SHE’S a 10-year-old internet sensation with more than a million fans on Instagram.
From chocolate cake to lentil soup and homemade bread, Renad Attallah creates recipes with the most basic of ingredients.
Renad has become an internet sensation with fans around the world[/caption]
Children have seen their whole neighbourhoods destroyed in the conflict[/caption]
But watching the chatty youngster, who dreams of opening her own restaurant, it’s hard to imagine how she gets her videos out at all – because her backdrop is the concrete rubble of war-torn Gaza.
Renad is one of around 94,000 children whose playground has become a sea of devastated buildings and bomb sites.
As Israel wages war against Hamas after the October 7 attacks – which claimed the lives of 1200 innocent people – children in Gaza face unimaginable horror, living cheek by jowl in apartments and tents as missiles fly in the skies above.
Renad features in a new BBC2 documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, which tells the story of the conflict through the eyes of children.
As politicians try to find solutions to hold on to the current delicate ceasefire, Renad along with 13-year-old Abdullah and 11-year-old Zakaria tell how they have coped with the war – witnessing bombs and death as well as losing family.
Renad, who lives in the designated safe zone, told The Sun: “From my wider family more than six people have been killed, babies, parents and older relatives.
“I made a video with one of my family but didn’t post it after they were killed in the north.
“One of the most terrifying moments was when a neighbour’s house was bombed at 2am and some of the displaced people were injured.
“I am scared, with all the news around the ceasefire, that it might not hold and war will return.”
When the war began, Renad was already living in the area which Israel determined a safe zone but dozens of displaced relatives began arriving and, at one point, 300 people were living in the family’s four floor home.
Renad, who has to rely on parcels of food aid to make her traditional Gazan recipes, said: “I had some engagement with school online and that’s how I understood my friends were alive.
“It’s been hard because one day we went three days without enough water but everyone around me was living the same way, facing the same things.
“Whenever I feel stressed or worried I cook and if I am afraid I look at the positive comments I get on social media and it makes me feel better.”
At one point in the film, which follows the kids shortly after the start of war, Renad gives a nervous giggle as she tells how a bomb went off close to her without going off – only for a second to land nearby which detonated it.
Gaza has been reduced to rubble in the war[/caption]
Renad grew so used to explosions she stopped being scared[/caption]
As the months roll on, viewers see Renad become hardened to the terrors of the conflict when explosions go off and she says: “We’re not afraid. We’re used to it.
“At the start of the war, even in daytime, every bomb terrified me (but now), not even in the middle of the night am I scared.
“We all think about the war, how we will survive each day and get through it.
“You have to find something to distract you from the constant pressure and I love creating food content.”
‘Hiding in the ground’
The documentary is narrated by 13-year-old Abdullah whose opening line is: “Have you ever wondered what you’d do if your world was destroyed?”
It shows thousands of Gazans fleeing their homes at the beginning of the war, carrying bags and children in their arms, mattresses on their heads and one woman even drags her small son behind her in a shopping basket.
Another shouts ‘May God curse you Sinwar”, in reference to the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the attack on Israel.
A toothless man tells the cameraman: “They’ve (Israel) killed our children, killed our women while Sinwar is hiding under the ground.”
Abdullah stands in a bombed out area[/caption]
Renad creates recipes from food parcels and cooks outside[/caption]
Teenager Abdullah, an eloquent, intelligent boy who was educated at an English-speaking school, describes how getting water “is a very hard task”, saying: “Everything has changed.
“I was in the best school in Gaza, a British school in the north…now I’m living here (in the safe zone) in a tent.”
Abdullah tells how the safe zone was hit by a massive bomb in the Israeli battle against Hamas terrorists.
He said: “I was sleeping and heard the bombing and we got covered in dirt. The smell was horrible. The camp was filled with tents, they got buried underground.
“It’s indescribable, 19 people were killed. When we saw body parts we couldn’t speak and felt sick. They (Israel) said it was a secret room for Hamas.”
Hospital bombing
The film also features eleven-year-old Zakaria who tends to the wounded and dying at Shuhada al-Aqsa hospital.
He is seen escorting badly injured, bloodied patients from the back of ambulances after leaving his home to help.
Zakaria says: “When I hear the ambulance sound I get people out of the way and I tell them there is a very serious injury.
“I help transport the dead, the injured, the kids. I love helping people. I’m not scared.”
Zakaria is looked after by hospital paramedic Said, who took the youngster under his wing as he refused to go home.
When the hospital was bombed in October last year as the Israeli air force targeted a Hamas command centre, killing five and injuring at least 70, Said was one of the few paramedics who remained behind to help despite evacuation orders.
Zakaria helps tend to the wounded and dying[/caption]
Zakaria is cared for by paramedic Said[/caption]
A boy comforts his baby sister among the chaos[/caption]
He said: “Headphones (music ) are the most important things that help me escape the war, the hospital gloom, the bombings, the dead and the injured.
“Zakaria loves the hospital more than anything else. He works tirelessly, he pushes a stretcher at least eight times a day.
“I sometimes forget he is just a child, it’s weird.”
The documentary is one of the few that records daily life for Gazans after Israel banned international press from visiting the country without the military.
Co-producers Jamie Roberts and Yousef Hammash, who comes from Gaza, directed two local cameramen inside the war zone over nine months to make the unique documentary inside the humanitarian safe zone.
Yousef told The Sun: “I left Gaza a few weeks before we started the film and the biggest challenge we faced was the logistics and how to deal with daily communication issues.
“We wanted to make a film on the ground that felt real, something that wasn’t recorded on phones, but shot properly.”
Hostage hell
Hamas terrorists dragged more than 250 Israeli hostages back across the border during their October 7 attack.
Three of those returned in a ceasefire deal told of being chained, gagged and burned by the terrorists.
Footage of Eli Sharabi, Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami showed them looking gaunt upon their release.
Innocent civilians taken captive are also reportedly being hung by their feet and starved.
US President Donald Trump described Sharabi, 52, Levy, 34, and Ami, 56, as looking like “holocaust survivors” when they were finally freed after more than a year.
The trio said they had been forced to go without food and were often only given a single rotten pitta to share and were only allowed to relieve themselves twice a day at specific times.
Israel’s health ministry said they were suffering from “severe malnutrition” and had lost significant body weight.
They were also cruelly interrogated by Hamas fighters, who burned them with a white-hot, unidentified object.
Yousef said it was important to tell the story of war through the lens of kids because half of Gaza’s population are children.
He said: “They are one hundred percent in survival mode, their window of thinking is limited and they live just for today.
“The children are subjected to continuous trauma and there were things we left out of the documentary because they were too graphic.
“It’s been like living in a horror movie for these children for the past 16 months, yet life goes on for them. Renad makes her content, Zakaria goes to the beach when he can. They are extremely resilient and brave.”
