It has been nine days since Hamas militants launched a brutal attack on Israel which then responded with relentless airstrikes on the Gaza Strip.
Israel says the gunmen murdered 1,300 people and authorities in Gaza say almost-constant bombing has taken the lives of more than 2,300, a quarter of whom are reportedly children.
Politicians around the world are trying to navigate the rescue of Israeli hostages stuck in the hands of brutal militants – at least 199, the government says.
International leaders are also calling on Israel to establish humanitarian corridors for the 2.4 million people who are essentially trapped in a blockaded Gaza.
All the images and footage coming out of the region make it impossible to ignore that it is ordinary people whose worlds are being destroyed in the conflict.
One clip, posted online by Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi, purports to show a doctor, Fadi Khoudari, discovering the dead bodies of his brother and father while treating patients at Shifa Hospital. He can be heard weeping as several of his colleagues hold him.
Gaza | Heartbreaking 😔
— Younis Tirawi | يونس (@ytirawi) October 15, 2023
While Dr. Fadi Khoudari was treating patients that arrived at the trauma unit at Shifa Hospital, he came across his father and brother dead bodies that had had been murdered by the Israeli military pic.twitter.com/pzVqjFhJ4L
At a different hospital in Gaza, four-year-old Fulla Al-Laham woke up from her injuries to find out she had lost almost her entire family.
Her grandmother Um Mohammad Al-Laham said an Israeli airstrike hit Fulla’s home and killed 14 people, including her parents, siblings and extended relatives.
"She doesn’t talk, nothing, just lays in her bed and they give medicine,” Mr Al-Laham said.
Meanwhile, Israelis are reeling over their loved ones being taken held captive by Hamas.
Some 11 members of the same family have not been seen or heard from since Hamas militants stormed the southern Israeli community of Be’eri on Saturday, said Nadav Kipnis, whose parents are part of the missing group.
Relatives believe the group was taken hostage because their bodies have not been recovered and some of their cell phones have been traced to Gaza.
The family is especially worried for Mr Kipnis’ father who uses a wheelchair, takes several medications daily and needs regular hospital care for a severe autoimmune condition.
For now, all they have to go on are the messages and videos contained in a “nightmarish” group chat of Be’eri neighbours who described in real-time as the gunmen went door to door, flushing people from their safe rooms, sometimes by setting their houses on fire, Mr Kipnis said.
He told how the chat described “people jumping off windows because their safe rooms are starting to fill with smoke and they were choking and they broke their legs trying to run to different houses, people being dragged out of their homes by terrorists”.
Shelly Shem Tov, who lives in Herzliya in central Israel, spoke to The Jewish Chronicle about how her life had become “hell” after her 21-year-old son Omer Shem Tov was kidnapped from the Supernova festival by Hamas.
In his last phone call to his mother, he told her he had managed to get into a car and escape but then “the phone stopped”, leaving Shelly to watch helplessly as they tracked his location towards the Gaza border,
Ofek Mishal, 24, previously told The Evening Standard about how he survived Hamas’ festival massacre, only to find out they had killed his 23-year-old cousin Amit Magnezi.
The bartender, who lives near Tel Aviv, joined others who had begun running into the woods, with “terrorists shooting at them”.
Ofek thinks he hid in the woods for seven hours - to the sound of constant shooting and surrounded by dead bodies.
“They don’t care about anything,” he said, “they come to kill, they want to kill. I saw smiles on the faces of terrorists when they killed people.”
Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu is under intense pressure to prioritise the safe return of hostages – nine of whom have already been killed in airstrikes, according to Hamas.
Things only seem to be escalating, with the Israel Defense Forces expected to launch a ground offensive for the first time in nearly a decade soon.
The United Nations is currently in “deep negotiations” to get aid into Gaza, with thousands of Palestinians gathering near the border crossing with Egypt in the hopes of escaping.
