Dunya is holding a photo. Seven smiling faces look back at her, a snapshot of the lives of friends who worked and socialised with each other.

She is in the middle of the picture, beaming. Now, her smile has gone. This photo was taken just over a year ago, at a birthday party towards the end of September 2023. Just days before the world changed.

The seven women all worked on the nursing staff at al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the biggest medical complex in Gaza but also a site suspected by Israel of housing a Hamas command centre. When the war started, al Shifa was attacked.

Two of the women in the photo are dead.

Rawan Abu Zbeidah, who is second from the left, wearing a black headdress, was killed on 11 November, along with members of her family. She was pregnant. Anwaar Yassin, who is third from the right, was killed at the start of December, along with her husband and children, in Nuseirat, central Gaza.

All the other women in the photograph have been displaced and dispersed.

“That last time we gathered together was a sweet day,” Dunya says. “It was beautiful. A week before 7 October. We never imagined it would be our last. All that’s left now are the pictures we have together, our memories. Our lives just disappeared.”

Dunya fled Gaza City and now works further south at a hospital in Deir al Balah.

“Currently we’re scattered in different places,” she says of her friends who are still alive. “One of us is in the north, there’s no way for me to reach her. She can’t come here, I can’t go there.

“A few of them are displaced in the south. We try our best to keep in touch. We try to see each other if it’s possible. We get on video calls, we try to stay as close as possible.”

‘We can’t bring ourselves to accept this reality of losing her’

Gaza is a place of ruined buildings and shattered lives.

In Gaza City, Houssam is sheltering in the ruined structure of Abdallah Al Dayhan School, where his young daughter, Dareen, used to study. The school has been battered, but it’s still just about standing, just about safe.

Dareen fled to the south in the early stages of the war, assured the city of Khan Younis would be safer. Instead, she was killed, along with four of her relatives, in an Israeli air strike.

Houssam, who stayed in Gaza City along with Dareen’s brothers, is haunted, his eyes hollow.

“Dareen was like any other teenager,” he says. “She was safe and she had ambitions. She dreamed of graduating to become a doctor. We can’t bring ourselves to accept this reality of losing her. We wanted to be there for her.”

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Not far away, Dareen’s former teacher, Roula, also shelters. She used to live across the road, but her home was blown up.

“It’s a challenge for students who want to learn,” she says. “I lost a lot. I lost my home, my family. Some of my students who are very dear to me.“

She still teaches local children and tries to preserve a sense of normality.

But how to be normal when the world outside is rubble?

“There is no safe space for students,” she says. “Schools have been targeted but we have no choice but to carry on teaching, despite being in a constant sense of fear. This is no environment for learning – we have no chairs, no tables, no whiteboard. No classroom.”

A year on from the Hamas attacks on 7 October and the outbreak of war, Gaza is a shellshocked place full of shellshocked people – a land of ruined buildings and wrecked lives.

Enormous explosions and thundering claps of sound reverberated around the Lebanese capital overnight, in what was probably the most violent night yet. They continued into the early hours.

It’s hard to encapsulate just how loud and frightening the Israeli bombings are in Beirut. The sound causes sheer terror. The shockwaves even some kilometres away can be felt shuddering through the buildings and ground.

People run to windows to check how close they might be. And the sound of the Israeli drones flying low and insistently across the city has become a pre-warning and another terrifying indicator of where the bombs might fall next.

The Lebanese Economy minister has called it “a city under siege”.

The Israeli forces spent the night concentrating on targeting the southern suburbs again. The skies of the capital lit up in certain areas as enormous orange mushroom clouds enveloped buildings and huge sparks flew. It is terrifying. Horrifying. Devastating.

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Beirut has utterly transformed in a matter of days. A bustling city centre is now crowded with people living rough, informal camps set up on pavements everywhere. The roads are gridlocked with extra traffic as families circle with whatever they can pile into their cars, searching for a place to camp or find some sort of shelter.

The official shelters in schools, universities, and designated government buildings are now in their hundreds and full to overflowing. A lot of roundabouts and road junctions are now filled with families camped on patches of grass; some have taken to sleeping on the public beaches.

The city is full up.

Nightclubs have been turned into emergency housing for those who have fled their homes from further south nearer the Israeli border – who now find themselves cowering in terror as Israeli jets make multiple air raids throughout the night.

The Israeli military has been issuing “warnings” on a daily, nightly basis and this causes fear and terror in itself.

Dahieh – the southern suburb area most targeted – still has a Hezbollah presence. It is known as a Hezbollah stronghold, but it is worth repeating that it is also usually home to tens of thousands of others who are not affiliated with the militant group, which is proscribed in the UK and US.

Difficult questions to answer

It is an area with a usual population of around 600,000 – so big I had to check and double-check the figure after being questioned about the size by colleagues. The figure is actually a bit old so it was probably, pre-war, much larger.

There are still people there, as well as Hezbollah fanatics. The many people we’ve spoken to tell us they are understandably nervous about leaving their homes with nothing to go to and uncertainty about when they’ll be back. So many have said to us: “But where would I go? What would I do? All I own and have is here – why would I leave it all?”

These are very difficult questions to answer.

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The Israeli forces insist they are targeting Hezbollah military structures and weapons stores, as well as the militant group’s political and leadership structure.

There seems increasing likelihood that the man most touted to replace the recently assassinated leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is now also dead.

Several media outlets have quoted Lebanese security sources saying the group had lost contact with Hasham Safieddine – who hadn’t even yet been officially named as Nasrallah’s successor.

But with the pounding of airstrikes now on a nightly basis and often stretching into the day, the Lebanese feel they are being targeted as a population.

“It feels like collective punishment,” is very often the refrain. Time and again, ordinary people ask us: “Why are WE being hit? Why have we lost our family home?”

The Lebanese government appears to be a bystander in all this, unable to exert diplomatic or political muscle while the Lebanese army is dwarfed in size and power by Hezbollah fighters and weaponry, and the United Nations – which has “peacekeepers” along the Blue Line demarking the de facto border between Israel and Lebanon – is confined to its bases and unable to patrol.

With the death toll already surpassing that of 34 days of war in 2006, it looks most definitely like this is going to be a lot worse in terms of casualties, never mind the level of utter destruction being wrought throughout the country. Yet Hezbollah continues to fire rockets, volleys of them sometimes, into northern Israel, and fight Israeli troops on the ground.

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Lebanese analyst and Hezbollah expert Amal Saad has said for some time, along with many others, that there is unlikely a scenario in which Hezbollah can be beaten militarily. And now Iran is very much involved too.

Michel Helou, secretary general of the National Bloc, a secular political party, said this morning on X: “Beirut just lived one of its worst nights. More than thirty strikes. Total silence in the international community.”

The UN has said Lebanon’s health system is “on the brink of collapsing”. Doctors and emergency workers are telling us in their droves how scared and terrorised they are and how they believe they are being specifically targeted.

The UK’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy has expressed alarm at the increasing reports of health facilities and emergency workers being attacked.

And still, there is no end in sight.

The mass of Israeli tanks and armoured personnel carriers was impossible to hide.

Dozens of beige-coloured military vehicles had assembled in a dirt field in northern Israel, a few miles away from the border with Lebanon.

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They appeared overnight earlier in the week but were gone the next day.

The only evidence of their presence was a few crates of empty ammunition cases and tank tracks in the soil.

It was unclear where the unit disappeared to but, with hundreds of rockets fired by Hezbollah into this part of the country in the past three days alone, it is unsafe to stay in the same location for long – whether or not the heavy armour was bound for southern Lebanon.

Later in the day, we drove closer to the border. It was possible to see Lebanese homes on the hilly terrain on one side and Israeli houses on the other – communities combined by geography but divided by war.

As we stood a few hundred metres away from the border, the sound of distant gunfire could be heard as Israeli ground troops battled against Hezbollah inside Lebanon.

There was also the boom of artillery rounds and the buzz of a drone overhead.

Blackened scorch marks scarred the ground around us – likely caused by some of the many Hezbollah rocket strikes in recent days.

The militant group – backed by Iran – began firing munitions into northern Israel the day after the 7 October atrocities in southern Israel by Hamas, which is also aligned with Tehran.

Since that moment, some 60,000 civilians have fled towns, villages and kibbutzim close to the border.

Enabling all these families to return is a key goal of the widened Israeli operation against Hezbollah, which began last month and expanded into a ground offence in the past few days.

We travelled to Kibbutz Dan, just over a mile from the border. Famous for trout farming, this used to be a vibrant community of around 700 people, including children who would race around on bikes or play in a large swimming pool.

Today, there are only about 150 residents left. Among them are Shaul and Bilha Givoni, aged 80 and 79 respectively.

He has lived in the kibbutz his whole life, including during the 1948 war that followed Israel’s establishment as a sovereign state.

At that time, as a child, he had been forced to evacuate.

“After that, I said – this is my home, no one will ever evacuate me again,” Shaul said.

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He and his wife showed me their lovingly-decorated one-storey home, built next to an orchard, where pomegranate trees were heavy with fruit.

Lucky charms hung on the outside wall of the front of the house, as well as an ornament made out of a chunk of metal from Israel’s air defence system and a display on a shelf made from shrapnel from an incoming Hezbollah rocket.

As we spoke, the distant booms of war could be heard. Bilha admitted that she found it scary. “Fear, fear, fear – it’s a lot of fear. Fear affects our health, our psyche, our thoughts.”

Her husband then interrupted to say: “I’m not afraid.” His wife responded: “That’s why I sit close to Shaul, I can rely on him.”

Pointing to her head and then to her heart, she said: “Shaul works from here [his head] and I work from here [my heart]. We’ve been married since 1969, and together since 1965.”

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Shaul said he supports Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah inside Lebanon, but he and his wife doubt whether it will result in all of the families who fled northern Israel to return – which is one of the stated goals of the Israeli prime minister.

“Home is home, but when one is afraid you can’t force the fear out of him,” said Bilha.

“That’s what happened to many people here – even with the discomfort of being evacuated – they are dominated by fear.”

Her husband added: “I believe that some people won’t return – because of fear but also because it’s already been a year, people have moved on, found new schools for their children. Why should they return to all this mess?”

A day after we visited the couple, they told us that a Hezbollah rocket crashed into the ground close to their home – shattering the peace, but not their resolve to stand firm.