Alone in Gaza: Genocide leaves Palestinian man without family or home

A man is wandering in Gaza looking for a place to sleep, having lost his family in the Israeli attack.

Gaza City, Gaza Strip - Every morning, Mahmoud Khala goes to a nearby cemetery to visit the graves of family members he lost during Israel's genocidal war in Gaza.

He has maintained this morning routine in the months since he buried them, assuming his family is still around.

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At the bottom of the list for 40-year-old Mahmoud, the cemetery is where some of the people he loved most in his life are buried.

His wife, his three children, his parents, his two brothers and their families, his sister and children, and other relatives were all gathered at their family home in Jabaliya, northern Gaza, on December 21, 2023.

An Israeli strike then targeted the family's five-story home, destroying the building and killing all 39 people inside. Mahmoud left his home shortly before the attack and is the only person left in his family.

Mahmoud remembers that day with pain in his heart. Israeli tanks surrounded the area near the house in Jabalia in northern Gaza, making it dangerous for people to travel. Food was already scarce due to Israel's ongoing siege. In the evening, Mahmoud left the house looking for food to feed his family

"I told them I would go and see what was available," he told Al Jazeera. As soon as I was outside for about 15 minutes, I heard a huge explosion.

"I ran back and realized it was our house. I was in complete shock. But I pulled myself together. With the help of some neighbors who were still in the area, we tried to rescue anyone who might be under the rubble."

Israeli airstrikes, quadcopters and surveillance planes continue to target the area. This made it impossible for Mahmoud and his neighbors to find survivors.

"A spy plane dropped a bomb on us, so we immediately ran away," he says. We returned the next morning.

Ambulances and civil defense teams could not reach the place that night.

With this feeling of helplessness, he imagined that some of his family might still be alive under the rubble and waiting for rescue. He felt like he died a thousand times that night.

The next morning, he returned to the site and called out to his family members who might be under the wreckage. No one answered and it was at this moment that he realized he had lost almost everyone he loved.

"There were five floors of rubble. We couldn't pull anyone out," he said.

That attack was the beginning of a long period of futility for Mahmoud. With his home destroyed and nearly all his relatives killed or displaced to the south, he had nowhere to go.

Even my uncles were killed, he says. "Their house, opposite ours, was targeted nine days before our family home. Eighteen people were killed in that attack. The rest of the family had gone south."

Mahmoud spent the next months displaced and alone. He moved between the streets, looking for a place to sleep for the night. While he had no relationship with the displaced families, it was difficult to find shelter.

"Whenever I saw things open, I would sleep on the streets, or in cars or vehicles," he says. "I was completely alone and homeless."

Without shelter, Mahmoud was vulnerable to Israeli attacks. The struggle for food became as necessary as the need to find a safe place to sleep.

"You don't know if a bullet will hit you, if a missile will come, if you will find food or where you will sleep," he said.

After a "ceasefire" was announced for Gaza in October 2025, families began a difficult search for their missing loved ones. Almost a year later, an estimated 8,000 people are still missing, possibly buried under the rubble of their homes or elsewhere.

Months after the beginning of the "ceasefire" and the reduction of the bombing, Mahmoud himself began to recover the remains of his family members. They had been buried in the remains of their home for the past 29 months.

"It was very difficult to feel that my family was still under the rubble without being buried," she says. "He never left me."

She has approached civil defence, the Red Cross and other authorities for help but she says a severe lack of equipment and the large number of other families asking for help means they can't help much.

Finally, with the help of friends and neighbors who volunteered to cooperate with him, he began the heartbreaking task of recovering his loved ones.

He began recovering the remains in May this year, a process that took three months.

"Sometimes, we manage to heal a person in a day. Sometimes, it takes two days," he said.

The first people he found were two relatives who were in the shelter with the family. The last ones were his sister and children who were buried together.

He buried his family members in a cemetery near Jabaliya al-Nuzla in northern Gaza.

"When I finally buried them, I felt so relieved," she said. It took me three months to recover all their remains and I worked day by day.