Six months ago, Mansour Shouman, his wife and five children woke up in Gaza City to the sound of rocket fire.
They weren’t sure what was happening at first, but Shouman and his family soon learned that a months-long war had just begun.
“No one expected it to be this scale, right? Everyone was like, ‘OK, it’s going to be a few days,'” Shouman told CBC News on Saturday.
“But for me, I saw that after a day or two, ‘No, this is going to be something bigger than anything else that we experienced.'”
Shouman, a Canadian-Palestinian citizen journalist, had been living in Gaza City for two years with his family when Israel started bombing the besieged strip in response to Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7. Though Shouman made sure his wife and children made it out safely, he decided to stay back.
He was in Winnipeg on Saturday after leaving Gaza about five weeks ago and is on tour with the Muslim charity Penny Appeal Canada to speak about his experience in Gaza.
“Any society, after over six months of what they’ve been going through by now, there should have been a total collapse in society and structure,” said the 39-year-old.
“However, one of the miracles that cannot be explained logically is how … the people there are functioning as a society, able to keep the calm, able to ensure that aid reaches as much people as possible.”
Deciding to stay
Shouman, who’s originally from Jerusalem and became a Canadian citizen in 2006, has reached millions of English speakers during his daily social media updates on the war.
He said he decided to stay in Gaza after Oct. 7 out of moral and religious obligation, and to get the story out there to media outlets around the world.
“As a Muslim, this life is temporary. This life is a test,” said Shouman.
“And as an able man who can add value even by removing rubble, you know, I should stay there … I know that I would have never forgiven myself if I left.”
For the first four days after Oct. 7, he remembers him and his neighbours sleeping in the basement of the block they lived in, in case it was bombed and collapsed.
“You don’t have much time during these moments to process your feelings and your emotions. You just need to think, ‘OK, what am I supposed to do?'” he said.
“Feeling scared is not really an option.”
As the war raged on, Shouman said he got used to seeing the devastation up close. He went missing for two weeks after going out with a team of volunteers one day. They later came under sniper fire and were hemmed in by tanks, forcing them to go on the run to stay alive.
“You get used to seeing the women, the children, the elderly, the civilians ripped apart, their legs and their arms amputated, losing their movement through spinal injuries, losing their eyesight,” he said.
‘Waiting to die’
But despite the hardships, he says people in Gaza are remaining resilient.
“People remember that, ‘OK, this is a test from God and this life is temporary,'” Shouman said.
“If given the opportunity to die while striving towards something bigger … then so be it.”
He eventually decided to leave Gaza to try to amplify his work through Penny Appeal. But it’s been difficult to adjust to life in Canada.
“I left the place where I sense the most peace and tranquillity in my life, and I’ve come back into the fake world, the world that’s built on materialism and capitalism,” said Shouman.
“Back into a world, you know, where people think about ‘What am I gonna eat? What am I gonna wear? What am I gonna drive?’ … whilst I was in a world where people were thinking, ‘OK, if I’m gonna die tomorrow, how will God accept me?'”
“You were in an area where you were waiting to die. Now you are thinking ‘How am I going to live?'”
Shouman will be at Parliament Hill in the next week to speak with MPs about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
“There’s a lot of work that needs to be done and we’re just getting started.”