<\/p>\n
Dozens of them sat in exam hall last week willing to focus on a test and not what was happening barely a five-hour drive away.<\/p>\n
The last time Saja Samy heard from her family in Gaza, they were sheltering, along with thousands of others, at a hospital compound under threat of Israeli air strikes.<\/p>\n
In her dorm room in Egypt, the 20-year-old medical student clutches her phone, desperately scrolling for any clue as to whether her family is still alive.<\/p>\n
On October 7, Hamas fighters had launched a surprise attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing at least 1,400 people, according to Israeli officials. Subsequently, Israel had resorted to bombarding Gaza in retaliation, with the aim of eradicating the group.<\/p>\n
Under siege and battered by Israeli reprisal strikes that Palestinian officials say have killed<\/a> more than 3,700 people, Gaza\u2019s 2.4 million people have since been deprived of electricity and, by extension, most contact with the outside world.<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t think straight. I don\u2019t know where my family is. I don\u2019t know if they\u2019re okay,\u201d she told AFP<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery time I talk to my mom, she tells me that she doesn\u2019t know if they\u2019ll survive this and how I have to take care of myself. But what am I supposed to do on my own?\u201d<\/p>\n Like 6,000 other Palestinians studying in Egyptian universities, Samy has been forced to watch the bombardment in Gaza from afar.<\/p>\n Dozens of them sat in an exam hall last week, willing themselves to focus on a test \u2014 and not their families suffering barely a five-hour drive away.<\/p>\n When her mother last spoke to her from Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, she said she was afraid that \u201cif the air strikes don\u2019t kill them, the children will die of fright\u201d.<\/p>\n Samy doesn\u2019t sleep, thinking of her six-year-old sister lying awake on the ground in the hospital courtyard, shivering in the cold.<\/p>\n Every time she sees news of a bombed-out hospital, her heart stops.<\/p>\n Like Samy, 21-year-old Ghaidaa Jaber stares endlessly at her phone screen, begging for her messages to go through.<\/p>\n The last message from her mother on October 12 said she was leaving their home in northern Gaza to head south with Jaber\u2019s four sisters and three brothers in a desperate attempt to flee the relentless bombardment.<\/p>\n \u201cI haven\u2019t heard anything since,\u201d she told AFP<\/em>.<\/p>\n In panicked group chats, Jaber and other students try to triangulate information.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re trying to see on social media where they\u2019ve bombed, what\u2019s nearby, what roads our families could be on, going through lists of martyrs and families that have been killed.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAll you can do is pray\u201d and hope you don\u2019t come across your own surname, she said.<\/p>\n Haya Shehab, 21, learned from an Instagram post that her extended family\u2019s home had been bombed, killing 45 people \u2014 dozens of them cousins.<\/p>\n \u201cJust like that, 45 of us gone,\u201d said Shehab, who studies at a private university in Cairo.<\/p>\n Jaber was six when she first felt her home tremble under the force of Israeli air strikes and remembers clutching onto her family for dear life as bombs rained down from above.<\/p>\n \u201cI know what it\u2019s like, but this time is so much worse,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The formative memory of Jaber, Samy, and countless others\u2019 childhoods was the war on Gaza in 2014 when Israeli forces killed around 2,250 Palestinians.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was 50 days. There were as many martyred now in the first week of the war,\u201d Jaber said.<\/p>\n For years, Samy\u2019s father insisted the family stay put despite the violence, reminding them \u201cour home is all we have\u201d.<\/p>\nPanicked group chats<\/h2>\n
\u2018This time is worse\u2019<\/h2>\n