For two years, our lives have been on hold amid constant air strikes and fighting. Now, we finally have reason to hope
( OpenDemocracy.net ) – Growing up in Gaza, my friends and I often heard older relatives’ stories of the Nakba; learning about the homes that Israeli troops forced them out of in 1948, and the keys they forever carried with them in hopes of returning. We never imagined that we would one day carry this pain ourselves.
For the last two years, history has repeated itself before the eyes of the world. Those of us in Gaza who have survived the Israeli genocide have lived a new Nakba, not knowing where to go or if we will ever return home.
This has not been one war, but multiple wars happening at once. It is the war of relentless bombing that destroyed homes and neighbourhoods, the war of forced displacement that has pushed hundreds of thousands into the unknown at a moment’s notice, and the war of tents that offer no protection from the scorching summer heat or the cold and rain of winter.
Today, as we hear news of a ceasefire, we’re caught between feeling joy and fear – between believing and doubting.
I was in my hometown of Rafah in May last year when the Israeli occupation launched its invasion of the city. In a single day, Rafah was transformed from an overcrowded city sheltering more than 1.5 million people – both its own residents and those who’d sought refuge there after being displaced from elsewhere in Gaza – to an empty wasteland.
Within hours, the roads filled with overloaded cars and carts as hundreds of thousands of people, my family included, abandoned their homes and most of their belongings, fleeing towards the unknown. There was no time to think or to salvage what remained; fearing what would happen to those trapped, we all chose survival over everything else.
A few days later, the evacuation operation expanded further, forcing tens of thousands of us to move to the Mawasi area in Khan Younis. I’d never been to Mawasi before, but I had heard about it from friends online: a barren land with sand dunes unlike anything we’d seen before. When we arrived, we found dilapidated plastic tents, extreme overcrowding, no sewage or basic services.
The tents’ flimsy fabric roofs offered no protection from the summer heat or the winter cold. Our daily life turned into a continuous struggle of finding water, trying to charge our phones, and dealing with internet cuts, with scorching days and freezing nights. Even sleeping and talking became difficult amid the complete lack of privacy.
Life in the camps offered no safety at all. One evening, my cousin Ali was returning from the sea at sunset when he was chased by a quadcopter – a small, remote-controlled drone that Israel has used to surveil, intimidate and even kill civilians in Gaza. Ali froze in place for minutes that he said felt like hours before the drone disappeared, and he ran away, terrified. After that, we no longer dared to leave the area once darkness fell.
Every night, we would lay awake listening to stray bullets from occupation snipers piercing the air, planting terror in our hearts. We would lie on the ground instinctively, fearing any bullet that might pierce the tent, and sometimes six of us would gather in a small stone room at my aunt’s place, seeking a sliver of safety. After a neighbour’s child was paralysed by a stray bullet that pierced their tent, some of my relatives dug small trenches inside theirs to hide in.
On 10 September 2024, we lived through a night we will never forget. The evening began like any other; my family was in the tent and I was laying out front, trying to escape the heat, reading Letter from Gaza, a short story about a young man who returns home to Gaza to find his neighbourhood destroyed. It could have been penned any day over the past two years, but was written nearly 70 years ago by Palestinian author and militant Ghassan Kanafani.
I was interrupted by the sound of a military helicopter, followed by five consecutive airstrikes that destroyed much of the camp. My family managed to escape unharmed, which was a miracle, but in an instant, we lost everything we owned for a second time: our tent, our few belongings, my university certificates, and the computer that I used for my studies.
I remember screams, blood, and mothers searching for their children in the smoke. The Palestinian Civil Defence Agency later reported that 40 people had died that night, and 60 others were injured. But we had nowhere else to go, so my mother and sisters moved briefly into a friend’s tent, and within a week my father and I had rebuilt a shelter for us.
Then came the ceasefire on 18 January 2025, bringing a ray of hope. I returned to my home in Rafah, clutching the key as if it were all I had left. But my joy did not last long. When I reached the neighbourhood, I found nothing but rubble. My house, the homes of my relatives and friends, even my grandmother’s house, the place I most loved spending time – they were all gone.
The key I had believed would take me back home became merely a symbol of a Nakba that my ancestors had already endured, a memory of a home that no longer exists. Still, we stayed in Rafah, staying with a relative and trying to rebuild our lives.
My family is far from alone. Since the start of the invasion, 1.9 million people, nearly 90% of Gaza’s population, have been internally displaced – many of them forced to move over and over again as Israel expands its war into areas it told us would be safe. The occupation now controls large parts of the Strip, leaving less than 30% of Gaza’s original area habitable and making freedom of movement impossible.
In mid-March, two months after it started, the ceasefire ended abruptly and the war’s devastation resumed overnight. The bombardment intensified worse than ever, and by the morning, Rafah was surrounded by Israeli tanks. We were forced to evacuate for a fifth time, returning to a tent in Mawasi without any of the belongings I had managed to salvage from our shelled home.
On that day, I realised my old life would never return. For me, it was a new phase of the war, a new chapter of terror. I had to face that the relentless and violent bombing was not just a passing event, but our everyday reality – everything I knew from before the war was gone, just memories.
For more than a year, Rafah has been entirely under occupation, with no news of when we might be able to go home. The city is no longer as I knew it growing up. There is no safety, and freedom of movement is impossible.
Despite all the loss and suffering tied into displacement, it has reunited me with friends whom war stopped me from seeing for over a year. Hamdan, my friend from Khan Younis, Mahmoud from Gaza City, and Ramez from East Khan Younis; we all found ourselves in the same area, a small solace in all the devastation.
My friends and I began sharing our stories and sorrows every day. Mahmoud, with whom I went to university before its buildings were destroyed and our dreams were shattered, told us of how his family spent most of the past two years refusing to leave Gaza City, in the north of the Gaza Strip, choosing to endure the war in their home.
Then, last month, Binyamin Netanyahu’s occupation announced its plan to fully occupy the city. The shelling intensified, and every time Mahmoud looked out of his window, he would see the trucks that were carrying more than half a million people and their belongings south.
Over 200,000 families remained in the city, though. Some had nowhere else to go, some could not afford the up to $5,000 it can cost to transport belongings and purchase tents, and some, like Mahmoud’s family, simply did not want to leave.
Eventually, the shelling hit the neighbourhood where Mahmoud and his family lived, and became a daily occurrence. Several nearby tower blocks were destroyed. All services in the area collapsed; there was no potable water, or even dirty water, and no people on the streets or in the markets. Life became impossible. Mahmoud’s family was finally forced to evacuate.
Wassily Kandinsky, “Ohne Titel,” 1923. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Mahmoud and I are no longer who we once were. We used to have breakfast together in the university cafeteria, walk through the lecture halls together to attend our daily classes, and go together to Gaza City’s central library to borrow a book or one of the English novels. Now, we still see each other most days – living as we do in nearby camps – but our lives are so different now; we are unrecognisable from who we once were.
Two years have passed in which life has been on hold. Every day we have asked ourselves the same question: will this nightmare ever end? Then, last night, we finally heard the news that we have all been waiting for: Israel and Hamas appear ready to reach a peace deal.
The camp instantly came alive. Women began to ululate and children laughed, it felt as though everyone had been waiting for just one moment to breathe, a brief pause from this long fear. No one knows if this is truly the end or just another pause in the war, but today, we all need to believe that peace – even for a moment – is still possible.
Hassan Herzallah is a Palestinian translator and writer based in Gaza.
This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
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