Since the war began, two friends have spent most nights locked in the Ramallah television studio where one of them works.
They linger long after the evening news is taped and most of the staff has left, chain-smoking cigarettes and talking about the only thing that matters: Gaza.
Both men have families trapped there. Ahmad Abu Alezz's four children are crammed into tents in the southern city of Rafah. Mohammad Al Farra's parents are camped in the nearby town of Al Mawasi.
At least that's what he hopes. It's been six weeks since Al Farra's mother or father responded to one of her messages. Every day she examines the lists of the latest victims of the war between Israel and Hamas, praying that she does not find their names.
The Gaza Strip and the West Bank, territories that the Palestinians claim for their future state, are separated by about 40 miles. But they are worlds apart.
Since 2007, when Hamas took control of Gaza, an Israeli blockade of the territory has almost completely restricted Palestinians' ability to move between the two regions, and residents of each area have led increasingly disconnected lives.
Above, a boy carries garbage to a container on top of a hill overlooking the Qalandiya checkpoint on the outskirts of Ramallah, West Bank. Below, commercial trucks near the checkpoint.
The war in Gaza has exacerbated that sense of distance, with periodic power outages and internet shortages leaving people there more isolated than ever from the outside world. In the West Bank, where news channels offer constant coverage of the nearly 30,000 Gazans who have died in Israel's attacks, the war has awakened feelings of solidarity… and helplessness.
Al Farra, 44, can barely sleep without knowing if his parents are alive or dead. One of the last times she spoke to her mother, she told her that she was so hungry that she had resorted to eating grass.
“I'm the oldest son,” he said. “I should be there to protect them.”
He couldn't protect his sister.
Mohammad Al Farra, center right, carries his son Yosef, 8, on his shoulders as he and his family march in a demonstration in Ramallah calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Al Farra, a cameraman, left Gaza in 1999 in search of a job opportunity in the West Bank.
Never comeback. But she managed to stay close to his family, appearing virtually at birthdays and other celebrations.
He was especially attached to his sister, Semat, who was a year older. She was full of life, a gossip who knew so much about her neighbors that Al Farra jokingly called her Reuters, after the news agency. Semat's eldest daughter was to be married on October 25. Al Farra had sent him a gift.
On October 7, Hamas militants breached the border barrier surrounding Gaza and killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, in southern Israel. In Gaza, Al Farra's family postponed the wedding and prepared for Israel's response.
Al Farra tried to stay in touch with his relatives as Israel unleashed a massive bombing campaign and worked overtime as a journalist in the West Bank, where many feared the violence would spread.
Palestinians march in Ramallah, West Bank, to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
On October 25, he was in the field with his camera when his colleagues broke the news: a missile had hit his family's apartment building in Gaza. Her parents had survived, but Semat and most of her children, including the daughter whose wedding had been planned for that day, were dead.
A video of Al Farra crying, still wearing a bulletproof vest emblazoned with the word “press,” went viral.
Mohammad Al Farra reacts to the news of the death of his sister Semat and her children in a missile attack on the family's apartment building in Gaza on October 25, 2023. (Abed Dolah)
In the weeks that followed, Al Farra stayed in the studio long after finishing work. He did not want to pass on his misery to his wife and two children.
Abu Alezz, 52, stepped in and showed up to cook Al Farra dinners of fish seasoned with Gazan spices. The men had met years before through a mutual friend, the station director, but the purgatory of war had brought them closer.
“We calmed each other down,” Al Farra said. “It makes it easier”.
Abu Alezz, who lives alone in a small apartment filled with caged songbirds, was dealing with his own nightmare.
He fled Gaza in 2007 after encountering Hamas, which had unleashed a campaign of violence against political rivals when it took control of the enclave. Her children remained there with her mother.
Ahmad Abu Alezz tends to his songbirds.
When bombs began falling in October, the family fled their home in Jabaliya and were forced to move four more times, eventually ending up with other displaced civilians (more than half of Gaza's 2.3 million people) in Rafah. .
Israel had declared the city a safe zone from fighting.
This month, the army said it plans to invade Rafah to root out remaining Hamas fighters. Abu Alezz has been gripped by fear.
“It's maddening,” he said. “Do they want to surround 1.5 million people with tanks?”
It was approaching midnight and the studio was almost empty. Al Farra had his arm on Abu Alezz's shoulder as they smoked and watched television. Finally Abu Alezz got up from the leather sofa and began to pace.
Mohammad Al Farra cries as he talks about his family trapped in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
“If they invade Rafah, Israel will regret it for a million years,” he said. “How will you convince people that one day they want peace?
Al Farra nodded. “This is genocide,” he said. “How can a child who saw his brothers or his parents destroyed forget this?”
They both lit another cigarette.
Before October 7, we each smoked a few packs a week. Now they needed two or three to get through the day.
For each other's sake, they try to keep things light.
Al Farra joked that his wife is jealous of all the time he spends with Abu Alezz and the fish dinners his friend gives him.
“At least he's saving on food,” Abu Alezz joked, and they both laughed.
But everything comes back to war. Images of demolished buildings in Gaza are not abstractions to the men who grew up there. “Of course I know that street,” Al Farra said as an image showing a bomb crater in a residential neighborhood of Khan Yunis appeared on the screen.
For months, Abu Alezz has helped people trapped in Gaza recover identity documents they lost while fleeing their homes, searching for birth certificates in archives kept by Palestinian authorities in the West Bank.
He also takes advantage of his Palestinian phone number, which allows him to make calls to Gaza, to facilitate conversations between people there and their loved ones abroad.
Almost every night, Ahmad Abu Alezz connects calls from Palestinians abroad to their relatives in Gaza.
On a recent afternoon, Abu Alezz put two phones together, screen to screen. In one line there was a man in Egypt. On the other, a relative of his in Gaza.
“Is there flour?” asked the man in Egypt.
“Yes but not that much. People are dying of hunger. “People are sick.”
“How is my dad?”
“He is fine. But the situation is very difficult.”
Al Farra also tries to stay busy. He works overtime and sometimes takes his young children, Lilia, 5, and Yosef, 8, to protests calling for a ceasefire.
At a recent event in central Ramallah, children each wore a checkered kaffiyeh scarf, long a symbol of Palestinian resistance. They helped carry a banner in memory of the victims of the war, most of whom are women and children. It included the names of Al Farra's sister and her children.
Their deaths put Al Farra at the center of a story he had long covered as a journalist. “It feels different because I'm a part of this,” he said. The death toll in Gaza was so high, he said, that few Palestinian families were left unscathed.
At a demonstration in Ramallah, Mohammad Al Farra's children Yosef, 8, and Lilia, 5, wearing scarves center right, help hold a banner covered with the names of people killed in the war between Israel and Hamas.
Al Farra and Abu Alezz once dreamed of returning to Gaza. They would study maps of the enclave and talk about how they would like to rebuild it. No more.
“I don't want to go back, except to say goodbye to my sister and make her a nice grave,” Al Farra said. “I want to take all the people and get them away from there.
“My Palestinian identity is in my heart,” he said. “And I'm tired of war.”
Abu Alezz said he felt the same. He has been trying to raise funds to evacuate his children. If they make it out alive, he wants to join them and have the family move away from the Middle East.
But for now, all the friends could do was sit in the studio in Ramallah.
They turned back to watching the television and its endless montage of destruction: missiles hitting buildings, women screaming in a hospital, a young woman pulled from the rubble of a collapsed house.
Mohammad Al Farra watches with his daughter, Lilia, a demonstration calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
“What a little boy,” Abu Alezz commented.
Al Farra didn't say anything. They sat and smoked in silence.
Times staffer Marcus Yam and Ramallah special correspondent Asala Zreiqi contributed to this report.
