To try and understand how bad things are in Gaza, you have to think about all the people you grew up with and came to know: your mom and dad and siblings, but also your grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins; the friends you knew since you were kids, and the friends of friends you knew for just as long; your neighbors, the people you went to school with, the shopkeeper you shared an inside joke with, or the restaurant owner who liked you and always gave you a little something extra with your order.

Now imagine they’re all gone. Maybe they died in air strikes — that’s how all of your family died, buried under the rubble of your house with your brothers, your parents, your grandmother, your dog, leaving, miraculously, only you and your youngest sister. In an instant, the entire world you know is gone, and the same goes for your neighbors and your friends. They’re dead too, along with their families, and if any of them survived, you won’t know, because you have to get moving.

Over the next year and a half, you and your little sister have to move three more times, pitching makeshift tents then abandoning them to walk miles and miles to the next “safe zone,” although you’ve heard that they bomb those too. Death is everywhere, and you spend hours every day trying to find food or clean water to keep your little sister alive, who, in the meantime, has lost both legs in a separate bombing you somehow survived, and whose hand you gripped while she had them amputated because the hospitals had run out of anesthesia.