Live updates: Israel at war with Hamas and Hezbollah, one year after the October 7 attacks

Palestinian women mourn near the bodies of their relatives killed in an Israeli airstrike in June outside the mortuary of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al Balah, Gaza.

A mood of despair is gripping many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, who are living in terrible humanitarian conditions after enduring 12 months of Israeli bombardment of the enclave.

“We spent a year in war,” Abdallah Hmeida, a cancer patient displaced from Beit Lahia, told CNN in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah. Hmeida lost his parents, brother and sisters in the conflict, he said.

“It's torture. We don't know where to go and we live in tents.”

Nabila Shunnar, a displaced woman from Sheikh Radwan, said she had spent the last year “in fear, terror, hunger and tragedy.”

Gaza residents told CNN they did not expect the fighting to drag on for more than a year, and some now fear it could be interminable as they see no concrete efforts to cement a ceasefire.

Some residents say they waited months for the war to end just so they could bury their dead or recover their remains.

Um Fadi, a displaced woman from the northern Gaza Strip now seeking refuge in Deir al-Balah, said she had lost hope in the world's ability to act in the face of bloodshed. Fadi lives in tents with her husband and five children and fears the coming winter. Her family has no clothing to protect them from the cold, she says.

For Gazans, it has been 365 days of “suffering, poverty, hunger, disease, instability and lack of security,” she told CNN.

“We are bodies without souls,” she added.