I live in the West Bank - this is what it is really like

I LIVE in the occupied West Bank.

Forced from our family home by Israel’s occupation forces, my family and I are refugees. I was born and raised in a camp. We are among millions of Palestinian refugees worldwide – making up one in three refugees globally.

I could have joined the resistance against Israel, which has illegally occupied my homeland for decades. But I chose not to. I wanted to be a normal kid with a normal life who dared to dream of a normal future.

I keep hope. It is all that we Palestinians have.

It’s been four months since the start of the most recent war in Gaza. In the first hours of the war as the bombs dropped from the sky around us, the most terrifying part was hearing the bombs and not knowing where they were going to hit. In one of the air strikes, a mother I know lost all her four children.

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We are walking targets. The occupation doesn’t see us as human – something they no longer even attempt to hide from the world. They don’t care if we die or even how we die. Life is getting harder. More Palestinians are dying and facing widespread hunger. We feel alone in our suffering.

Today I heard that funding from the UNRWA may be cut. What will happen to us? What will happen to Gaza? To the millions of Palestinian refugees who have no choice but to seek aid to survive. UNRWA is the only reason Palestinian refugees get any recognition in this world and the only way that three generations of Palestinian refugees have survived after being displaced and losing everything.

Cutting the funding, especially for people in Gaza, will kill whoever hasn’t yet been killed. They will die of starvation or extreme weather without a roof or even a tent to cover them. It feels like everyone has signed up to inflict pain on us. When will the hypocrisy end and all life be seen as equal?

In the afternoon when I’ve finished studying, I go out to see some friends but we all go home before it gets late because of Israeli military raids. Here in the West Bank, raids are much more frequent now and even more destructive.

The streets are empty in the evening; people go home early for fear of being caught up in them. The mosques put on sirens all over the city to warn us when they start so, sometimes, we can escape to our homes just in time. The raids mostly take place after midnight, so our nights become like days. The mosques try to help by putting on spiritual readings to cheer people up and to dampen the sounds of gunshots but the sound of gunshots never gets any easier to hear.

I keep my head down. I want to survive. I’ve seen many people – friends and neighbours killed or die from life in the camps.

However awful life has become in the West Bank, people in Gaza are suffering so much more than anywhere else. I can only imagine how scared they must be.

Here, we have got to a point – and I’m sure this must be true for people in Gaza too – that we are not afraid of dying. What we are afraid of is how we’re going to die. The horror, the terror, the physical pain of being bombed or shot without any hope of help. This is truly our biggest fear.

Life gets ever harder. We are forced to adapt to our occupation, to this war, to our casualties, the economic crisis and the crushing sense that there is no end in sight.

Most people have lost their jobs and are without income. We even struggle to feed ourselves. It hurts to see elderly people and children suffer, knowing there’s very little you can do to help.

During a recent raid, the neighbours came together to clear up the rubble left by the bombs and the destruction. This time, together with many of my neighbours’ houses, my home was also destroyed.

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There’s nothing I want more than to have the world know the story of someone who lives under occupation, in a camp, under constant raids by the occupation force. I want the world to know of our suffering and to not forget us.

But I fear for our safety. The Israeli occupation forces arrest people in huge numbers on flimsy and bizarre charges. We live under constant surveillance. We don’t know when we will be arrested or killed.

December was one of the worst times. The sound of military vehicles was everywhere. The West Bank was peppered with hundreds of Israeli army vehicles and more than 1500 soldiers.

They dropped a bomb and then invaded West Bank with ground forces destroying everything in their path.

Gunshots and bombs filled the air for more than 12 hours. Can you imagine what that feels like? Children, babies, the elderly, our wildlife – we all suffer; we become paralysed with fear.

That night, they raided the hospitals. Soon afterwards, our health ministry informed us that all hospitals were out of service. So, the injured were left to suffer and die in the streets. Two nine-year old boys I know died that night. They were both shot and killed.

Two more young lives cut short. Another day in the life of us Palestinians living – and dying in increasing numbers – under the world’s longest illegal occupation.