Gaza couple loses home in Israeli strike as peace talks stall

Just after midnight, Neveen Abu Hatab and her husband Mohammed were awoken suddenly by the sound of shouting from their neighbours.

The panicked screams would save their lives. Shortly after they fled their Gaza home with just a work laptop, an Israeli missile reduced the building to rubble.

“I cried uncontrollably because I lost everything in an instant, for no reason at all,” Neveen says, speaking of the moment she saw footage of her new home in the Zeitoun neighbourhood the burning on social media on Thursday 30 July.

The destruction of the house was heartbreaking for the couple, who had recently married and hoped to get their lives back on track after nearly three years of a brutal Israeli bombing campaign.

Israel has continued launching attacks on Gaza and seized more territory since a ceasefire deal was agreed last October, killing at least 1,222 Palestinians during that time, according to figures from the Gaza health ministry.

Meanwhile, Hamas has stated that it will disarm, but only if Israel ends “all forms of aggression” against it and withdraws its forces from Gaza.

The Israeli military said it killed two Hamas commanders in its overnight strikes on 30 July. Meanwhile, Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that three Palestinian citizens were killed in the Gaza City strikes overnight, and another 21 killed across the Strip by Israeli shelling and gunfire after dawn.

Asked for comment about the strike on Neveen’s home, the Israeli military said it had “struck in several areas in the Gaza Strip and dismantled four Hamas weapon storage facilities”. They claimed the facilities held “Kalashnikov guns, explosive devices, additional ammunition and military equipment”.

“The weapons were intended to harm Israeli civilians and IDF troops operating in the area of the Yellow Line and were dismantled to eliminate the threat,” it added.

The prospects for the a second phase of the truce look bleak, after Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a 15-point document put forward by Donald Trump earlier this year, declaring Israeli forces would not withdraw from Gaza until Hamas was disarmed.

For Neveen and Mohammed, both aged 28, the possibility that there will be no immediate end to the ongoing military strikes in Gaza, has shattered their efforts to rebuild their lives amid the rubble.

She recalls details of the night of the attack tearfully during an interview with The Independent.

“I grabbed my personal bag and work laptop, then we left to get away from the apartment unless than 10 mins before it was targeted,” she recalls.

“We spent the night at my husband’s family home, where I still am to this day. We were shocked later to find out the missiles had rained down on the buildings, burning and fully destroying our apartment.”

The Israeli military added that it takes “great measures to mitigate harm to the civilian population” and that it “works to distance civilians from combat zones and areas where military activity is expected, by issuing advanced warnings and calls to move to safer areas”.

Neveen and Mohammed had waited for years to get married and buy their first home, as the war in Gaza raged. Over nearly three years, the Israeli military has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry, during a bombardment and invasion it launched after the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October in which militants killed 1,195 people, according to Israeli tallies.

“We have not even been married for four months,” says Neveen. “We were postponing our wedding until the Gaza war ended. We finally got married dreaming of stability, only to feel that everything we tried to build was shattered once again, resetting us back to zero.”

“We decided to set up our home despite resources being so scarce.”

With no sign of a stable political future for the Strip, the outlook for Palestinians in Gaza remains bleak.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair, whose role in the Gaza “Board of Peace” has grown in recent months, has been drafted in to try and fast-track the peace process.

Along with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, he met with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, for a nearly-four-hour meeting aimed at saving the 15-point roadmap for peace in Gaza.

But the talks failed to make a breakthrough on the stalled deal, after Netanyahu reiterated the Israeli stance that there will be no progress on the deal or on Israel’s withdrawal from the enclave before Hamas disarms.