When you're flat hunting in Gaza there's a lot to consider. Does it have a generator that kicks into gear as soon as the electricity cuts, is there air conditioning and how close is it to a police training ground?

I lived in Gaza in 2011 for one year, working as a correspondent for Al Jazeera English and needed somewhere permanent to call home.

Our two Palestinian producers, Samy and Safwat, drove me across Gaza City looking for flats.

In the end we settled on Hanadi Tower. I was on the eighth floor of the 13-storey building. I had a large three-bedroom flat with beautiful views over the Gaza seaport and the Mediterranean Sea.

The block was full of UN staff and middle-class Palestinian families.

I was lucky to live there, when the electricity stopped every eight hours, the generator kicked into gear and kept the lights on for another eight hours. Most Palestinians had to suffer in darkness.

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Every morning I would hear the the sound of donkey carts owned by fruit and vegetable sellers as they rode down the street. Often the smell of garbage being burned close to the city was so strong you couldn't sleep. And if the sea breeze was coming in from the south you could smell the raw sewage being pumped into the sea from Gaza’s broken sewage system.

I could look out the kitchen window and hear the police force in Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, jogging in the street below me. They had a training ground a few blocks away.

You could never escape the reality of living in Gaza.

On the weekends in spring and summer you could barely sleep from the sound of the wedding hall next door. When there was something to celebrate, the Gazans partied.

But in Gaza you are never far away from another war with Israel. Even in quieter periods there were frequent Israeli airstrikes carried out on so-called "empty land," blocks of land in Gaza with no development.

Later in the year I got new neighbors.

Hamas took over control of the Hanadi building from the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations staff moved out.

Not long after Israel and Hamas carried out a prisoner exchange. One Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, for more than 1,000 Palestinian political prisoners, some had been in Israeli jails for decades.

And some of them became my neighbors in the tower block.

The prisoner swap was a huge story in Gaza. When I returned back to the flat after a 16-hour day, it was brimming with former prisoners in new shiny suits and their families. I rode the elevator up with them and had to pinch myself that one day ago they were in Israeli jails and now they were living beside me.

Later, most of them moved out to other parts of Gaza and the building became a normal residential block.

Another memory, destroyed

The Hanadi Tower is full of memories for me. Being picked up every morning by our office driver Rami and listening to Fairuz on the radio as we drove through the streets and quiet Friday mornings waiting for the Zyara family and their nine children to stop by the building and pick me up for lunch.

When you leave Gaza you leave with a sense of loss, knowing that returning is difficult if not impossible unless you are a journalist. 

And that the people you have left behind can't escape.

I covered the 2012 and 2014 wars in Gaza and saw whole neighborhoods like Shajayea destroyed.  

On Tuesday evening Hanadi Tower was also destroyed. Its residents were given two hours' warning by the Israeli army to evacuate before it was bombed.

In Gaza the occupation never ends. While the rest of the world has been locked down by a virus for one year, the people of Gaza have been locked inside its borders for almost 14 years.