Reem Al Ghussain, an English teacher at Al-Azhar University in Gaza
Today I walked for half an hour to find bread, and then I queued for five hours. All I could buy was enough for one day. My children didn't want me to go - they were worried I would die. They are scared. Whenever they hear any sudden sound they think it's a bomb. They don't sleep, and as a result I don't sleep.
Sometimes they don't want to eat. I say don't worry, the bombing is far away, but they know it's a big lie because the house shakes. They haven't been outside in 10 days and now they're fighting each other.
My children ask me, if they are killed what will happen to them. I say, "Don't worry, nothing will happen to you." They ask me: "Why are the Israelis doing this to us?" My child in fifth grade asks me: "What did we do to them?" I tell them that they want to take our land and they want all Palestinians to die. They ask me: "Why is the world watching without doing anything?" I don't have any answers for them.
If Israel thinks that our suffering from this siege will make us hate Hamas, they are wrong.
Halla Qishawi lives in Gaza City with her husband and four children
All day and night there is bombing and shooting, from the sea, from the navy ships, from the F-16s, from the Apache helicopters. Gaza is very small, so when there's bombing anywhere, in the north, the east or west, you can hear it at my place.
It's winter but we have to live with our windows open, and our doors as well, to stop the glass from shattering when there's an explosion. This is the coldest winter in Gaza that I can remember. We sleep together in my daughter's room because it is facing away from the shelling that comes from the sea.
When the bombing stops for a while we rush downstairs and have tea with the neighbours, and then we rush back and say thank God we are alive.
An old man died in our building two days ago and we couldn't take him to the main cemetery because it has been surrounded by the Israeli forces. So we took him to the cemetery in Gaza City even though it's closed. We had to open the grave of his father to bury him.
This is not a matter of blame. Here the people don't care about politics, they just want the invasion to stop.
Ramzy Hassouna, 27, an English teacher on the west side of Gaza
Two days ago one of my relatives was killed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. The missile targeted a car next to him and he was killed along with a neighbour. Another relative was with them and his legs were cut off.
Before this operation started we didn't have enough electricity; we had three to six hours every day because there was no fuel for the power plant in Gaza. Now we've had no electricity at all for the past 10 days. Because there's no electricity, we can't pump water into the tanks on top of our house, so we have no water in the taps. Our food is also running out.
I live with my parents and my brother, who has one child. He's always afraid. I can see the panic on his face. He can't sleep and neither do we.
I've been trying to leave Gaza for the past two years, but every time I've tried to leave we've been sent back from the crossing.
I can't think about the future now, it's very distant. We can't think one hour ahead, because the next hour you don't know what will happen.
