Tala Herzallah, a 21-year-old Palestinian student, had just started her final year at the Islamic University of Gaza when Israel began its retaliation following the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack in Israel.
“I was preparing myself for this moment of graduation," she told ABC News. "I was preparing myself for these happy moments, and they are all destroyed now.”
The university is destroyed, turned into rubble. Her home in northern Gaza, she says, is now unsafe and her future is uncertain.
Gaza has been hit by hundreds of Israeli airstrikes. 4,651 people dead, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, including some of Tala’s own loved ones.
At least 1,400 people died in Israel in the Hamas attack, according to Israeli authorities.
Through video diaries and Zoom interviews just days after the war began, Tala chronicled her life under Israeli siege.
“They didn't leave anything for me to think of -- the dream of everything is destroyed, literally everything," she said.
She continued, “I dream to Gaza to be free, to Palestine actually to be free. I dream that we all can come and go back to our homes.”
"We have some food and some water that may be enough for a couple of days, but we don't know actually if we finish these supplies, what will happen? We don't know," Tala said in her first interview with ABC News.
She continued, "Everything is getting very hard: water, food, health, medicines, health services, medicines ... We're not allowed to go in or out of Gaza. They bombed the crossing so no one can go and no one can come out of Gaza Strip. We are living under siege and they are trying to kill us in all ways."
The Rafah border crossing, the only one between Gaza and Egypt, was shut on Oct. 10 after it was hit by Israeli warplanes on the Palestinian side three times on Oct. 9 and 10.
"There is no safety in Gaza ... Everything's being bombed," she said.
Tala said her family is running out of necessities. On October 10, Israel declared "a complete siege" on Gaza, cutting off food, water and fuel to the already blockaded region.
She described streets being bombed, consequentially blocking ambulances with the injured to get to care; unable to go and take people to medical facilities.
"My brother have received a message that the building in front of them will be bombed. And we don't know if it's a rumor. We don't know if it's true."
Some of her neighbors have received similar messages, and then a different building was bombarded, she said.
She continued, "You have to stay at your house and wait for death."
"The central hospital that we have, Al Shifa Hospital, is now filled with injured and killed people and it can't have anybody else. And so we don't know where to go with the injured people. We don't know where to go with the killed people. They will be left in the streets."
She and her family have bags packed -- filled with important documents, clothes, money, books, laptops -- waiting by the door. They're ready to begin their escape at the first sign of trouble.
“I took my my university books. My university is bombed, but I don't know, I took them anyway,” she said.
There are no bomb shelters or warning sirens in the Gaza Strip.
In the morning, Tala watched from her window as her neighbor’s funeral procession passed.
“A young man in his 20s, about 25,” she told ABC News in a video diary.
“He was just in front of his market, seeing his friends. The other people were walking in the street when the Israeli airstrikes decided to bomb them without any word, without telling them to leave the place.”
It is her first personal loss since the beginning of the siege.
Tala said, in a series of texts to ABC News: "We're not OK at all."
The texts continued: "They are forcing us to leave our area. And pushing us to go to Egypt step by step. History is repeating itself. They are repeating what happened in 1948!!! Spread our voices please!!"
Tala said the ongoing conflict is a reminder of what Palestinians called the "Nakba" or "catastrophe," when in 1948 they were forced off their lands or fled en masse during the Israeli-Arab War.
Tala and her family followed the evacuation order from the Israeli government, fleeing her home in Northern Gaza and moving south.
"We're leaving our house right now and we don't know where to go," she said through tears.
She says she was nearly bombed en route.
"While we were moving as they told us and we were obeying the rules and their instructions and other things, they bombed us."
She and her family made the tough decision to turn back.
"Please let everyone know. We are dying. We have to move. The world has to move. We are dying, guys," she said. "They are brutally killing us. No one is listening. No one listens to our voice."
Tala said she heard bombs dropping nonstop around her home the night before. It’s been days since she said she has slept well.
"Let me say I'm just alive. I'm not good. I'm not fine. Not well at all."
She later continued, "They have been bombing for 12 hours and they didn't stop. They didn't take breaks. It was just a bomb after a bomb after a bomb."
Like many other people in Gaza, they tried to evacuate their home, but were unable to find a car and did not have a place to stay in southern Gaza.
"Nothing is getting better. Everything's getting worse."
Her family is running out of food, supplies and other necessities -- and they do not know when aid will come. On Oct. 16, aid awaited permission to enter the Rafah crossing.
"I don't know if the supplies that they are saying they will enter will reach us or not, as I am staying still in the Gaza City," she said. "And they are saying that the supplies will only be to the people who live in the south. So I don't know. Things are very complicated and I don't know where -- what is waiting for us."
Tala’s cousin and her husband’s family were all killed last night.
“We woke up on this news: She was bombed," she said.
“She was actually with her husband's family again, without warning they bombed their house, and they are getting them out of the rubble using very simple tools because now nothing is available to use," she continued.
Tala said the time it takes to get people out from under the rubble makes it difficult to save those who are injured: "He or she will be killed because of the time they take to get them out."
Her cousin was just texting her the night before, asking her how she is and how's her family.
"In just one night, we lost them all."
“Another new night ... and a new terror. They are bombing in my area,” Tala said.
Tala and her family – her father, mother, brother, his wife and their two children – have moved to the nearest hospital, as their home is no longer safe. Around them, she said the buildings were being hit, one after the other.
“They started bombing the buildings without warning anyone. We thought our building would be the next.”
As they packed up and moved to their new shelter, they could hear the airstrikes continue to turn homes into rubble. The hospital, though, had no guarantee of safety either.
“When we reached the hospital, we adults, we older people, we were shaking and they were, the children -- my nieces -- they were really terrified," Tala said.
“We tried to calm them down. We tried to wash their faces and do whatever we can to them. We started to play with them, to laugh, to have some jokes that it's safe. Like it's nothing.”
She continued, “It really hurts that these children are having such a life, such a frightening life, with no crimes. They haven't done anything in their lives. And they can't live like all other children.”
They spent the night there with hundreds of others, as the news of the explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital weighed heavily on her family.
Between 100 and 300 people people were killed in the explosion, according to the U.S. intelligence agencies.
“I hope the morning comes very, very, very soon," she said.
Tala and her family are attempting once again to move south after almost being hit by airstrikes several days before while attempting to evacuate.
"Not because the south is safer, but ... they don't bomb the streets that much. They bombed the bakery, they bombed the school there, they bombed houses, but they haven't reached the point to bomb streets."
She continued, "But in the north and whether they are bombing streets very randomly, that's why we decided to march to the south again."
When she returned home from sheltering at a local hospital, she said she discovered that a store across from her window was bombed. The journey south was also full of close bombardments, so much she said she thought they wouldn’t make it. But they did.