Around noon on Friday, October 20, residents of the upscale Al Zahra neighborhood in Gaza stood in front of the rubble and dust, looking at the place they had until then called home.
Friday was supposed to be a special day: the Islamic day of prayer marks the start of the weekend, and at Al Zahra that means falafel and hummus, coffee and tea, served in spacious family apartments or villas by the Mediterranean Sea.
The residents here knew very well that they were luckier than most in Gaza.
But during the night, Israeli bombs leveled 25 residential buildings, home to hundreds of people.
Israel has bombed Gaza for days in response to Hamas attacks since October 7, but Al Zahra was not targeted until then.
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Some of those who lived there - among them doctors, lawyers, academics, fashion designers and entrepreneurs - tried to stay and survive in the ruins, but most packed up what little belongings they could salvage and scattered across the Gaza Strip.
Hana Hussen, who grew up in Al Zahra, watched the news in horror hundreds of kilometers away from Turkey, where she moved two years ago.
In a frantic phone call that day, she called the family to check on them.
She told them she loved them.
Then the connection ended.
“Thanks for asking. We're still alive"
Residents of destroyed apartment buildings hid from the bombs at a nearby university thanks to the efforts of local dentist Mahmoud Shahin, who led the mass evacuation of neighbors.
The BBC published a story earlier this week about how he was called at dawn by an Israeli intelligence officer warning him that the buildings were about to be bombed.
The Israel Defense Forces told us that they "cannot answer specific operational questions" when asked about the decision not to hit residential buildings in Al Zahra.
Hamas attacked Israel from the Gaza Strip and "nestled itself into civilian infrastructure," they added.
They did not name any Hamas operatives who were killed in the attack on Al Zahra, and no one is believed to have been injured.
Israel says its strategy is to root out Hamas, which it accuses of operating in the heart of civilian communities - and is taking all steps to minimize civilian casualties, such as the phone call Mahmoud received instructing him to evacuate the settlement.
The agent who called the dentist also told him, "We see things you don't."
Mahmoud's neighbors may have made it out alive, but not all of them survived what followed.
The BBC spent two weeks talking to several families from the area, both natives and younger, ambitious newcomers.
They told us how they grabbed what they could from their homes, watched their homes explode before their eyes and then scattered across Gaza and their fate is still unknown.
From makeshift shelters and temporary homes across the strip, residents wanted to tell the story of life and the neighborhood they loved.
We communicated through intermittent phone calls - sometimes with bombs going off in the background - and sporadic messages on Vocabulary.
People stopped talking to run or seek shelter.
In some cases we would lose contact for days at a time.
After a recent communication breakdown during heavy Israeli attacks on the Strip, one resident of Al Zahra ended up sending a short message: “Thanks for asking. We're still alive."
Our conversations show that not everyone who left Al Zahra survived.
Among those reported dead was a young bodybuilder from a local gym whose last words to a friend, according to posts on social media, were: "There's nothing left."
The Hamas-run health ministry says more than 10.000 Palestinians have died in Gaza since the war began, more than a third of them children.
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The Gaza Strip is densely populated, with high levels of poverty and strict entry and exit controls.
But Al Zahra was a neighborhood of massive houses and sparkling open spaces, almond and fig orchards, sports fields and parks.
Al Zahra was built in the XNUMXs by the late Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat as a place for staff and supporters.
Locals say he still has close ties to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, which is a bitter rival of Hamas.
It is north of the Wadi Gaza River - the point from which Israel ordered civilians to go south on October 13.
After that followed days of bombing, Israel's response to an attack by hundreds of Hamas fighters who went on a rampage across the border killing more than 1.400 people, mostly civilians including many children, and taking more than 200 hostages.
The brutality of the attacks in the villages of southern Israel and the massacre of young people gathered at a music festival traumatized the nation.
Everyone we spoke to insisted that, to their knowledge, the area was as far away from Hamas and its operations as possible in Gaza, which has been ruled by Hamas since 2007.
"There was no army here," one man told us.
"I don't think there were even any Hamas supporters there."
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For Nashva Rezek, who lived in Al Zahra for 18 years, "it was the greatest city of all".
Participating in the work of the local community and the youth association, Nasva has been one of the administrators of the community group on Facebook for more than a decade.
If you ask her about a specific tenant, it is very likely that she knows him and may even have his phone number.
The Facebook page has 10.000 followers.
Just before the outbreak of war, there was an announcement about a pool tournament in a local cafe and congratulations to a graduating student.
Now, a Facebook group is sharing new information about the destruction of their neighborhood and commemorating the deaths of those who lived there.
Našva has never been so busy before.
A recent post mourns the death of a family killed in an attack on an Italian restaurant.
When war was declared, Nasva headed south with her husband and four children, as the family always did during escalations of the conflict.
She gave the neighbors the keys, asking them to look after her beloved home while she was gone.
Two days after the first bombings, her own building - the tallest in Al Zahra - was destroyed before dawn.
"Someone called me and said, 'I just passed by your building and it's all torn down,'" she recalled.
She describes her apartment on the fifth floor as "very big and spacious".
Her family bought it and renovated it over the past decade - recently they bought a new air conditioner, TV and furniture.
"A lot of people say it's just money, but for me, my home was my soul."
Now in southern Gaza, she says her family is still in danger.
"Three days ago, they bombed the house next to us. We began to suffocate from the smoke from that bombing."
Her children keep asking her why they couldn't take the new air conditioner and TV with them when they left Al Zahra.
They also keep asking when they can come home to pick up all their toys.
For Nasva, these are her houseplants: "I loved them all."
University professor Ahmed Hamad, who lives in a building near Našvina, was another respected member of the community.
He was one of those who decided to stay after the airstrikes.
A professor of media and communication in his fifties at a university north of the settlement, Ahmed is eager to send us all his studies and proudly tells us about his six children, aged eight to 27.
"One is a dentist, one works in IT, one studied English literature at university. The remaining three are still in school," he says.
When we spoke on the phone last month, Ahmed and his family were hiding in their home in Al Zahra, which now has no doors or windows.
Unable to go to work or school, they spent their time looking for firewood to cook.
They stayed because they were too afraid to evacuate, worried that they would be caught in the storms as they moved south.
But on the night of October 27, Israel stepped up airstrikes and expanded ground operations - and we lost contact with Ahmed.
A few days later, he called to say they had left the settlement after a "very, very rough night" and an even worse morning.
He describes avoiding "incessant bombardment" on the way south.
"Every time a bomb fell, we would fall to the ground."
Entrepreneurs from Al Zahra
During that time in Turkey, Hana remained glued to the phone waiting for news from her family.
While she was waiting, she told us stories about "the most beautiful, warmest place in the world".
Residents of Al Zahra used to gather on the beach and fill the main streets there at dawn and dusk.
On Fridays, Hana and her friends went there to share jokes from the previous week, she says.
As an indication of how the war changed life here, Hana says she began to receive "heartbreaking" messages from those same friends - one asking if Hana would take care of her children if she died, while others sought advice on "alternative options for feminine hygiene products".
The third said that she would like to have clean water to drink.
After many days of waiting, Hana finally managed to establish contact with her family, among them her brother Jahja, whom she described as a kindred spirit.
Jahja was among the new generation of entrepreneurs in Al Zahra.
The XNUMX-year-old fashion designer prefers to talk about his former life instead of his current cramped accommodation south of his neighborhood, where he walked with his family a few hours after their home was destroyed.
He remembers the sounds of birds as he watched the neighborhood from the roof of his family's apartment building.
People often posted footage taken on the rooftops of Al Zahra.
Some show spectacular colors as the sun sets.
"All those things made us very happy," says Jahja via Vocap.
Citing some of his favorite things about the settlement, Jahja writes in a series of messages: “Lights at night. The sea. A quiet and elegant city."
Now he sometimes abruptly ends Vocap conversations.
"Can I go now because bombs are falling near me," he says in one message.
He left Al Zahra with two bags containing an iPad, documents, sweatshirt, water bottle, passport, chocolate and first aid equipment.
He was forced to leave behind carefully designed creations - textiles, dresses and skirts.
"And sewing machines. And many beautiful memories," he says.
Cousins Ali (28) and Muhammed (25) are also young entrepreneurs in the city and had a lot of work in Al Zahra as a pastry chef and cafe owner.
Both lived in a row of buildings destroyed on October 19 and 20.
They invested a lot of money in building a life there.
But he got married earlier this year and spent $6.000 on new furniture in the family home, where his pregnant wife also lived.
His family moved here during the 2014 war between Hamas and Israel, thinking it was "the safest place".
Last month, they prepared bags with two changes of clothing each, ready to grab quickly if they had to run.
"One bag for my mom, one for my brother, one for my wife," he says.
On October XNUMXth, the family took those bags and left everything else behind.
When the bombs hit the building, Ali says all losses doubled - his and his wife's furniture was destroyed along with his parents' belongings.
Two refrigerators, two washing machines, two sofas.
Muhammad says his father had only recently paid off the final installment on their family home, when they too had to evacuate that night.
"He finished paying off the apartment, and now the apartment no longer exists," he says.
Now he spends his days searching for water. "There is no time to rest," he says.
He misses the cafe he used to run on the campus, with a pool table and a picture of the American rapper Tupac Shakur on the wall.
He misses going to the gym every day.
But he misses his friends the most.
"We would joke, laugh. We would sit until midnight."
Journalist Abdullah Al Katib says his extended family also lost four homes in the attacks.
He says that his son keeps asking when he will be able to come home and play with his friends in the park.
But he may never be able to return.
"Our home is now the street. Everything is destroyed," he says.
Mahmoud, the dentist who received the evacuation warning call, is now a volunteer at a health center in central Gaza.
"I smell the worst possible smells. You don't take a bath and you're there with 130 other people."
Mahmoud says he feels lucky to have enough money for the exorbitant prices of daily necessities.
One of Mahmoud's close friends stayed at a villa in Al Zahra, and the dentist recently sent him flour so he could make bread.
But these same foods are now increasingly scarce.
"I went to all the stores today looking for the lens ... and I don't want to overdo it, but I went into at least 40 stores to ask if they had the lens and it was nowhere to be found," he says.
"One store owner told me, 'You're just wasting your time.'"
Mahmoud says he hopes to return to Al Zahra when the war is over.
"I hope that God will allow us to survive and then we will try to fix everything."
The IDF claims that Hamas continues operations from all parts of the Gaza Strip.
They add: “As part of the IDF's mission to defeat the terrorist organization Hamas, the IDF is targeting military targets throughout the Gaza Strip.
"Strikes against military targets are in accordance with the relevant provisions of international law, which include taking sustainable precautions to minimize civilian casualties."
Hana was last in Al Zahra five months ago, not knowing that it was the last time she would see her home.
"If I had known, I would have said goodbye to the walls of my room, which I adore, and which have witnessed moments of happiness and sadness in my life."
"I would take a lot of my things that hold fond memories," she says.
"They left us nothing. Absolutely nothing."
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