As the war in Gaza approaches its fourth year, the Guardian follows five ordinary Palestinians as they go about their lives. Each tells the story of their day, revealing the terrible toll of the conflict. Overcoming internet cuts and power outages, Mahmoud battles to provide his students an education

It is time for Mahmoud Seydam’s online lecture on museum architecture. He squats in front of the step he calls a table and opens his laptop.

“Is Mohammed the only one here?” He pulls out his phone and types into the students’ chat group that the lecture is about to start. There are two students now. Mahmoud decides to wait a little for the others to join.

Despite the supposed end of the fighting last year, casualties in the territory continue to rise, with volunteer ambulance driver Abed Elrahman Hamdouna joining the long list of those killed by Israeli forces

Of all their seven children, Abed Elrahman Hamdouna’s parents worried about him the most during the war in Gaza. Hamdouna was a volunteer ambulance driver in northern Gaza, “risking his life to help people who were injured”, says his father, Hosny Hamdouna. They knew about the repeated Israeli attacks on Gaza’s health facilities which have claimed the lives of hundreds of healthcare workers.

So when a ceasefire was reached in October 2025, they were cautiously relieved. But that relief turned to shock after Hamdouna, a 31-year-old father of two, was killed in a reported drone strike west of Gaza City two weeks ago, as he was on his way to a family Ramadan iftar, to break fast with his brothers.

Dr Ahmed Muhanna, one of the country’s most senior emergency care consultants, says the scale of destruction he saw on his release brought him to tears

The only thing that kept Dr Ahmed Muhanna going during his 22 months inside Israeli prisons and detention centres was dreaming of his return to his family and to Gaza. When he was finally released after 665 days as a prisoner, he arrived home to find every place he had returned to in his memories had been obliterated.

While in prison, he and the other inmates were “completely cut off from the outside world”, he says. When he was released he was driven over the border and through Gaza to his hospital, the al-Awda. The scale of the destruction he saw “made my skin crawl … my chest tightened and my tears began to flow”.

Guardian investigation reveals at least 119 direct attacks on hospitals and delivery wards since start of wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan

• ‘I can’t forget the horror’: a young mother on giving birth twice during the Gaza war

Thirty women were sheltering in the Saudi maternity hospital in El Fasher, Sudan, on 28 October when the massacre began. Some had just given birth and others were still in labour.

Working at the hospital that night, lab technician Abdo-Rabo Ahmed, 28, was one of the few known survivors. “I heard the voices of women and children screaming,” he says. “They were killing everybody inside the hospital. Those of us who were able to run, did.”

Hadeel Al Gherbawi survived her two pregnancies despite extreme hunger and pain

• Childbirth under attack: how women and babies became targets in conflicts around the world

Hadeel Al Gherbawi was seven months pregnant when the war started in October 2023. Up until that point the 26-year-old had meticulously prepared for her son’s arrival. She visited her doctor twice a month because the pregnancy was high risk, had regular ultrasounds and took vitamins. “I love the details,” she says.

Living on the east side of Gaza City, close to the border with Israel, and knowing that being pregnant would make moving fast difficult, she decided to go to her parents in the west of Gaza City that first day. “I thought it was just going to be a few days and I would go back.”