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Editor's Note: This story was updated on November 22 to include the name of Moureen Kaki's village, al Mazra a-Sharqiyya.
The Oct. 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel and Israel’s devastating response that has killed more than 13,000 people in Gaza have reignited international attention on Israel and the Palestinian territories. Palestinian Americans in San Antonio who have loved ones in Gaza and the West Bank say their lives have been forever changed.
Asil Elashy said one of the things she misses most about living in Gaza City is the beach, where she met her husband and where, she said, Palestinians in Gaza go to be free.
“I’ve always been, of course, loving the beach,” she said. “This is the only thing that God give us in that Strip to breathe. You’ll see all Gaza people every Friday, because this is the weekend for us, right at the beach. And when you have no power, then the beach is the one that gives you the breeze to breathe.”
Elashy came to the U.S. in 1998 after she married her husband, who became a U.S. citizen after he attended a university in the United States.
Now a citizen herself, she said she’s only visited Gaza a few times since then, most recently in 2021 just months before her father died, because of exorbitant costs and the ever-changing rules to get into the territory.
“I did not choose to stay 11 years without visiting them, without seeing my parents,” Elashy said. “And then we’re getting older, they’re getting older too, and so it’s been always hard to go visit them.”
Elashy said she has not lost any close loved ones since the bombing started, but their lives are in constant peril.
Her immediate family evacuated from Gaza City to Khan Younis, a city in the south of Gaza, in the first 10 days of Israel’s bombing campaign.
Then the bombing in the south intensified, killing thousands.
“Israel did not stop bombing even to the safe area that they claimed was safe and asking people to evacuate from the north part to the south part, so people started to doubt,” she said.
So her family went back to their home in Gaza City before fleeing again to the southern city of Rafah, which borders Egypt, as Israeli soldiers encircled Gaza City.
Elashy said her mom and brother’s names are finally on the list to exit through the Rafah border, but her mother is too frail to go alone, and her brother won’t leave his wife and children.
She said she has looked for any attorneys or elected officials who can help get her family out of Gaza.
“When it comes to them, when it comes to just like [the] last minute, you just wanna save them,” Elashy said. “And saving them for me is just if I can get them outside Gaza, crossing the border.”
Israel’s brutal bombing and ground campaign in Gaza have made the small enclave the center of international attention, but violence has also spiked in the West Bank, where the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed 202 Palestinians since Oct. 7.
Sara Masoud said her family lives in Burqa, a small village north of the Palestinian city of Nablus.
She visited her family’s home in July with friends for the first time since childhood.
“Oh man, it was like everything,” she said. “It was my first time being back since I was a kid, it was beautiful.”
But she said the process of getting to her family was humiliating and dehumanizing.
Even as American citizens, Masoud said she and her friends who have Palestinian heritage were forced to wait for hours as Israeli soldiers checked their papers, while non-Palestinian Americans moved through much more quickly.
Masoud said every checkpoint they went through was filled with Israeli soldiers with their rifles pointed at them, and it didn’t stop once they got to her family’s village.
“Our village in particular has a lot of children. It’s quite beautiful. You have kids running around. The streets are full of kids and laughter — juxtaposed with soldiers with guns pointed at them constantly,” Masoud said.
She said her family has often dealt with violence, harassment, and hateful graffiti from Israeli settlers who live nearby, but that things have only gotten worse since Oct. 7.
“A couple of weeks ago a second cousin of mine was shot by a settler — not by a soldier — by a settler,” she said.
Masoud said the settler shot her cousin when he decided to talk back after being harassed.
He is recovering but has a wound in his arm that she said will last for the rest of his life.
The Israeli settlers near her village and across the West Bank live illegally in territory the U.N. has designated for a future Palestinian state.
They are often aided by Israel through official electrical grid and water connections, as well as with the protection of Israeli soldiers.
The U.N. has said Israeli soldiers often accompany settlers when they kill Palestinians, offering them “near total impunity.”
Israel has said it does not tolerate anyone taking the law into their own hands.
Masoud said Israeli soldiers watched when the settler shot her cousin.
“The concern is every morning we wake up, and we’re worried about when is it going to happen that a settler comes down that steals our ancestral home and our village,” she said. “The Masoud family has a home there. And that’s a fear because it happens.”
President Joe Biden has threatened sanctions against individual Israeli settlers who have become increasingly violent in the West Bank.
Masoud said her family will never leave Burqa, even if the settlers escalate their violence.
“Now I understand in such a deep way what it would mean to not ever even entertain the idea of leaving your own land,” she said. “I mean everything you know and understand about yourself, your history, the world around you is rooted in that physical land. So no, we don’t have a Plan B.”
Moureen Kaki, the founder of San Antonio for Justice in Palestine, also has family living in the West Bank.
They live near the city of Ramallah, north of Jerusalem.
She and Masoud visited their homes together in July.
Kaki described her family’s village, al Mazra a-Sharqiyya.
“My family’s village sits on top of one of the highest peaks in all of historic Palestine, and so [the] mountains are beautiful, they have olive trees and fig trees and almond trees and pecans and walnuts and peaches and cactus and anything you can grow,” she said. “And there’s sheep and cats and horses and donkeys that roam the lands.”
But Kaki said that beauty is only part of what her family’s home is.
“That beautiful Palestine that I know is also marred by checkpoints, by sniper towers, by this apartheid wall,” she said.
Kaki said violence in the West Bank touched her close circle when a friend was killed by the Israeli military a few weeks ago.
“He was a health care volunteer, he was a dad, his name was Rasmi Arafat, and he was a brother to five sisters, the caretaker of his dad and his mom, who have outlived him,” she said.
Kaki said her friends in Nablus are much closer to the violence than her family, and have described scenes of settlers and Israeli soldiers who have destroyed refugee camps, bulldozed markets, and killed Palestinians.
Despite announcing a deal for a temporary pause in hostilities in exchange for hostages, and despite repeated pleas from the U.N., the U.S. and Israel continue to reject a long-term ceasefire, claiming it will only help Hamas.
Israel has bombed U.N. schools, hospitals, and refugee camps in what it said is a quest to destroy Hamas and its operations — a quest that has killed 5,500 children.
To Elashy, she doesn’t see how life can ever return to how it was.
“Even when we had bombs and wars before, it never lasted that long and it had never been ferocious and brutal like this,” she said. “And I definitely feel like I’m still living a nightmare. I’m still feeling like I hope I would wake up and that all of this is a dream, a bad dream. But it’s not. And I don’t think our life is ever going to go back to normal.”
Palestinian officials with the Gaza Health Ministry said on Tuesday that Israel’s military presence in the north and the collapse of Gaza’s health infrastructure means they have now lost the ability to count the dead.
For Elashy, Masoud, Kaki, and many other Palestinians living in San Antonio, the official death count is already too high to fathom.
