My name is Raghdad. I am 7 years old.

'My name is Fatima Osama Mohammed Abu-Saffia.

These are the sounds of everyday Gazans.

The idea is to make my voice heard all over the world.

A seven year old girl, an expectant mother, a breast cancer patient who plays on a special needs basketball team. They are just some of the people trying to survive Israel's brutal onslaught in Gaza for the last six months. While Israel says its military campaign is necessary to destroy Hamas and insists it does not target civilians, regular Palestinians are caught in the middle regardless. When you hear about the dire conditions in the enclave, these are the people navigating them. But what are they really feeling? What do they want the rest of the world to know?

'I'm literally recording this with the sound of drones and F-16s bombing around me, and I do not know if any of these bombs will hit me before I even send this message. But I want you to know one thing that you need to do more.

Today, ordinary Gazans, and the hopes and dreams they had before the war, and how they are coping now that their primary goal is survival. From CNN, this is Tug of War. I'm David Rind.

'For the last few months, my colleagues Alaa Elassar and Yahya Abou-Ghazala have been working on a project. They've been asking people on the ground in Gaza to send them voice notes. Because, remember, reliable internet and phone signal is extremely hard to come by right now. Often these simple voice memos are the best way to get any information out of Gaza. So between December and January, Alaa and Yahya sent these people a few questions to get a sense of what life looked like for them, the challenges and heartache they faced, but also what their life was like before the war, what dreams they had, visions for the future, and if they still have those today. So in this episode, I'm going to step back a bit and let you hear what they sent in.

Just right before the aggression started, I had gotten engaged. I was I was engaged for one week before the aggression started, and I was planning for my engagement party and the announcement party. I was also supposed to get, a promotion at work, and all of these things came crashing down in, in seconds in, in, in literally the blink of an eye.

Afaf Al Najjar is 21 years old. She's a student at the Islamic University. She's originally from Gaza City, but has since moved south to Rafah.

I've seen my childhood house looking like a biscuit. The floors of the house looking like a biscuit because of bombing. I've seen my aunt's house completely demolished. And I've seen my dad coming out of the rubbles with. With blood on his face and and on his hands. I've seen. The sons and daughters of my cousins with their heads completely smashed and with different wounds. I've seen pictures of my uncle, trees of my friends, completely, covered with blood after they were killed in airstrikes. I've seen. Amounts of destruction that I cannot begin to explain to you. I can't sleep at night because of the amount of of, nightmares that I get because of the, the thoughts that I'm thinking. I'm away from my father, away from so many of my family members. And I just keep thinking about all of them. I have friends who are still stuck in the North and in Gaza. I have friends who are still stuck in, and you can get out of it. I cannot begin to explain how how exhausted I am, how terrified I am, how helpless I am. And it feels like there is nothing that I can do to stop any of this. And I'm in so many cases, I'm at the edge of giving up and just losing it.

Well, this is Ghada Al Kurd, freelancer journalist from Gaza...

Ghada Al Kurd is 37. She's currently at a tent shelter in Khan Younis. She continues to do a job that has become one of the most dangerous in Gaza. She is a journalist.

I've been covering this war since the beginning, since the 7th of October. And I've witnessed many of my colleagues, journalists. They were killed. This is like, what keeps me, or carries me to covering this, and. This is my message, my duty as a journalist to keep, covering my. Sending all the news about what's going on inside Gaza. The most difficult pictures I took by my phone. It was like when I was in the hospital in Gaza City. I was there and I saw many people were killed. They were coming by ambulances, and I saw them in pieces. And I also saw their bodies in the side bags. So it was very, hard for me. Even the footage of, some kids, they were like half of their body. They were killed and all. They just have lost their body also. You know, when you are coming through the road and out to south of Gaza City, we saw many of people, bodies or on the street. So you have this is like the most difficult.

Mahmoud Jarousha is a college student originally from Gaza City. He's just 18 years old.

Well, just like any other young man in this world, I had dreams and ambitions. Like when I was a kid, I wanted to be a professional soccer player and some of my ambitions is going to university having a good job and, building a beautiful house. But now it really doesn't matter anymore. I said one of my ambitions is having my own house, and, I don't want it after years of work and exhaustion. I don't want it to be gone in a second. Just like what happened to many of my people here in Gaza. Of course, me and my family have experienced a lot. Well, we experienced the feeling of immigration. It was hard enough to leave our house and it was hard physically also. My family, including my grandparents, had to walk for more than three hours on feed just to get to the south. We have also experienced the lack of water, fuel, cooking gas, flour, gasoline and almost any kind of life supply. We experienced the waiting lines to water line, cooking gas line, red line. Speaking of the red line, personally, once I waited for nine hours just to get one bag of bread.

Hello everyone. This is Frieda from Gaza City and I'm going to share with you my experience as a teacher. First of all, the Israeli occupation have demolished all aspects of life in Gaza, and there are now almost no schools, hospitals almost left. And the occupation have directly targeted humanity, destroying everything that humans could build. It's destroyed the psychological, physical and academic aspects of life, making it impossible to live academically. The occupation has targeted governmental schools, the private schools, as well as agency ones. During the displacement of the Gazans from the center of Gaza to the south. They sought refuge in skills thinking that deceive. However, the virtuality of the occupation then proceeded to destroy most of these two, as well as most other public and private buildings. The idea that schools turned into shelters, which could be destroyed and bombed at any moment, made the experience of seeking refuge in the schools extremely difficult. And we used to sleep on notebooks and other students books just to rest our head.

You can hear even more of these voices, along with some really vivid pictures over at CNN.com/gazavoices. We're going to leave a link in our show notes as well. Again that CNN.com/gazavoices. We'll be right back.

Welcome back to Tug of War. We've been hearing again from regular Gazans trying to live through this war that has killed more than 33,000 of their neighbors. There are so many teachers and doctors, students who have had their careers and lives completely interrupted by these really bombardment. Mohamed Ghuneim is one of those people.

I'm a medical doctor and I'm teaching public health and health care management at Faculty of Medicine at Islamic University of Gaza. I have seen a video for bomb being the medical school, of Islamic University. Actually, it was heartbreaking. And, I'm thinking always, what will be next? How we will deliver the lectures, how the students will gather again, how the staff will gather. What about the offices? What about the the labs? And if we want to deliver on campus teaching, it will be impossible, because there is no buildings, there's no labs, there is no offices. And there is no, holes to to to deliver lectures for the students.

Nour Shaer meanwhile, is a medical student. She's 23 years old and was just trying to continue her education when the war broke out. That's now on pause.

'How I've been feeling every day. I don't know. Sometimes I feel numb. Sometimes my heart aches. So bad, so bad. Sometimes I just don't feel anything. Sometimes I feel like death is too close to me. You know how I feel. Sometimes I just don't know how you feel. I've seen. I've seen horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible things. When one of my neighbor's houses was bombed, I saw one of my neighbors and a close friend of ours into pieces, cut into two pieces. I also saw some other relatives and some other neighbors whose faces were not pretty, no longer recognized. Like, I mean, you can't you can't even recognize her face. Or I was just looking at body parts. I had to I had to, like, in the hospital. I had to, help my family recognize our relatives through looking at their hands and their. And their fingers and their rings and their hair. Their faces were not recognizable. Some were smashed completely, others with burns that we'd never, ever seen before. And I have never, ever studied in med school. Anything like that. I've seen. I've seen the worst. You know, sometimes we try to console each other, telling each other that, well, if you heard the sound, we would hear the sound of these F-16s or whatsoever, it means that it was the imitated slowed somewhere else. And it means that we're not the target. And it makes me think that. Why would that even make me feel satisfied or safe or anything like that? Because it emptying its load somewhere else means that another family got bombed at the second. These are all cars and families. These are all my people. None of this is okay. None of it. None of that shouldn't make me feel satisfied or safe or anything. I don't know how I'm going to be able to finish med school. Look, I don't know if they're going to rebuild my med school year or if we're going to leave and do it somewhere else. I do not know. But I know one thing that, and none of this is going to stop me from pursuing that if if I make it alive out of this.

When her colleagues reached out to these Gazans, they had one final question for them. If you could reach the people who haven't been watching or who have but don't seem to care, what would you say to them? What is your message for the rest of the world? This is what they had to say.

Calling all the humanity to stop this genocide. This is a genocide. If you are a human, please help to stop this genocide. Please help to stop this a humanitarian crisis. I am not only calling the Muslim countries. I'm not calling only the Arab countries. I'm calling all the humans. If you are a human, you should act, to stop this genocide.

Well, the message I want to send for all over the world that you have to see the people of Gaza, the civilian people, you have to see their sufferings. You have, to believe in their, right to live and the right to has a good life without any problems that they want peace. They didn't want, and the other war anymore. It's enough for them. Like, every two years. Every three years. And that I have to send their message to all over the world.

This war put me in a state of shock, after I had seen how the international organizations deal with the ongoing, painful events here in Gaza and Israel disappointed me because they thought they were able to make a change in people's lives for the better and remove injustice and oppression. But it turned out they're unable to do anything. Like, for example, issuing a cease fire decision, providing Gaza with food aid or even medical aid. The unfortunate thing that I started to doubt, they consider us as humans who deserve to live, at least normally.

I think one of the most important messages that I want to send to people around the world would be that me, my family, my relatives, my friends, the people I'm currently staying with, the people I've met because of this aggression. We are as much human as anyone else in the world is, and we have dreams, and we have ambitions, and we have. We have things that we want to accomplish. And and we have stories that we want to tell, just like everybody else. And that's why I want everyone to know that the littlest things that they do posting, protesting, sending emails, calling representative, representatives and, and boycotting all of these things are extremely crucial and important. And collectively together we can move mountains. And that's why we shouldn't ever lose momentum. And we should always keep talking about the Palestinian cause and working for it, and working to end this genocide that that we have been living for more than 80 days now.

'The message I want to send to the world is. We know. We know that you. We know that you are against us. We know that you want this. Stop. We know that you tried. We know that. Some of you protested. We know that in your heart. In your heart. Under the name of humanity. You believe that this should not happen to humans. But. It's still not enough. We need you to do more. I'm literally recording this on his sound. Drones and F-16s bombing around me, and I do not know if any of these bombs will hit me before I even send this message. But I want you to know one thing that you need to do more, and you can do more you to pressure you governments to stop this. A ceasefire. We need a ceasefire. You need to stand with. With us. You need to stand. With everyone. In Gaza because in stronger ways than anything you tried. Because none of this stopped this yet.

And just a reminder, you can see pictures and hear even more of these stories over at CNN.com/gaza voices. That's CNN.com/gazavoices. A link to the page is in our show notes.

'Tug of War is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Licktieg is the executive producer of CNN audio. We get support from Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Alaa Elassar, Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Nadeem Muaddi, Matt Dempsey, Janie Boschma, Byron Manley, Will Mullery, Caroline Paterson & Katie Hinman. We'll be back next week on Wednesday. Talk to you then.