Tea and cheese sandwiches are on the breakfast menu for Taghrid al-Najjar’s children. It should be an everyday moment, but their home in the Gaza Strip is now mostly rubble, AFP reports.

The walls have collapsed, with furniture and appliances buried under concrete. Until the bombardment started, the 46-year-old mother had never left her farming village along the border with Israel in the southeast of the Strip.

“It is only here that I feel good,” she said.

Najjar fled when Israeli bombardments started in retaliation for the October 7 attacks.

For weeks she lived with nine members of her family in a Khan Yunis school converted into a makeshift camp for displaced people.

“I discovered that my house had been completely destroyed — 27 years of my life to build it and everything is gone!” she said.

“For two days I couldn’t eat, then I told myself that I had to continue living,” she added, looking at her children.

“My house is destroyed but my children are alive, so we will rebuild. We have already done it once, we can do it again,” she told AFP.

Each night the family squeezes through a window to sleep in the only room where the walls have not entirely crumpled.

Read full story here