A Christian family was buried alive in Gaza.

but a miracle from God changed everything

My name is Yusf al-Manssour.

I am 42 years old and until October of 2023, my life was defined by words, by the rhythm of Arab literature that I taught at the university and by the comfortable silence of my library in the Rimmel neighborhood of Gaza City.

But Gaza’s silence changed.

It became heavy, laden with the smell of gunpowder and the constant metallic sound of drones that never stop watching the sky.

On that night of October 13th, the air was strangely still, a calm that brought no peace, but rather a tension that made the hairs on my arm stand on end for no apparent reason.

I looked at the dark wooden bookshelves in my living room, where the poetry books seemed like sentinels of a world that was crumbling outside.

Ila, my wife, had just arrived from Alshifa Hospital.

She exuded that strong smell of antiseptic and exhaustion that had become her trademark in recent weeks.

My children, N Karim, and little Salma, tried to draw by the light of a single batterypowered flashlight, as electricity was only a distant memory.

We were one of the few Christian families there, and our home on the third floor of that five-story building had become a refuge, not because it was stronger than the others, but because there we placed our last drop of hope through prayer.

Around
22:00, people began to arrive for our vigil.

There were 18 friends and neighbors from our small community.

People who had crossed destroyed streets and avoided flashes on the horizon to be there.

The apartment hallway was crowded with shoes left at the entrance, a gesture of respect and daily routine that in retrospect seemed so fragile.

Father Antonius, a man of 67 years with a white beard that seemed to glow in the dim light, sat in the worn fabric armchair that I liked so much.

The atmosphere was stuffy.

The windows were taped shut to prevent glass shards from hitting us in case of a nearby impact, which made the air dense with the heat of 23 bodies gathered in a confined space.

I served small cups of warm tea, the last water we had managed to boil, and felt the slight tremor in each person’s hands as they touched the glass.

There were no political speeches, just the low sound of murmurss and the heavy sigh of those who no longer had tears to cry for the dead of the previous day.

We were there to pray for peace, a word that in Gaza sounded like an abstract concept from a science fiction book.

At exactly 22 hours and 37 minutes, I remember looking at the wristwatch my father gave me, an old windup watch.

The second hand seemed to drag.

Father Antonius began to read a passage in a low voice, and Salma, my seven-year-old daughter, was leaning against my knee, playing with the hem of my tunic.

The sound began not as an explosion, but as a displacement of air that made my ears pop painfully.

It was a sudden pressure, a vacuum that seemed to suck all the oxygen from the room before the noise arrived.

And when the noise came, it was not the boom one hears in movies.

It was the sound of a giant breaking concrete bones and chewing metal.

The floor, which I considered the solid foundation of my existence, simply ceased to exist.

I felt Salma’s body torn from my grasp by an invisible force, and then the ceiling descended upon us with a speed that the human mind cannot process.

It was a dive into a blender of dust, rubble, and a darkness so absolute that it seemed to have physical weight.

The final impact was a dry shock that ran through every vertebrae of my spine, ending in a crack at the base of my skull.

For a few seconds, or perhaps minutes, time dissolved.

There was no Yousef.

There was no Gaza.

There was only the sharp, deafening ringing in my ears and the alkaline taste of cement dust in my mouth.

I tried to open my eyes, but my eyelids seemed glued shut by a moist, grainy substance.

The weight on my chest was immense, as if an elephant was sitting on my ribs, preventing me from expanding my lungs.

I tried to move my right hand and felt something cold and rigid, an exposed rebar.

The silence that followed the fall was more terrifying than the roar of the missile.

It was a silence of death, interrupted only by the sound of smaller pebbles settling and the crackling of something burning somewhere above us.

I was buried alive, and the understanding of this hit my brain like a second explosion, making my heart race frantically against the concrete that surrounded me.

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The first thing I recovered was my sense of touch, and it brought me pain.

I felt the heat rising, a temperature that began to climb rapidly, coming from some fire above us in the upper floors that were now our cover of rubble.

My fingers fumbled the fine dustcovered floor, and found a familiar fabric.

It was Salma’s blouse.

I pulled hard, ignoring the stabbing pain in my left shoulder, and heard a low whimper, almost imperceptible.

It was her.

She was alive.

The feeling of her short, rapid breath against the palm of my hand gave me a surge of adrenaline that allowed me to push a block of plaster that was pinning my legs.

I could not see anything, absolutely nothing.

The darkness under tons of rubble is different from the darkness of night.

It is a dense solid blackness that seems to enter through your paws.

I started calling names.

First in a whispered choke from the dust, then with a cry that tore my dry throat.

Ila, Nure, Kareem.

The sound of my own voice seemed muffled, as if the concrete walls were drinking the sound before it could reach anyone else.

One by one, small noises began to emerge from the chaos.

a sob to my left, a long groan of agony further ahead, and Ila’s firm, though trembling voice.

She was about 2 m from me, trapped by a metal structure that had formed a miraculous triangle over her and our two older children, Nure and Kareem.

Hearing her voice say, “I’m here, Yousef.

The boys are with me.

” Was as if the air regained meaning, although each breath was a challenge against the cement mist that floated in the environment.

We were in a tiny air pocket.

By my mental calculations, as I fumbled the edges of our tomb, we were about 6 m long by 4 m wide, and the ceiling, if that unstable pile of slabs could even be called a ceiling, was no more than 2 m high at its highest point.

There were 23 of us inside, compressed in a space where oxygen was already becoming our most precious and scarce commodity.

The smell was unbearable.

It wasn’t just the dust.

It was the smell of chemical smoke, burnt electrical wiring, and the metallic odor of blood that I now felt trickling down my own face.

Selma was on my lap, and when I ran my hand over her forehead, I felt a deep cut and the warmth of blood that would not stop flowing.

She wasn’t crying loudly, just trembling.

A rhythmic tremor that went through me and made me feel the greatest helplessness.

I was the father, the protector, the man who brought them there to pray.

And now I had led them to the center of a crater.

Guilt began to coil in my mind like a snake.

Ila, using her nurse’s instinct, even in total darkness, began to instruct people to stay still.

“Don’t waste air,” she said, her voice trying to mask the panic.

“Breathe slowly through your nose.

Don’t speak unless necessary.

” but how not to speak when you hear the desperate cries of neighbors who lost contact with their loved ones at the moment of the fall.

Father Antonius was near one of the main beams that supported what remained of the ceiling.

He let out a cry of pain that chilled my blood when he tried to move omeaded with superhuman effort not to scream again.

Ila tried to crawl to him, but the space was so tight that she had to pass over other bodies, feeling the hands and legs of people she could not identify.

The heat was oppressive, easily exceeding 40°.

The fire I suspected was raging above us, radiated a dry heat through the slabs, turning our small refuge into a concrete oven.

Sweat mixed with dust, creating a gray mud that stung cuts and eyes.

Every movement caused a new small collapse of gravel, a constant reminder that we were under a house of cards of tons that could definitively close at the slightest sign of external vibration.

I could hear the sound of bombs continuing outside, but the sound reached us as muffled thuds from another planet.

We were buried deep.

Gaza city with its war noise seemed like a distant memory as we fought against the suffocating silence of the underground.

Salma squeezed my hand and I realized she was becoming lethargic.

The bleeding on her forehead needed to be stopped.

But Ila had no light, no gores, nothing but her hands and her own clothes.

She tore a strip from her tunic in the dark.

I heard the sound of the fabric tearing and asked me to press the girl’s wound.

Keep pressure, Yousef.

Don’t let go, she instructed.

My fingers became sticky and warm.

At that moment, the reality of our situation imposed itself with terrible violence.

We were 23 people, many injured, trapped in an unventilated space without water and under a heat that drained our energy every second.

Time began to distort.

Without [music] light and without any external reference, minutes felt like hours.

I tried to count my heartbeats to get a sense of the passage of time, but fear quickened the pace and I lost track.

Kareem, my 11-year-old son, began to hyperventilate.

He had always been afraid of enclosed spaces, and now he was in the worst of them.

I heard the sound of his short, desperate breaths and tried to talk to him.

“Kareem, look at me.

Imagine we’re looking at the stars like you like,” I said, knowing he couldn’t see me, but hoping my voice would reach him like a thread of hope.

He didn’t answer, just continued to sob quietly.

Father Antonius, even wounded, began to pray in a rhythmic whisper, a litany in Greek and Arabic that served as an anchor for the group.

Some people joined the murmur, creating a sonic vibration that seemed to be the only thing keeping us sane in that tomb of steel and stone.

Thirst came quickly.

The dust saturated air dried out the throat instantly, making the act of swallowing a painful task.

I felt my tongue swollen, and the taste of earth ingrained in every tooth.

Ila reported that Father Antonius was losing a lot of blood.

The metal beam had pierced his thigh, and he was leaning against it so as not to pass out from pain.

“We can’t pull it out,” she whispered to me, moving close enough for me to feel the warmth of her breath.

“If we pull it out, he’ll bleed to death in minutes.

” We stayed there side by side in the dark, listening to each other’s heartbeats and the occasional sound of concrete cracking under the immense pressure of tons above our heads.

I thought about how irrelevant my life as a literature professor seemed now.

All the metaphors I taught about suffering and redemption were useless in the face of the raw weight of a construction beam on a friend’s leg.

Around what I estimated to be the fifth or sixth hour, the despair of some group members began to overflow.

A man named Basher, a neighbor who had always been very reserved, started screaming.

He fumbled the rubble walls furiously, trying to push the concrete blocks.

We’re going to die here.

Nobody knows we’re here.

The building fell.

They’ll run bulldozers over us,” he yelled, his voice rising in pitch, until it became a shriek of pure terror.

“Hysteria is contagious in the dark.

I felt panic begin to ripple through the group.

People who had been silent began to cry loudly, and the disorderly movement threatened to cause a new collapse.

I had to let go of Salma for a moment, entrusting her to Nure’s care, and dragged myself towards Basher’s voice.

I found his shoulders and held him with all the strength I had left.

“Bashier, stop! You’ll kill us if you bring down what’s left of this ceiling,” I shouted close to his ear.

I felt his body shake with violent sobs until he collapsed against the dusty floor.

The heat was becoming unbearable, bordering on delirium.

I felt my brain cooking inside my skull.

The lack of oxygen began to produce false lights in my peripheral vision, bright spots that danced in the absolute darkness.

Salma was very quiet now.

The bleeding had lessened, but she was cold.

Despite the ambient heat, a clear sign of shock, I pulled her back to my chest, feeling her little heart beat like a startled bird.

Ila was doing her best, moving among the wounded by touch alone, cleaning wounds with what she had, and offering words of comfort that I knew she herself struggled to believe.

Her strength shamed me and sustained me at the same time, while I battled the guilt of having opened my home to that tragedy.

She fought simply to keep people alive for one more minute.

At some point, I heard a different sound.

It wasn’t a bomb, nor the crackling of fire.

It was a metallic rhythmic sound coming from very far away above us.

Tap tap tap.

Could it be someone digging? Hope is a cruel thing in situations like this.

It gives you a surge of energy that then throws you deeper into the hole when the sound stops.

Everyone fell absolutely silent, holding their breath to listen.

The sound lasted a few minutes and then disappeared, replaced again by the distant roar of war on the surface.

The discouragement that followed was devastating.

A woman at the back of the group began to pray loudly, questioning why God would have abandoned us in a concrete tomb if we were there precisely to cry out to him.

Those words echoed what I myself was feeling deep in my soul.

Where was the protecting hand? Where was the light in the midst of this solid darkness? My thoughts began to wander through memories of my childhood in Gaza, of the smell of the sea in the port and the olive trees in my grandfather’s backyard.

It seemed that
my mind was trying to escape that 2 m high space so as not to go crazy.

I felt fragmented.

One part of me was Professor Yousef trying to logically analyze our chances of survival based on the building structure.

The other part was just a cornered animal wanting to dig with its nails until it saw a thread of light.

The dust never settled.

It floated entering my eyes, my nose, making each breath feel like sandpaper scraping my trachea.

My throat was so dry that speaking became an exercise in agony.

My vocal cords felt covered in ground glass.

Father Antonius called my name with a voice that seemed to come from a deep cave.

Yousef, give me your hand.

I dragged myself to him, feeling the feverish heat emanating from his body.

When I held his hand, I felt the rough skin and the fingers that squeezed mine with surprising strength for someone in his state.

“Don’t let them lose hope in the light,” he whispered.

“Even if we don’t see it, it still exists.

” I wanted to laugh, a bitter, dry laugh.

But I just squeezed his hand back.

How could I speak of light to those people when I myself was immersed in a darkness that seemed eternal? The smell of decomposition of some animal, or perhaps something worse, began to mix with the smell of burning.

The air was getting heavier and heavier, harder to draw into my lungs.

Nure, my 14-year-old daughter, who had always been the quietest, began to sing softly.

It was an ancient hymn, a simple melody we used to sing in church on Sundays.

Her voice was thin, trembling, but it filled the space between the concrete blocks with a strange dignity.

Gradually, other voices joined her, creating a dissonant and fragile harmony.

For a few moments, the fear of being crushed seemed to recede, replaced by a human connection that the concrete could not stifle.

I felt tears stream down, clearing two furrows in the dust on my face.

That was our resistance.

Not steel, not weapons, but that song sung by people who were about to run out of air.

The 15th hour, or what I thought it was, brought a change in the structure.

A sudden bang made everyone fall silent.

The ceiling yielded a few more centime, and I heard the sound of bone breaking, and a short scream that was quickly silenced.

Someone had been hit by a new fall of debris.

Panic returned with full force.

Ila tried to reach the person, but the space was now so reduced that it was almost impossible to move without getting stuck.

The ceiling was inches from my head now.

I had to stay bent over, my neck at a painful angle.

The feeling of claustrophobia became physical, as if the building was actively trying to chew us.

The heat reached an unbearable peak.

I felt my skin starting to blister due to the hot steam that seemed to emanate from the stones.

I began to lose consciousness for brief periods.

There were blackouts where I dreamed of ice water, of the sound of waves breaking on the beach, only to wake up to the taste of dust and the sound of suffering around me.

Salma was no longer moving, just breathing shallowly.

Kareem was in a state of catatonia, hugging his own legs.

I looked up to where the ceiling should have been and saw nothing but infinite blackness.

At that moment, I felt as if I were already dead, as if this were purgatory, an eternal weight in a suffocating void.

Faith, which had once been a bright flame, was now just a dying ember fighting against the cold wind of reality.

I wondered if the people on the surface knew that the five-story building in the Rimal neighborhood was not just a pile of rubble, but a tomb for 23 souls.

We had been down there for over 30 hours, according to my internal clock, which now seemed to be stopping along with my heart.

There was so little oxygen that every movement required monumental effort, and most people were unconscious or in a state of deep stuper.

The silence had returned, but it was the silence of final exhaustion.

I could barely keep my eyes open.

It was then that in the midst of that deadly resignation, a different sound began to vibrate through the floor.

It was not rhythmic as before.

It was a continuous roar, a vibration that made my teeth chatter.

I thought the building was finally going to collapse completely on us, ending our agony.

I closed my eyes tightly, hugged my family as close as the space allowed, and whispered a last prayer, not for rescue, but for mercy.

And it was at that exact moment when the pressure on my temples felt like it would explode my skull that something impossible happened in the deep darkness.

What I saw was not a rescue flashlight, nor the flash of another external explosion that had opened a hole in the slabs.

It was a pale, almost bluish luminescence that seemed to sprout from the very cracks of the crushed concrete in front of us.

At first, I thought my optic nerves were finally collapsing from lack of oxygen, or that the delirium of dehydration had taken over my reason, but the glow was constant and revealed the dust particles suspended in the air, dancing like tiny fragments of stars in a beam that had no obvious source.

The silence that followed that glow was absolute, as if time itself had decided to stop to observe what was happening in that damp, hot hole.

I felt Salma’s body heavy in my arms, but her breathing, previously almost imperceptible, seemed to gain new strength, a deeper rhythm.

Ila, who was leaning on my shoulder, let out a gasp of astonishment.

She was seeing it, too.

It was not an illusion of my feverish mind.

It was a real light, solid enough to cast long, distorted shadows of twisted iron beams against the rubble wall that surrounded us.

With the light came a sound that defied all logic of civil engineering and the laws of physics that I knew.

The immense block of reinforced concrete that weighed tons above our heads and that until then seemed about to crush us definitively began to groan.

But it wasn’t the dry crack of a structure yielding to gravity.

It was a dragging sound, slow and heavy, as if something was pushing that mass of debris away from us.

I felt the vibration in the dirt and cement floor, a tremor that climbed up my legs and made my teeth vibrate.

I saw, with my own eyes injected with blood and dust, a steel beam bent to the opposite side, opening a space that previously did not exist.

It was as if invisible titanic hands were rearranging the rubble, creating an arc of protection where before there was only the chaos of collapse.

The air, which had been stagnant and saturated with chemical smoke, began to move.

I felt a subtle displacement, a breath of air that, although still laden with soot, brought with it a slightly lower temperature, an almost painful relief for my skin that burned with constant fever in that tomb.

The people around me began to awaken from that deadly stuper.

I heard Bashier’s gasp, who before was screaming in pure panic, and now only watched the light with wide eyes, his trembling hands covering his mudstained mouth.

Father Antonius, even with the metal piercing his leg, and his face pale from blood loss, tried to lift his head.

His lips moved in a silent prayer, and I saw a tear clear a dark trail in the ash that covered his cheeks.

The heat was still intense, but the feeling of compression in my chest diminished.

It was as if the weight of the world had been partially lifted.

Kareem crawled closer to me, gripping the sleeve of my shirt with desperate strength.

“Father, what is that?” he asked in a whisper that almost didn’t come out, his throat raar.

I had no literary answer, no scientific explanation about structural tensions or air vacuums.

I just pulled him closer, feeling the warmth of his body against mine, and looked at that opening that grew centimeter by centimeter.

The concrete continued to move, sliding over each other with a metallic, persistent sound of intense friction.

Ila, regaining her sense of duty amidst the ore, began to move in the small space we had gained.

She did not ask where the light came from.

She simply used it.

With vision now facilitated, she could see the severity of Salma’s injury.

The cut on our daughter’s forehead was a dark, deep gash that had already stopped throbbing, but the edges were dirty with debris.

Ila used the little saliva she had to moisten a piece of cloth from her own clothing, and began to clean the girl’s face with short, precise movements.

I watched her hands, the hands that had so often held books or prepared dinner, now acting as the only line of defense between life and death in that crater.

The bluish light gave her skin an almost ethereal tone, making her look like a figure from an old painting, a saint surrounded by rubble and shadows.

In the background, the sound of bombs on the surface seemed to have ceased for an instant.

Or perhaps it was just our isolation that made the rest of the world irrelevant.

We were in a pocket of suspended time, where the only thing that mattered was the next breath and the next centimeter of concrete moving away from our fragility.

The movement of the slab stopped as suddenly as it began.

The silence that followed was even denser than the previous one, broken only by the low moans of pain coming from the back of the group.

I counted the heads I could see under the pale light.

23.

We were all there, huddled like animals in a stone pen, but alive.

The crack that had opened at the top of our safety triangle was about 30 cm wide.

It was not enough for someone to pass through, but it was enough for us to see that there was something beyond that solid darkness.

I pressed my ear to the opening, ignoring the pain in my dislocated shoulder, and tried to listen.

At first, I heard only the familiar ringing in my own blast damaged ears.

But then, coming from somewhere far above, I heard a sound that made my heart skip a beat.

It was the sound of metal hitting stone.

It was not the roar of a plane or the thud of a missile.

It was the rhythmic, deliberate, insistent sound of a human tool.

Someone was digging.

Someone knew we were there, or at least was looking for signs of life under the ruins of what was once our home in the Remal neighborhood.

The news that someone was up there spread through the group like an electric current, reanimating bodies that seemed to have already given up.

Bashier tried to get up, but the ceiling was still too low, and he ended up hitting his head on a beam, which made him fall to his knees again.

“They came.

They’re here,” he repeated, his voice rising in tone bordering on the hysteria we were trying to contain.

I asked him to be quiet, to save oxygen.

But it was impossible to hold back the hope of 22 other people.

Everyone wanted to scream at the same time, wanted to signal their existence to the world outside.

Ila looked at me with an expression of deep concern.

She knew that if everyone started screaming, the little air we had would be consumed in minutes.

I dragged myself to the center of the group and with the authority that my professor’s voice could still command, asked for silence.

We need to [music] be smart, I said, feeling every word scratch my dry throat.

If we all shout together, no one will hear us properly, and we will pass out.

We need a rhythmic signal.

I picked up a small concrete stone and began to tap on an iron pipe that ran near my leg.

The sound of metal hitting metal echoed through our small refuge, a sharp clang that seemed to travel through tons of rubble.

Thump, thump, thump.

Pause.

Thump, thump, thump.

I repeated the pattern, focused only on the movement of my arm, ignoring the exhaustion that weighed on my eyes.

Father Antonius, realizing what I was doing, began to tap rhythmically with his metal ring on the beam he was leaning against.

Soon we were creating a symphony of survival, an improvised code that we hoped would reach the ears of whoever was on the surface.

The heat, however, offered no restbite.

Sweat streamed into my eyes, stinging from the dust, and my vision began to flicker again.

Thirst was now a physical pain, a claw that clutched my stomach and made every breath a conscious effort.

I looked at Salma and saw that her lips were cracked and white.

She needed water more than any miracle of light.

Nure, who was sitting next to her sister, held her hand, and whispered something I couldn’t understand.

Perhaps a story, perhaps a goodbye.

Despair which had receded with the light, began to crawl back through the cracks.

The sound from above stopped.

The silence that followed was agonizing, a vacuum of anticipation that seemed to last an eternity.

I stopped hitting the stone on the pipe, my arm paralyzed in the air, waiting for a signal, any signal that we had been heard.

For several minutes, we heard nothing but our own heavy breathing and the occasional crackle of embers somewhere above.

Then a muffled shout came through the crack.

It was a human voice, distorted by the concrete and the distance, but unmistakable.

Is anyone down there? The sound of those words in Arabic, spoken with a local accent that seemed like the sweetest music I had ever heard, made tears well up again.

I tried to answer, but my voice failed, coming out only as a dry croak.

I cleared my throat forcefully, tasting blood in my mouth, and shouted with all the strength I had left, “Yes, we are here.

We are 23 people.

The effort made me dizzy and I had to lean against the rough wall to keep from falling.

Ila joined me shouting too and soon Nur and Kareem were adding their voices to ours.

The concrete tomb transformed into a resonating chamber of desperate cries for life.

Keep calm.

Don’t move.

The voice from above shouted again, sounding a little clearer now.

We are trying to reach you, but the structure is very unstable.

Don’t shout anymore.

We need to hear the movement of the slabs.

The command brought immediate and reverent silence.

We stood motionless like statues of dust, listening to the sound of muffled conversations and what seemed to be the engine of a generator being started on the surface.

Hope now had an invisible face and a human voice.

However, the reality of our physical state began to impose itself more strongly now that the initial shock was passing.

I looked at Father Antonius and saw that his leg was dark in color under the pale light that still emanated from the cracks.

He was going into septic shock or losing the battle against internal bleeding.

Ila was beside him trying to stop the bleeding with what was left of her clothes, but the expression on her face was one of pure helplessness.

“He needs a hospital, Yousef,” she whispered to me, her eyes full of a sadness she tried to hide from the others.

If we don’t get him out of here in the next few hours, he won’t make it.

The bluish light began to change in intensity, [clears throat] pulsing slowly, as if accompanying the rhythm of an invisible heart.

I realized that it was not just static illumination.

It seemed to have a protective quality.

Where the glow touched the slabs, the concrete seemed firmer, less prone to sliding.

I observed this phenomenon with an astonishment that surpassed my fear.

It was as if we were inside an improvised sanctuary in the midst of hell.

The hours continued to pass, or perhaps it was just minutes, time no longer had meaning.

The heat began to drop slightly, perhaps because the fire above us was being controlled, or because the cool air of the Gaza knight was finally finding a way through the rubble.

I thought of my destroyed library, of my books that were now ashes or under tons of stone, and I realized that none of that mattered.

The only literature worth anything at that moment was the sound of Salma’s breathing and Ila’s whisper comforting an elderly neighbor who was in shock.

We were a small underground church stripped of everything except our faith and our shared humanity.

The sound of excavation began again, but this time it was heavier, more violent.

I felt strong vibrations that made small pieces of plaster fall from the ceiling onto our heads.

The danger of a new collapse was real and imminent.

Each pickaxe strike or machine roar outside felt like a stab in my chest.

I feared that in trying to save us, they would end up sealing our fate.

“Be careful,” I wanted to shout, but I remembered the orders to stay silent.

“Salma woke for a moment, her large dark eyes focusing on the crack of light.

” “Father, is it heaven?” she asked, her voice so weak that I had to tilt my head to hear.

It’s a piece of it, darling, I replied, kissing her forehead covered in dust and dried blood.

We’re getting out.

I wanted to believe my own words, but I looked at the immense twisted metal beams above us and saw a deadly trap that any wrong move could trigger.

The structure looked like a puzzle of tons where each piece depended on the other not to tumble down.

I prayed that the rescuers would be as precise as surgeons.

But in a war zone like Gaza, precision was a luxury we rarely afforded ourselves.

Kareem, who had been in absolute silence for hours, began to point to the opening.

Look, father, they’re not stars, but something is moving there.

I looked and saw a fiber optic cable being inserted through the crack, a thin black snake that carried a small camera at its tip.

The rescue was using search technology in collapsed structures.

The camera slowly rotated.

its small LED light sweeping the environment and revealing our misery in sharp detail.

I saw the faces of the 18 neighbors, all covered by a gray layer of dust, looking like ghosts who had just emerged from the ground.

I saw Father Antonius’s leg, a horrifying sight that made me avert my gaze, and I saw Leila’s face, who looked directly into the camera lens with a determination that must have shocked whoever was on the other side.

She raised three fingers, then pointed to the others, trying to communicate the number of survivors.

A hissing sound came from a small speaker attached to the cable.

We saw you.

Hang in there.

We are from the Muslim civil defense and some volunteers.

We will not leave you behind.

Hearing that it was our Muslim neighbors up there brought a wave of emotion that almost suffocated me.

The voice on the loudspeaker explained that the building had collapsed in a very specific way, creating what they called a survival pocket, but that the surrounding ground was giving way due to craters from other nearby bombings.

They needed to reinforce the base before trying to open a larger hole.

It will take time, the rescuer warned.

Try to stay hydrated if you have any water source.

Water? That word sounded like a cruel mirage.

We didn’t have a drop.

Father Antonius coughed a wet worrying sound.

Tell them not to hurry on my account, he murmured, showing a selflessness that broke my heart.

I carefully picked up the camera cable, bringing it close to my face.

We have seriously injured people here.

A child with a head cut and an elderly man with a beam through his thigh.

We have no water.

Oxygen is very low.

The silence on the other side lasted a few seconds and I heard the sound of someone crying near the microphone.

Understood.

We are sending saline and water through a small duct.

Look for a green plastic tube that we will pass through the same crack.

All eyes turned to the top, waiting for the miracle of water to descend from the concrete sky.

The green tube appeared 10 minutes later, snaking through the debris like a lifeline.

When it finally reached the floor of our refuge, there was an instinctive movement from everyone towards it.

I had to intervene again, holding Basher by the arm.

“Children and the injured first,” I commanded.

And to my surprise, the group retreated in respectful silence.

Ila took the end of the tube, and soon a transparent liquid began to flow.

It wasn’t much, just a constant trickle, but the smell of pure water was more intoxicating than the most expensive perfume.

She gave it first to Salma, who drank eagerly, small drops running down her dirty chin, then Nure, Kareem, and Father Antonius.

When it was my turn, the water touched my tongue and seemed to awaken every dead cell in my body.

It was cold, metallic, and delicious.

We passed the tube from hand to hand, each taking only a few sips, ensuring that all 23 could moisten their throats.

That communion forced by tragedy was the purest expression of brotherhood I had ever experienced.

In the darkness of Gaza, under tons of hatred and metal, we were caring for each other with a tenderness that the outside world seemed to have forgotten.

As we drank, the sound of explosions resumed on the surface, this time much closer.

The ground shook violently, and the bluish light that protected us flickered for an instant.

Fear returned as a physical weight.

They are bombing the neighboring district.

The voice on the cable’s loudspeaker shouted, now charged with urgency.

We need to speed up or the rubble will settle again.

The panic we had tried to contain for so many hours threatened to overflow.

If a bomb fell close enough, the precarious structure that kept us alive would collapse like a house of cards.

I felt the vibrations of the explosions in my chest.

each impact a promise of definitive burial.

Ila hugged the boys, and I placed myself over them, trying to shield them with my own body.

The concrete above us groaned again, and some gravel fell on Father Antonius, who didn’t even have the strength to dodge.

The irony of being saved, only to be killed soon after, was a bitter thought I tried to push away.

The rescue was now a race against time and against the war that continued to roar above, indifferent to the fact that 23 souls struggled not to be forgotten.

Yousef, the rescuer called, his voice now mixed with the sound of sirens and shouts.

We’re going to try to use a hydraulic jack to push away the main slab.

It will make a lot of noise and the structure will vibrate.

Protect your heads and don’t stay under the central beam.

I looked at the beam he was talking about.

It was the only supporting pillar preventing the ceiling from falling on us.

If it gave way, no air pocket in the world would save us.

I instructed everyone to crawl to the corners of the triangle, the space becoming even tighter.

We became entangled, legs over arms in a human mass of survival.

The sound that followed was terrifying.

The hydraulic jack began to exert pressure, and the concrete reacted with cracks that sounded like rifle shots.

Every centimeter the slab rose was accompanied by a scream of metal suffering.

I felt the dust entering my lungs, making me cough violently, but I couldn’t let go of Salma.

The pale light from before seemed to have concentrated around the central beam now emitting a rhythmic pulsation that seemed to hold the weight while the rescuer’s metal worked.

I couldn’t explain it, but I felt that we were not being sustained only by iron and hydraulic oil.

The slab rose high enough for us to see for the first time a real piece of the Gaza sky.

It wasn’t blue.

It was a dark gray cut by the orange glow of fires in the city.

But it was the sky.

The fresh air invaded our hiding place with an overwhelming force expelling the smell of death and dust.

The group let out a collective cry, a mixture of laughter and tears that echoed through the ruins, but the joy was short-lived.

With the entry of air and the change in pressure, the structure began to creek in a new and dangerous way.

Quick, pass the children first, shouted the man from above.

I lifted Salma, passing her small body into the hands that appeared in the opening.

She was gone in an instant, sucked into the light.

Then it was Kareem who looked at me with terrified eyes before being pulled up.

Nure was next.

Seeing my children leave that tomb was like my own heart being removed from my chest, but in a necessary way.

“Go now, Ila,” I said, trying to push her towards the opening.

But she shook her head, pointing to Father Antonius and the other injured who couldn’t move.

I’ll stay until the last injured Yousef.

You know that.

Leila’s stubbornness was her greatest virtue, and at that moment, my greatest agony.

I knew it was useless to argue.

We began to help the rescuers pass our neighbors.

One by one, they were hoisted up by rescue harnesses.

Bashier was one of the first, crying so much he could barely hold the rope.

The process was slow, and every minute felt like an hour under the constant threat of bombs that were still falling in the distance.

Father Antonius was getting grayer and grayer.

When it was his turn, the rescuers had to send down a specialist with a circular saw to cut the metal beam that was pinning him.

The sound of the sawar against the steel was deafening, and sparks flew all over the space, illuminating the concrete walls with yellowish flashes.

Ila held the priest’s hand, speaking softly in his ear, while the rescuer worked with millimeter precision.

I watched everything with nerves on edge, every spark seeming like a potential threat, the smell of burnt metal mixed with sweat and hope.

We were almost there.

Only six people were left when something terrible happened.

A much stronger bang than the others shook the earth, and the opening we had started to use contracted violently.

“Retreat! Retreat!” I heard shouts coming from above.

The vibration of a nearby impact had displaced an immense part of the rubble that we had not yet stabilized.

The rescuer, who was with us down there, looked up with panic in his eyes.

He had only a few seconds to decide whether to stay or go up before the path was closed.

Don’t leave, I shouted, grabbing his canvas jacket.

There are still people left.

But the decision was made by the earth itself.

A cascade of stones and dust fell through the crack, forcing the rescuer to jump back.

He was quickly hoisted up by his companions just before a half-tonon concrete block slid and blocked half the opening.

There were me, Ila, Father Antonius, still pinned to the beam, and three more neighbors in a space that now seemed to be crushed again.

The pale light from before had vanished, replaced by the reddish gloom coming from the remaining crack.

The silence that followed the collapse was interrupted only by the rhythmic sound of the circular saw, which had fallen to the ground and continued spinning, cutting nothing, until the motor died with a metallic choke.

We were alone again, and time was no longer our ally.

I looked at Ila and saw in her the reflection of my own fear, but also a spark of something that would not be extinguished.

“Father Antonius opened his eyes and smiled weakly, as if he knew something we had not yet understood.

” “The light did not come from the ceiling,” Yousef, he murmured, his voice almost a breath.

I did not have time to ask what he meant because a new sound began to emerge from the depths of the ruins beneath our feet.

It was not the sound of rescue nor of bombs.

It was the sound of running water, a strong and constant bubbling that seemed to be rising through the foundations of the destroyed building.

In a matter of seconds, the dust on the floor turned into mud, and I felt the cold liquid rising to my ankles.

We were in an air pocket that was now being flooded.

The irony of having begged for water and now running the risk of drowning in a concrete tomb hit me like a punch.

I looked at the narrow crack above us and saw No’s face screaming my name, but her voice seemed miles away.

It was then that the central beam, the one the light seemed to protect, let out a final and definitive crack, tilting dangerously towards where I was crouching.

The water was freezing cold, a brutal thermal shock against my skin that had been baking in the 40° rubble.

It didn’t just seep in.

It gushed from somewhere deep within the ruptured foundations, bringing with it a smell of wet earth and old pipes.

I felt the mud forming under my boots, slippery and treacherous, as I tried to maintain my balance on the sloping floor.

Ila was struggling to pull Father Antonius to the highest part of that concrete triangle, but the beam still held him with an unrelenting force.

The groan of the building above us changed to a rhythmic thud, as if a giant were hitting the ceiling with closed fists.

I looked at the main beam and saw that it was tilting dangerously towards Ila.

Without thinking, I threw my shoulder against the rough, cold concrete, feeling my skin tear with the friction.

The water rose to our knees in a matter of seconds.

and the fear of drowning after surviving the missile hit me like a punch to the stomach.

Ila’s face was covered in gray mud, but her eyes shone with the determination I had never seen before.

She wasn’t looking at the ceiling that threatened to collapse, but fixing her gaze on the father, whose head was already beginning to droop dangerously close to the surface of the rising water.

“Jesef, help here.

He’s going to sink,” she cried, her voice echoing metallically in that space that was becoming increasingly smaller.

I crawled through the mud, ignoring the sharp pain in my dislocated shoulder, and held the old priest’s torso.

His body was heavy, an inert mass that seemed to want to merge with the concrete.

The water now reached our thighs, carrying pieces of wood, plastic, and furniture debris that floated around us.

The noise of the machines outside seemed to have doubled in intensity, but it sounded muffled by the liquid barrier.

I felt the vibration of the jackhammer passing through the water and hitting my bones.

A constant tremor that made me lose focus, but I refused to let go of the man who had been our anchor there.

Above us, the crack that had been partially blocked by the collapse began to glow again.

Someone was using a powerful flashlight, and the beam of light cut through the haze of dust and the steam rising from the cold water.

“We’re coming back.

Don’t let go of anything,” shouted a voice I recognized as the rescuers from before.

I heard the sound of metal hitting metal with renewed fury.

They were using some kind of hydraulic saw to cut the slab that was pinning us.

Orange sparks began to fall into the water, hissing and disappearing into the dark liquid.

Father Antonius opened his eyes for a second, looked at the light, and whispered something I didn’t understand, but I felt his hand squeeze my wrist with what remained of his strength.

The water was up to my chest now.

I had to stand on tiptoes to keep my nose above the liquid level, feeling the cold penetrate my lungs, and making every movement difficult.

Ila was beside me, holding the father by the neck to keep him breathing.

A silent struggle against gravity and time.

The water pressure against the rubble walls began to make the air crackle.

It was a sucking sound, as if the building was trying to drink what remained of our space.

The other three neighbors, who were still with us, huddled in a corner, praying aloud.

A desperate plea that mingled with the noise of the tools.

Suddenly, a part of the slab above us gave way, not falling, but being pulled out with a monumental crash.

The sky of Gaza, dark and heavy with smoke, appeared again through a larger hole.

Now, pass the rope,” shouted the man from above.

A thick nylon loop descended through the opening, hitting the water with a heavy splash.

I grabbed the rope with trembling hands and tried to pass it under the father’s arms.

The water level was almost at my mouth now.

I had to tilt my head back to avoid swallowing the muddy liquid.

“You go first, father,” I murmured, although I knew he could barely hear me.

Ila helped me secure the knot, her fingers acting with surgical precision even under that absurd pressure.

As Father Antonius’s body began to be hoisted, the metal beam that pierced his leg, emitted an agonizing creek.

There was a moment of absolute tension when I thought the rope would snap or the ceiling would come down with the movement.

The old man let out a short sharp cry before passing out completely, and I saw dark blood mixing with the water around his thigh.

But he went up.

I saw his body being pulled into the light, disappearing beyond the concrete edge.

Then the three neighbors were hoisted up one by one, their pale and terrified faces disappearing towards the surface.

Only Ila and I remained in that pool of rubble.

The water was now at my neck.

I felt the current pulling at my legs, trying to drag me into the voids that the collapse had created below us.

“Your turn, Ila, go now,” I ordered, grabbing the rope that descended again.

She looked at me for a second, a look that contained 19 years of marriage and all the pain of those last hours.

“I’ll wait for you up there, Yousef,” she said before securing herself.

Watching Ila ascend and disappear into the flashlights glare was the loneliest moment of my life.

I stood there alone in the dark with the water reaching my chin and the silence returning for brief moments.

I felt the immense weight of tons of concrete above me, a structure that now seemed to be settling definitively.

The air was almost gone again, and the water had a taste of iron and death.

I closed my eyes and for the first time did not pray for rescue, so I simply thanked God for having seen my family leave that tomb.

I felt something touch my foot in the depths of the water.

It was a piece of the wall clock from my living room.

A mundane object that was now just garbage at the bottom of a crater.

The rope descended one last time, hitting my face.

I held it as if it were the very hand of God.

I wrapped the nylon around my chest, feeling the rough fibers burn my wet skin.

Pull, I shouted, or tried to shout, but the sound came out as a gasp.

I felt a violent jerk and my feet left the muddy ground.

I was ascending, leaving behind the underground world of dust and silence.

The transition to the surface was a shock to the senses.

The air of Gaza, which I had always found heavy, seemed like the purest oxygen in the universe as it entered my lungs.

I was pulled out of the hole by strong, calloused arms.

When my back touched the destroyed asphalt ground, the first thing I saw were the stars shining pale among the clouds of black smoke rising from Rimmel.

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