Ruwaida Kamal Amer is a journalist in Khan Younis, Gaza. Her mother has a bone and nerve disease and can’t move if she doesn’t have her medication. Every time Amer can find some, she buys as much as she can. But amid the bombing and displacement, it’s become harder and harder to find. Her mother rations the medicine, stretching it out as long as she can. “We hear her groans,” Amer writes in the left-wing Israeli magazine +972, “yet we’re helpless to alleviate her suffering.”

Amer’s situation is painfully easy to imagine. Who doesn’t have an older relative who desperately needs medication? It’s the kind of agonizing story that’s become commonplace across Gaza in the last year.

In a landscape of horror, it’s even relatively mundane. The tiny strip of land has become home to the planet’s largest population of child amputees in a year of relentless bombing. At least 90 percent of the population has been displaced from their homes. As civilians scurry from one side of the twenty-five-mile strip to the other, ordered back and forth by the Israeli military and then often bombed in whatever part they were told was “safe,” it’s become mind-numbingly common for several generations of an entire family to die together.