The new baby was supposed to come in early October, when things were still normal. Najia Malaka and her husband, Hammam, had been counting the days. But when the war came to Gaza, they said, they were still waiting.
As Israeli bombs thundered down on Gaza City, Israel’s military ordered everyone in the north to evacuate. The Malakas made a decision. He packed up their two older children to go south. She stayed back with their two toddlers to give birth.
She went into labor that day, Oct. 13. But he had already left. They have not seen each other, barring a few early visits, ever since.
The war has shredded many families since Israel attacked the Gaza Strip in retaliation for the Oct. 7 Hamas-led assault on Israel. Fighting and bombing have killed tens of thousands. Many of Gaza’s roughly two million people have had to flee again and again, scattering families across the strip. Just moving around the tiny territory involves great risk, sometimes death.
For the Malakas, the war is a wall. They have been trapped, less than 20 miles apart, for almost a year.
“My heart aches every single morning,” said Mr. Malaka, 30. “I feel so awful, just missing them and wanting to hear their voices.”
The Malakas relayed their story to The New York Times in separate interviews — he in person in southern Gaza, she by phone from the impassable north.
On the day she gave birth, Israel was just beginning to send troops into northern Gaza. She had a hard delivery. She said she was still catching her breath in the clinic, a nurse washing the blood from her body, when an airstrike hit a neighboring building.
The nurse and the doctors fled, shouting at the new mothers to run. Ms. Malaka said she grabbed her newborn and hid in a stairwell, the umbilical cord still inside her. The strike had flung dust and broken bricks everywhere. Eventually, she edged outside, carrying the infant she had named Mohammed, and found a taxi to her mother’s house, where she was staying while her husband was gone.
When he heard that his son had been born, Mr. Malaka rushed back north, leaving Yamen, then 6, and Sandy, then 4, at his aunt’s home in southern Gaza. But, when he arrived, he couldn’t bring himself to hold 1-day-old Mohammed. He had been like that with their other babies, too. They seemed so delicate, so small, he was afraid he would drop them or hurt them somehow.
He visited twice more over the next few weeks, he said. Then, in early November, Israel’s military surrounded Gaza City to isolate Hamas fighters there and seized the main road from the north to the south, severing the two halves of the Gaza Strip.
For many families with relatives on the other side, a journey that had taken an hour or less was fast becoming about as doable as driving to Mars.
Israel’s military allowed civilians in the north to evacuate south through “humanitarian corridors” at set times of day. Yet people who did flee south, mostly on foot, described a terrifying journey through Israeli checkpoints and down a damaged road strewed with what they said were dead bodies and rubble.
Gazans in the south were barred from returning north, where the fighting was then fiercest.
On his first visit, Mr. Malaka had told his wife she should come south; if his aunt’s house was too crowded, he would find shelter for the whole family of seven.
But she was still weak, and could not yet face the risky crossing with three tiny children — Seela, then a couple months shy of 3, 15-month-old Ashraf and the baby — and all their luggage. In the north, Ms. Malaka’s mother could take care of them, feeding her soup, as Gazan mothers do for daughters who have just given birth.
She was in no shape to go live in a tent, anyway, her mother said; she should stay until the war ended. They thought it would be two months at the most, maybe three.
Then the daily evacuation windows set by the Israeli military ended. She had missed her chance, she thought: bad timing, or just the ruinous illogic of war, which spurned all plans or predictions.
For more than three months, the Malakas lost contact completely. With internet and cellphone service largely cut as Israel laid siege to Gaza, they called and called each other, but never got through.
He was glued to the radio, shuddering every time it reported airstrikes around his mother-in-law’s Gaza City neighborhood. His mind went in panicky circles: Had they fled? Where were they sheltering? How were they finding food and water?
Up north, Ms. Malaka kept telling Seela, Ashraf and Mohammed that they had a father far away in Egypt, buying them toys. It broke her heart that only Seela really knew him. Ashraf kept calling his uncle “Daddy.”
“After the army closed it off,” she said, referring to the north-south divide, “I felt like my whole life was closed, too.”
They got through to each other when cellphone service was restored at last. That first call was joyful and tearful, he recalled, both of them overflowing with questions about how the children were and what they were eating. It pained him to hear that the others had little to eat but potatoes.
“My wife was always calling me telling me that they were hungry,” he said. “And I was totally helpless.”
They have since been speaking twice a day — once in the morning, once in the evening. Though they have exchanged a few photos of the children, there are no video calls. His smartphone broke, so he has only an old Nokia borrowed from a friend.
“‘Where are you, Daddy?’” he said Seela would say. “‘I miss you so much. Please, when you come back from Egypt, can you bring me a little doll?’”
Over the months, Ms. Malaka said she tried to distract Seela with games on her phone and promises of ice cream. But as Seela got older, she learned the vocabulary of war, of bombs and martyrs, as Gazans refer to those killed in the conflict. She realized how close her father was, Ms. Malaka said, and she cried over the phone, asking him to come back.
Even little Ashraf had caught on. Ms. Malaka said she once found the toddler standing at a window, crying, “Baba! Baba! Come here!”
She ached no less for a reunion. Weeping on the phone, she pleaded to join her husband in Deir al Balah, the city in central Gaza where he, Yamen and Sandy had moved into a tent after Israel’s invasion of the area forced them to flee his aunt’s house. She had been packed and ready to go at a moment’s notice, she said, for months.
At one point, she heard that Gazans displaced to the south would be able to return north. Bursting into tears of joy, she called her husband and his mother. “We’re ready to welcome you!” she told them.
But it was just a rumor.
“I’m afraid of being separated forever,” she said. “I’m much more scared of that than of living in a tent or going hungry.”
In the south, her husband was searching for a way, any way, to be reunited. Friends had told him there might be a route to the north close to Gaza’s eastern border. But if he was caught by Israeli soldiers, he said, he feared he could easily be shot.
It would be equally hard for her to come south. She did not have the money for a donkey cart, she said, and the road remained dangerous. Baby Mohammed had already broken a leg falling from her arms as they ran to flee her mother’s house for a shelter.
Even if they managed to reunite, they could not afford a shelter big enough. Mr. Malaka, a builder, had lost his job when the war began, leaving him to eke out around 20 shekels a day, or about $5, selling cigarettes.
In the moments before sleep, seeing them was all he could think about. “I know it would be risky,” he said, “but I spend so much time planning in my head and trying to figure out some way to get to my family.”
But the war had little time for such hopes.
On Aug. 31, 10 months and two weeks after she last saw her father and older siblings, Seela was playing in the street outside her grandmother’s house when an airstrike hit nearby, the family said. The blast knocked a concrete pillar into her.
They took her to one hospital, then another. Seela died the next morning. She was 3.
For her father, Yamen and Sandy, there could be no last look at her, no funeral. There was nothing they could do, he said, but cry.
The post A Gaza Family Separated by a Few Miles, and the War appeared first on New York Times.
