Some viewers might find the following footage distressing.
The whirring of drones has become an inescapable constant to life in the Gaza Strip. At night the sound is punctuated by more violent intrusions: Israeli missile strikes, sirens, gunfire and the screams of frightened people. The sonic hellscape is alleviated at dawn, when people go out into the daylight to find the missing, dig out the dead and look at the damage. This contrast between the day and night is captured below in sounds recorded over the past year.
Here, we hear the sound stress on Gazans, as witnessed by two Palestinians. It is a layer of the war that experts associate with long term psychological trauma.
Night
At 3am, the incessant buzzing of the drones pauses – unusually. Breaks from the unsettling, high-pitched whirring that Palestinians call the “zanzana” are rare so its absence is noticeable.
But even as Shahd al-Modallal’s ears clear from the drone noises, there is suddenly a series of loud explosions. In the darkness, her family scrambles.
The only light comes from their phones and a red glow outside.
As gunfire hammers the neighbourhood, the family scream at each other to gather together, trying to stay close in the chaos.
Rafah, in the south of Gaza, was supposed to be a safe zone but in reality at no point in this year-long war has it been spared from fighting. A 22-year-old English literature student who also ran her own stationery business, Modallal has watched her hometown transformed by fighting and learned to differentiate between the weapons Israel sends overhead by their different noises. As she cowers in the darkness reciting the Islamic declaration of faith – “I bear witness that there is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his messenger” – as Muslims do daily and when they fear death is close, there are sounds outside that she has never heard before.
All three times Modallal’s neighbourhood has been bombed it happened at night, when people can see almost nothing in the darkness and so strain their ears to hear the noises that haunt them afterwards.
Like most Gazans, Modallal has adapted to war by staying awake throughout the night, hearing the missiles fly and land, learning how the sounds differ when they are at a safe distance, and almost constantly disturbed by the noise of drones. When the buzzing occasionally does stop, Modallal says she feels unbalanced – as if her ears have suddenly popped – and fearful. The pauses often mean the drones have chosen a target and will be replaced by airstrikes.
It is only when morning comes that Modallal can sleep.
Day
Each time he has to leave his sheltering place, Bader al-Zaharna loads his belongings onto his bicycle. Neighbours call out to each other, urging everyone to make the journey together. They grab the bags they now keep ready at all times and then trudge to their next destination, mostly in silence, aside from the clatter of carts pulled by undernourished donkeys transporting their anything of value: clothes, medicine, jewellery and food. An aspiring short-story writer who has studied in the US in pursuit of his passion, Zaharna also makes sure to grab his laptop so he can continue writing.
In the background, Zaharna can hear explosions. He says sometimes it feels like they are in time with his heartbeat, and he fears the next one will come down on his head. He has a heart condition – tachycardia – and these sounds regularly send his heart rate out of control, even with his medication.
After initially leaving his neighbourhood of Tofah in Gaza City when Israeli ground troops invaded in October, Zaharna and his family returned to the city in December. But they have been displaced four times since then, shuttling between their own home in the city’s east and a relative’s in the west. After several months during which they were able to remain at home, they were displaced again in October, after renewed operations in the nearby Jabaliya refugee camp meant the resumption of bombardment close to their home.
Each time, their movement is dictated by an order from the Israeli military. Their phones ring with either a withheld number or one they initially could not recognise but have now become familiar with. When they answer, a gruff, robotic pre-recorded voice tells them to leave where they currently are.
“The voice sounds really frightening, it’s like someone threatening you, ordering to leave, to evacuate and giving you an order to move south, sometimes, to move east, west … You’ve got no option to actually talk to a human being, to ask questions, to negotiate. It’s all recorded. It’s like you’re talking to an AI.”
Zaharna says the calls appear to be geographically targeted rather than sent to specific numbers and can add to the feeling of being hounded. Even when they answer them, the calls continue to come as long as they are in the area, his phone ringing a dozen times in a single day.
Modallal’s days are quieter than the nights. She feels it’s a sort of punishment – they are kept fearful when they can see almost nothing.
The sound of the drone is constant but the city’s usual sounds have faded – there is no sound of traffic or people at work, unless you are near the few operating markets or aid collection points. So all other sounds are amplified.
For several months there were new sounds – a displaced family in the home next door could be heard at almost all times, their children occasionally playing. Until one of the strikes on their neighbourhood killed the family – silencing them utterly. Modallal never learned their names.
“It felt like we were living in a ghost town. Whichever direction you turned to, there was someone who had been murdered,” she says.
The sounds of the day form a backdrop to the new daily routines and everyone learns to differentiate between the sounds of explosions or gunfire and estimate how distant they are. Children have adapted: some are terrified by all sounds but others have stopped flinching.
The sound of drones is not new to Gaza - it has long been associated with disrupted sleep – but over the past year, the sound has been relentless. Children look up at the sinister-looking electronic machines and yell at them to leave.
In the daytime, families search for the missing. There is no rescue or lifting machinery so that search is quiet – the gentle crushing sound of broken glass or rubble being heaved. Families call out the names of the missing. Where people have disappeared, half-starved dogs roam. Some have been seen feeding on corpses.
The daytimes are busy with the tasks of survival – going out to get any food that is available, looking for aid, water or firewood, trying to find a place to charge phones. Women often gather around fires they have built to cook meals for their families; Modallal sometimes records the conversations they occupy themselves with.
Night, again
Zaharna’s phone rings again. The terror of the call at night is the worst, disturbing him when he tries but fails to sleep.
“The sounds of war occupy my head. I have a lot of nightmares,” says Zaharna.
“Receiving that call at night is the worst thing ever. It’s night, it’s dangerous. Sometimes I feel too traumatised to tell my mum and dad that I’ve received a call, that we need to move.”
There was one time when they did move at night – it was the first time they received one of the calls to evacuate. They left with nothing, because they had not yet learned to keep a bag packed at all times, and stepped into the night.
Now Zaharna tries to hold out through the night and wait for the morning before he moves again, listening to the sounds of the city around him: explosions, gunfire, sirens.
The sounds that come mostly raise questions – about their safety, or the safety of others. Sirens occasionally pass as the civil defence try to respond to air strikes.
So Zaharna’s family hold tight and hope they can survive till the morning.
Long-term impact
Modallal listens to voice notes on her phone sent from Gaza by her father and brother. Often, she can barely hear what they are saying over the drones and explosions. She cannot summon the strength to ask them to repeat themselves.
In March, Modallal was able to escape Gaza with her mother, but the rest of her family were not allowed to cross the Egyptian border. She made her way to Ireland and watched as the long-threatened ground invasion of Rafah happened in May and the rest of her family sought refuge elsewhere. She tries to continue with her life but is constantly worried about their safety.
When the war does end, its sounds are likely to have a lasting effect on the population. Studies from Afghanistan have shown that communities can suffer collective trauma in response to the drones and airstrikes.
“The drone, the buzzing sound, is an audible reminder that you can be killed at any moment and that has very serious mental health consequences,” says James Cavallaro, co-author of a study on the subject in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “[High] levels of stress, accelerated heart rates, high blood pressure, post-traumatic stress disorder, full-blown psychiatric episodes. All of those consequences we heard about.”
Bahzad Al-Akhras, a psychiatrist now living in the Mawasi displacement camp, says everyone is now more conscious of the noise of the “military machines” and show signs of hypervigilance – a state of being constantly on guard, often associated with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“This has become the normal behaviour … you are expecting the bad thing to happen. This is abnormal to live in this way,” he says. “Living in survival mode, trying always to escape is affecting our sense of security. These sounds are continuously heard, are in our ears, we are living this again and again … [the young] are learning that nothing is secure, nothing is stable. They have learnt to continuously escape, not to trust others, not to trust life itself.
“This is the most impactful thing: the sounds of bombs, the sounds of warplanes, the sounds of F-16s. We can recognise the missiles from their sounds,” he says. “In the beginning we could not sleep but we have now what you can call an ‘alert sleep’; superficially we are sleeping but we cannot reach the point of deep sleep because of these sounds.”
Insomnia extends beyond Gaza. Modallal still struggles to sleep until after 3am – when the risk of airstrikes would usually recede.
“I can imagine the explosions and the sounds … sometimes I really do hate the night time. I can’t sleep until I see the light.”
Imagery and videos courtesy of Shahd al-Modallal, Bader al-Zaharna, Medical Aid for Palestinians, Azooz on Snapchat, Afaf Ahmed on Instagram, and Getty.
