Ed. note—This story represents one area family’s perspective on the conflict in Israel and Palestine.
Bilal Koraz, a Gazan-born father living in the dense forest of rural Louisa County, says his 11 family members—mostly women, children, and the elderly—have been sheltering in the family home in Gaza.
“Every day, all the time, I’m afraid to hear [the news],” Koraz says. “Just the other day, the house next to [their’s] was completely blown up.”
He pulls up pictures on his phone, scrolling through them like a reverse timeline. There are recent photos of his daughter, and pictures from 2019, when he married his wife Jessica, a Louisa County resident. There are some from Istanbul, when the couple traveled halfway across the world to meet in person for the first time. One picture is of him in Gaza with four other well-dressed, college-age men.
“These are my good friends,” he says. It looked like they were at a wedding.
His face lit up a bit as he talked about his home, but only briefly. He wore his feelings on his brow, furrowed like he had to break bad news to himself. He sighed and went quiet, but his wife elaborated.
“They were like brothers to him,” Jessica says.
She paused, hesitant to get to the end of the story.
“Were,” she says. “They’re gone now. All of them.”
The Koraz family originally came from just outside Jerusalem.
“That was before,” he says, meaning before the partition. “They came and took [our home], with everything in it. Even the pictures. We couldn’t have the pictures of our family members.”
Afterward, his family settled in the Deir Al-Balah neighborhood in Gaza.
“My father was [a] colonel with the Palestinian Authority before Hamas,” Koraz says. “He was like a policeman.”
The Palestinian Authority was the governing body established in the mid-1990s by Fatah, a major political party in Palestine. According to Al Jazeera, “its creation was supposed to pave the way to an independent Palestinian state.”
In 2006, however, the party’s power dissolved with the rise of Hamas, as did Koraz’s father’s job. For both this reason and ideological differences, the Koraz family are about as far from Hamas supporters as the Israelis, voting against them in that year’s election. Regardless, the Korazes are treated the same as any other Arab family in Palestine.
Jessica met Koraz in 2018 on social media through his work and advocacy with a local children’s center in Gaza. The two struck up a conversation and they fell in love. Despite their distance, they decided to pursue the relationship, and arranged to meet in Istanbul. He moved to Jessica’s hometown in the U.S., where the couple now live with their three children.
Through a crackling, fuzzy reception, Koraz calls his brother in Gaza. He asks him how he’s doing, and if he wants to talk for a moment. It’s not a good time to talk, and after a few exchanges in Levantine Arabic, they trade goodbyes and hang up.
“They have to cut wood to cook or heat water,” Jessica says, after the phone call. “And they have to find fresh water, because it’s been shut off. Just like the power. And the phones. And the internet.”
She shows me a photo: two men chopping wood in the middle of a sandy street, flanked on all sides by damaged buildings and signs of combat.
“That’s honestly the only way they sleep at night,” she says. “Exhaustion. Otherwise the bombs and gunfire would keep them awake.”
Following this interview, the Koraz family home in Gaza was damaged when a neighboring house was shot by a Merkava tank, and they had to flee. They went to the refugee camps, which were supposed to be safe, but as of mid-February, the Israel Defense Forces had begun attacking those as well, citing terrorist activity and potential hostages being held in the area.
“He feels guilty,” Jessica says. “Because he got out and they didn’t. If he didn’t have kids, he’d go back to be with them. So would I.”
At press time, about 30,000 have been killed in Gaza in just under five months of fighting. For comparison, the U.S. lost just over 7,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It’s like the cartoons, where they tie up people and leave them on the railroad tracks,” Jessica says. “His family is tied up on the railroad tracks, and the train is headed their way. But the train has brakes. We can stop the train. It’s not inevitable. It doesn’t have to be like this, but no one is listening.”