb the electricity restrictions in Gaza.

Credit: The Age

Ismail added more floors to the family home. This is typical of houses in the Gaza Strip, where space is scant. New generations build upwards rather than spread out. By the end of 2021, he had 12 employees. He married his wife, Dina, in January 2022 and they welcomed their baby boy, Oday, on August 29 last year.

“My life was flourishing before October 2023,” he says. “I thought things were going well and I had secured our future, from the mud home to the five-storey house.”

This home has now become one of an estimated 164,000 structures to be damaged or destroyed in Gaza in the 12 months since October 7, 2023, making up two-thirds of the buildings in the strip, according to the United Nations Satellite Centre.

What remained of Karam Ismail’s family home in Khan Younis after shelling from Israeli forces.

On October 7, the first rockets to be heard were those fired by Hamas into Israel. Hamas crossed the border and co-ordinated attacks that killed more than 1100 Israelis.

The Jewish state quickly retaliated with a relentless air and land assault that continues to this day, turning Gaza to rubble and killing countless civilians.

An accurate death toll has so far been difficult to establish. The Hamas-run Palestinian Health Ministry says the number of people killed in Gaza exceeds 41,000 – 16,500 of them children – with almost 100,000 injured, but the true numbers are thought to be much higher.

On the morning of October 7, Ismail’s first thought was to protect his city’s internet and power infrastructure. He worked all day.

“We were used to Israelis responding by hitting specific targets that may belong to the military wing. It didn’t occur to me that we could be harmed, except if we get closer to these military places,” Ismail says.

Oday, pictured at home on his one-month birthday just over a week before the October war began.

“At night I went home and saw the videos of what happened inside Israel. Then I knew that this war would be at least 100 days long. Still, I never thought it would be this. You can’t call this a war. A war is one army against another army. This is a war on civilians.”

Gazans were ordered by Israel to move to the south, and hundreds of thousands of displaced people descended on Khan Younis, cramming into already-full homes.

Ismail says people started asking him to dismantle the solar panels and internet towers because they were becoming targets for Israeli bombs. Transporting solar panels became a perilous task.

“We thought they would not go after us because they said the south was a safe area,” he says.

His new reality hit him when his cousin was killed by an airstrike. He was atop an internet tower on his roof to fix the signal. Ismail was talking to him on the phone at the time. He heard everything.

“They hit the tower while he was on it,” he says.

“Three days later, another tower. Two more cousins were killed. That’s when I decided to pack everything.”

The first hours of work on October 7 after the power was cut off.

In December, Khan Younis was ordered to evacuate. Dina took baby Oday and fled to stay with her family.

Ismail stayed behind with employees to try to maintain their infrastructure. He says they were the only ones left in their part of town. He watched as the Israeli army rolled in.

He stayed 55 days and saw his home destroyed. Ismail says that when they tried to escape, four of his staff were killed. He pulls up a photo on his phone and points at the screen. There, among the rubble, are the bodies of the men he worked with.

Things hadn’t been much better for Dina. Bombs were dropping all around her, including the house next door. Her breast milk disappeared with the fear.

“I would go out every day to look through the pharmacies and the shops to find formula. It was hard to find nappies. Oday got really sick and his rash got really bad,” she says.

Ismail reunited with his wife and son in February. Having lost hope the war would end, he decided to seriously plan their exit from Gaza. In November, Ismail and his family had received tourist visas for Australia after a relative onshore applied on their behalf.

Between October 7 and August 12, the federal government approved 2922 visitor visas for Palestinians, and rejected 7111 applications. About 1300 of those with visas have made it to Australia.

“If I had to leave Khan Younis, we had to leave Gaza. I had not expected to see that level of destruction,” Ismail says.

Ismail and his family bound for Melbourne.

He had to find US$35,000 ($A51,000) to pay for his family, his sister’s family and his brother to cross the Egyptian border at Rafah. They sold whatever gold they could and, in late March, their names made the list to exit. As they travelled the 10 kilometres to the border, airstrikes were firing in the sky to their left. In front of them, cars were bombed. They made it to Cairo and flew to Melbourne in April.

“Australia is a dream after everything we’ve lost in Gaza,” Ismail says. “We want safety.”

It’s been six months since he and his family settled in Melbourne and Ismail is trying to integrate with the help of support services and groups like the Palestine Australia Relief and Action (PARA) Foundation.

He wants to find work and push on, but there are several hurdles. Most obviously, there is a language barrier. Then there is the guilt from leaving behind the relatives who raised him, on top of the psychological trauma.

Oday, after hearing bombs for five months of his little life, still jumps up and screams in fear when he hears unusual noises.

Ismail’s body, too, bears scars. He lost a third of his weight, developed severe irritable bowel disease, and has back and nerve problems from when a ceiling collapsed on him during a blast.

Most heavy though is the feeling of being in limbo. He and his relatives are on a bridging visa waiting for a protection visa, which can take years.

Ismail’s sister Nour at her medical school graduation, with aunts Sabah and Enaam, who remain in Gaza.

Just last week, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told ABC radio he had begun stepping in to grant humanitarian visas to some Palestinians. Ismail worries about investing in a new life in Australia only to be uprooted again and sent back to Gaza.

“We have nowhere else to go,” he says. “If I go to Gaza I’m going to start from below zero. But here, if we can get residency, even if I can’t get a grand future, I know that my child can.”

Ismail says it hurts to see the pictures of the home he and his family had proudly spent decades building, now flattened.

“We have so many memories, and the last memories were the nursery for Oday. That cannot be compensated no matter what happens. We will have to build something else that is void of memories.”

But they are trying. Oday turned one five weeks ago. There is a “Happy Birthday” banner on the wall above a playpen filled with donated toys.

Ismail’s sister, Nour, lives 10 minutes away. She is an internal medicine specialist who had worked around the clock to treat victims of war.

“We hope to be able to give back to this place,” she says. “If we are part of this country, we know that we will be able to contribute, because wherever you plant us, we grow things.”

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Smaher Alalawi cannot settle on a favourite memory of her life in Gaza. It was her house, in general, that she loved most.

“It did not come out of nothing. It was built with so much sacrifice and hard work and labour. All our memories are in our home; I gave birth to my children in this home. I yearn for every part of that,” Alalawi says.

Smaher Alalawi at the home she now lives in with her family in Melbourne’s south-east.Credit: Simon Schluter

It has been only four months since 33-year-old Alalawi arrived in Australia and moved to a single-storey home in Melbourne’s south-east with her husband, Ali, and their three sons: Ziyad, 10, Mohammed, 8, and Yazan, 5.

Life in Gaza was never easy, Alalawi says. As with Karam Ismail’s forebears, her own and Ali’s relatives fled to the Khan Younis refugee camp in 1948.

She and Ali both completed university degrees, but constant conflict meant there was little employment. Ali worked in a curtain shop and Alalawi was a stay-at-home mother.

“Since we were born, our lives were full of wars,” she says. “We made our life and home beautiful as much as we could.”

On October 7, Alalawi was woken by a call from her sister.

“She told me, ‘Don’t wake the kids up, don’t send them to school.’ We started hearing the sound of the rockets and bombs,” she says. “I tried to calm the boys down and said it was just another airstrike.”

Gaza City evacuees arrived and every level of their house was filled with about 100 people. Alalawi says the shelling started to feel more random and heavier than before.

The Alalawi home after Israel’s invasion of Khan Younis.

“They were hitting homes, hospitals, ambulances … everything that was moving. I could be walking in the streets and a car would blow up,” she says. “Every day, we’d wake up and go to bed to the sound of bombs.”

Ten days later, on October 17, their home was hit. It is a date that is seared into this family’s memory.

Ziyad’s little voice interjects: “That was the worst day of our lives.”

The boys were sleeping in the living room, where their parents thought it would be safest. At 4am, an enormous blast landed on the building next door, closest to the room where Alalawi’s sons were.

Glass, stone and shrapnel smashed over them. Alalawi and Ali couldn’t see a thing. It was pitch black and people were screaming all around them, but not their children.

Ali and Smaher Alalawi and their three sons in their Melbourne backyard.Credit: Simon Schluter

“The kids didn’t make any noise. That’s what scared us the most,” Alalawi says. “I started walking on the shattered glass to find them.

“The first thing I found was Ziyad’s hand. I held his hands and asked him, ‘Are you OK? Why are you not moving towards me?’ He said, ‘There’s something on top of me.’”

Ali found his mobile and turned on the light. Ziyad was pinned under a metal window frame. Shards of glass were in his legs. They freed him, then Mohammed, who was beneath a blanket with explosive material burning through.

Finally, they found their youngest, Yazan. He was buried under rubble. For a whole day, Yazan did not stop screaming. Then he stopped talking entirely.

“He would sit in my arms, he never wanted to leave me. It took him two weeks to start talking to me, but he wouldn’t talk to anyone else,” Alalawi says.

Ali’s view of Khan Younis after devastating bombings.

“He became like a baby. Every time he was hungry or wanted to go to the toilet, he would scream instead of using words.”

The October 17 bomb killed 11 neighbours, Alalawi says, including six children.

When the Israeli ground invasion of Khan Younis began in December, she fled with her sons to Rafah to stay with her sister. Ali left a month later. Their house was gone.

In Rafah, about 30 people shared two bedrooms and one bathroom, and they ate canned food that had been stuck inside hot trucks. After four months, Alalawi says, life was unbearable.

“The kids got really sick many times from eating expired foods,” she says. “Disease was spreading everywhere. With one toilet and sleeping on top of each other, there were a lot of skin diseases, rashes, insects in people’s hair.

The destruction around the Alalawi home in Khan Younis.

“We stayed like that until April 17. I couldn’t do it any more. I said to Ali, ‘Just make us a tent.’ On that same day, we were called and told our names were on the list to cross the border the next day.”

Ali’s cousin had organised visas for the family in November. Alalawi says being approved “felt like somebody had lifted us from the bottom of a sea we were drowning in”.

An enormous grin spreads over Ali’s face as his wife recounts the joyful moment she called him to say they finally made Egypt’s exit list. The family of five crossed the border, and their very first stop was to buy chips and chocolate.

“You can’t imagine how much food we bought the kids,” Alalawi laughs.

They flew to Melbourne on May 19. The family is adjusting to its new Australian life.

Ali Alalawi and his children Ziyad, Mohammed and Yazan, on the journey to Australia.

Ziyad and Mohammed are in school, while Yazan is at kinder. They have a cat, Koci, and a classic Aussie Hills Hoist in their backyard.

“Australia is a very different life, the opposite almost,” Alalawi says. “First of all the language. It’s hard but we’re learning. Then the social life – in Gaza we had all our family around us.”

Ali explains that they strictly do not tell their loved ones in Gaza about their lives in Melbourne. These are difficult, daily phone calls. Every time they hang up, they expect it to be their last conversation.

“We just call to check they’re still alive,” Ali says. “What else can you say? We lived it.”

Alalawi is desperate for some certainty around their Australian visa status. They hope to stay.

“The future has been destroyed for the children of Gaza,” she says.

Most profound has been Yazan’s healing. He’s started playing with his brothers again. And last week, he even began speaking to a teacher at kinder.

“He’s not hearing the bombs, he’s not running to me screaming with hands over his ears.”

Most importantly, she says, they feel safe.

“When our kids have gone to school, we know they will come home.”

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Walking into the Sabawi family’s brick house in the outer south-eastern suburbs, it’s hard to believe they arrived in Melbourne only eight months ago.

The home is thoughtfully decorated and has a sunny conservatory they built themselves in the car port. Festooned lights hang from the ceiling above shisha pipes, cosy couches and a small water fountain.

High school student Yasmin Sabawi, 18, at her family’s new home in Melbourne’s south-east.Credit: Simon Schluter

The Sabawis have done all they can to make this feel like home with the support of their many Gazan relatives, who have long lived in Australia. But it isn’t the same as the home they left behind in the Tuffah district of Gaza City, which carried decades of family memories.

Yasmin, 18, says her childhood was beautiful. “All the people who lived in that home filled me with love,” she says.

Yasmin’s great-grandfather was the first to live in what was originally a mud-brick home and she would be the last generation to live there, on the fourth level with mother Lobna, father Ali and two older brothers, Ezz and Zin.

Their whole neighbourhood was shelled by tanks and warplanes. All that survived was a jasmine tree planted on the day Yasmin was born.

On the morning of October 7, she was on the bus heading to her UN-operated school.

A photo from the Sabawis’ home taken after October 7.

“I just looked up at the sky and it was full with bombing. Like New Year fireworks, but not the same,” she says. “Everyone was crying on the bus. I got scared because I was without anyone from my family. When I got home, I found my mum crying.”

Yasmin had lived through wars before, but this one was different. They sheltered inside for about a week as explosions hit all around. Then, Israel told them to evacuate to the south.

Lobna says the family had no choice but to immediately flee. They had a small grab-bag ready to go with two changes of clothes and important identity papers. It’s all they took.

“We thought we were coming back,” Lobna says. “We took 15 minutes. There was shrapnel falling all over the place. The ground beneath our feet was shaking.”

The family of five, along with Yasmin’s 74-year-old grandmother and wheelchair-using aunt, moved five times in four months. Every place they stayed in has now been destroyed. Once, a bomb hit the very building they were sheltering in. They ran for their lives.

For Yasmin, a lot of this period is hard to remember. She says she prayed and relied on her family’s determination to make it through.

In November, they were granted Australian visitor visas. It provided them the hope they needed to hold on until Egypt would permit them to cross the border.

They had spent two months in a tent when, in February, they got a call at 2am: their names were on that day’s exit list.

“It was my happiest moment ever. It was like a dream,” Yasmin says.

They crossed the border with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Two days later, they flew to Australia.

“We arrived at 6am. We came with the sunrise and in that moment it felt that I was born again,” Lobna says.

Yasmin in the conservatory her family built.Credit: Simon Schluter

Yasmin says that at first she’d cover her ears when she heard planes overhead.

Now, she is settling. She is at school doing year 11. She hangs out with friends and cousins, goes to the movies, enjoys spritzing perfume at the shops and helps her mother in the kitchen.

Her English has improved significantly, and she hopes to become a criminal lawyer. Her brothers are studying English and working in construction.

Very few new arrivals from Gaza attend the weekly pro-Palestine rallies. Reasons can include a need to focus on rebuilding their lives, a fear of jeopardising their residency and protests being suppressed back home.

Yasmin says she went once with her cousin to see what it was like. She found it eye-opening and encouraging to see the passion from protesters for the rights of Palestinians.

This weekend, she will not be marching. “I started a new chapter in my life,” she says. “But of course I still worry about my family [in Gaza].”

Upturned furniture and windows blown off the Sabawi family home.

Yasmin’s aunt, uncle and five cousins remain trapped in Gaza. They’ve been unable to get visas, and the Rafah crossing into Egypt has been closed since Israel seized it in May.

Her father, Ali, says: “I call my sister every day and expect the worst. She has stopped wanting to live. Every night there is fire and bombs. She says, ‘We have been sentenced to death, we’re waiting to reach our execution date.’”

The Sabawi family’s roots in Gaza run deep. Ali explains there is a book that traces the names of all the original families of Gaza City, and Sabawi ancestors are charted as far back as the 12th century.

It pains him, but he does not want to return.

“There is nothing for us to go back to,” Ali says. “Everything is gone. The house, the work, the universities, the schools, the streets.”

Yasmin feels that she has found freedom. “There was no oxygen in Gaza.”

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