Palestinian paramedic Maha Wafi, 43, in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on September 15, 2024. [AFP]
Then, in early December, Wafi's husband was arrested. She has not seen him since.
She worries for her partner, but she must face the hardships of war alone. She takes care of their five children while continuing to work as a paramedic.
"You're living in a tent... you have to bring water, fetch gas, light a fire and deal with the hardships of everything," she said.
"All of this is psychological pressure on a working woman," Wafi said, sitting by her ambulance, before scrubbing blood from its floor.
During the war, she has seen people killed and maimed. She narrowly escaped death when a strike hit a vehicle right next to her ambulance.
All she longs for now, she said, is for her husband to be released, and for life to go back to the way it was before the war.
"I don't want anything more than how it was before October 7," she said.
- The civil servant turned beggar -
Until October 7, Maher Zino, 39, lived a life of "beautiful routine" as a government employee earning what he described as a decent wage.
Together with his wife Fatima, they were raising their three children in Gaza City.
A year on, they have been displaced "so many times that it's hard for me to count", he said from his shelter in an olive grove in central Gaza.
Moving from Gaza City to Khan Yunis in the south, to Rafah by the Egyptian border, and then back to central Gaza, the family had to start from scratch each time.
"Set up a tent, build a bathroom, buy basic furniture, and find clothes because you've left everything behind," he said.
Sometimes, they were able to find cover before nightfall.
Maher Zino, 39, his wife and children outside their tent at a makeshift camp in al-Zawayda in the central Gaza Strip on September 15, 2024 . [AFP]
Others, they've had to sleep on the street, said Zino, who said he'd "never needed anyone" before the war.
In the shelter they now live in, Zino and his wife have managed to create a semblance of domestic life with a place to sleep, a water tank and a makeshift toilet.
He, too, said he wished things could go back to the way they were before.
"I became a beggar," he said, pleading for blankets to keep his family warm and searching "for charity kitchens to give me a plate of food just to feed my children".
"That's what the war did to us," he said.