On the night of June 6th, I found myself alone beneath the rubble in the Brazil neighborhood of Rafah. I had no idea where I was. All I knew was that my family was with me, and that we were all trying to sleep—like any displaced family forced into a school-turned-shelter.

I remember hearing the terrifying sound of an Israeli warplane above us. Suddenly, darkness swallowed everything. I lost all sense of direction. The air became thick with dust and silence. I was buried under what I later realized was the roof of the school.

I couldn’t move, but I could feel. I felt a warm liquid around me—blood, though I didn’t know it yet. I tried to shout, but my voice was lost. I could only hear my heartbeat and distant cries fading away.

It took hours, maybe more, before someone pulled me out. My back was torn open, my body shredded. But I was alive.

My brother Mohammed wasn’t. His wife and their three children were gone too. Our neighbors, the people we shared the classroom with, they all died. Eighteen people were killed in an instant. The shelter we thought might save us became a mass grave.

There are moments that still echo in my mind: the scream of a child who will never speak again, the smell of burnt flesh, the unbearable silence that followed the blast. I carry them with me, stitched into the skin that somehow survived.

Sometimes I wonder why I lived. Maybe to remember. Maybe to speak for those who can’t. All I know is that I walked out of that rubble, but I left my soul behind with my family.