Shaban

As for the grand piano, Khamis Abu Shaban hopes students will one day be able to play it again.

Khamis Abu Shaban had finally risked returning to the music school at which he taught - and which owns the piano - a few months into the current conflict.

"I am trying to leave for Rafah but the tanks are now very near to the coast and are firing toward the west," Shaban, an electrical engineer with four children, told Reuters news agency.

“The suffering is really apocalyptic,” said Khaled Abu Shaban, 38, an aid worker near Khan Younis.

Shaban Ali has lived in a public housing tower in Bristol, in southwest England, for seven years.