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00:00 I am Pragya and I bring to you excerpts from the year-ender issue titled "We Bear Witness".
00:06 The issue is dedicated to the people of Gaza and what they went through.
00:10 I am ready to die here in Gaza.
00:14 Maraz Shamali.
00:15 Republished with permission from This Week in Palestine.
00:19 She is a 21-year-old dental student in Gaza.
00:23 She has survived many Israeli military attacks.
00:26 The Israeli army assassinated two of her uncles and two of her cousins.
00:31 This is her story.
00:33 I don't know where to start or what to say about the current situation here in Gaza
00:39 because we are not numbers.
00:40 Everyone has a story to tell.
00:43 It is my destiny that I was born in a geographical area
00:47 where wars and sieges haven't stopped since my birth.
00:51 I have survived three wars but was not sure I would survive this one.
00:56 During the 2008 Israeli aggression, I was 9-year-old.
01:00 In the 2012 Israeli assault, I was 13-years-old.
01:04 In 2014, I was 15-years-old.
01:09 And here I am, 22 now.
01:12 I still remember vividly when the Israeli occupation forces bombed us directly in 2014.
01:18 My mother and brother were seriously injured but miraculously we survived.
01:25 The story is too long to tell but the scars of the 2014 war have not yet been erased by time.
01:32 And the 2021 Israeli aggression brought back these painful memories as time repeats itself.
01:40 At the beginning of every Israeli assault, my mother sends us to my grandfather's house.
01:46 Is that strange?
01:47 Of course not.
01:48 Actually, this is what every Gazan family does to make sure that if the occupation strikes the house,
01:55 at least one or two of them would survive and the entire family would not be completely obliterated.
02:01 One night I wrote a tweet saying,
02:05 "I am afraid of living at home and living the Shusas massacre of 2014 once again.
02:11 Then again I am afraid of leaving and being bombed and wounded as in 2014.
02:17 There is no safe place in Gaza."
02:19 Two hours later I tweeted,
02:21 "The shelling has intensified. We can't live the 2014 massacre again.
02:27 We will leave the house now. Pray for us."
02:29 We went out and were surprised to find that all the people in our area
02:34 were leaving in the middle of the night.
02:36 They were leaving their homes, hopes and memories, yearning for safety that was no way guaranteed.
02:43 We moved to my aunt's home where about 40 people live in the same house.
02:48 We had hoped it would be safer for us to stay there, but in reality,
02:52 it was more heavily bombarded every night.
02:55 They say death with a group is mercy.
02:59 We didn't gain the safety we had hoped for.
03:02 When the tower next to my aunt's home was bombed, we ran in panic into the street to escape,
03:07 thinking that perhaps the street was safer than the houses,
03:11 as they are being destroyed over the heads of their owners without warning.
03:16 For this and more, read the Year-Ender issue of Outlook.