A story of displacement and the loss of my homeland

When I evacuated my home in Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighborhood to go to the nearby Zeiytoun neighborhood, I knew this would not be the only stop in my family’s journey of displacement. It became clear to me what would happen next. I believed that Israel would take advantage of this opportunity to end the Palestinian presence in Gaza and expel us to the Sinai. This is what Israel has always desired and has only been stopped by the refusal of Arab leaders.

This time, however, it seems that everything is clear and was planned in advance. This time, there is a real danger that we will actually lose our homeland, possibly forever, and will be forced into Egypt. Our choice is to risk staying and dying. We are being forced to leave our destroyed homes. We are being forced to abandon our memories buried under the rubble. We are being forced to let go of the dreams we built inside those homes.

After we left northern Gaza to go south, we settled in Khan Younis, but I wasn’t under any illusions that we would stay there for very long, even as the army designated it a “safe zone.” Khan Younis would soon be emptied of its inhabitants as well, with everyone being forced toward Rafah on the border with Egypt. And after Khan Younis is emptied of its inhabitants — after its infrastructure is decimated, after its buildings are leveled, and after those who stayed behind are killed off — that’s when it will be Rafah’s turn to be displaced, but this time it will be to outside of Palestine.

Escaping Khan Younis

Last Friday, we woke up to the sound of heavy bombardment in Khan Younis. The sound was close and terrifying. In the preceding weeks, even though Khan Younis was exposed to considerable fire, one could still say that conditions were comparatively stable, because the nature of the bombardment was less intensive in that part of the strip and not around-the-clock. No longer. 

The bombardment was now everywhere. It shook everything. Whoever was standing indoors in their living room would be shaken off their feet just from the force of nearby explosions. All this bombardment occurred in the early morning, between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m. By 7:00, the occupation army started to call our cell phones. Everyone in that area of Khan Younis received the same call warning residents of specific areas in their own numbered residential blocks to flee.

“Your area of residence has now become a dangerous battleground. You must evacuate immediately to the safe areas indicated by the Israel Defense Forces,” the army recording said. One of those areas was called al-Mawasi in western Khan Younis, stretching south along the coast all the way to Rafah.

At first, my family decided not to move because we had nowhere to go that could house a family, mostly of women, children, and the elderly. There were eight of us living in the same house — my family, composed of four people, and my father-in-law’s family, also made up of four people. We resolved that we would not go to any of the shelters for the displaced, where conditions are so deplorable that the elderly and frail among us would not survive. My mother is old and suffers from diabetes and heart disease. She is also blind. All of us will remain, we decided. 

We remained firm in that resolve until the evening hours of that same day. I went out into the street to see how people were responding to the army phone calls. I saw people pulling their suitcases and leaving the area. People were abandoning Khan Younis in droves as women looked for animal-drawn carts to carry their belongings. The lucky among them was able to secure a car or truck, but most were proceeding on foot, carrying bags, suitcases, backpacks, propane canisters, portable mattresses, and food items like flour.

I returned to the house we were staying in and told my family that everyone was picking up and leaving. Only a few houses remained with inhabitants still in them. That was when Israel bombed two houses inside our residential block. The force of the explosions shattered the windows in our house. Billowing smoke filled the room as my mother and infant son started coughing uncontrollably. We frantically went down to the street in an attempt to run away from the smoke. It was everywhere, a gray mist carrying dust and the smell of gunpowder. We couldn’t see anything in front of us or each other. We were screaming each others’ names and trying to stick together. Those moments were some of the most terrifying I have ever experienced, and the explosions weren’t even that close, as dozens of houses separated us from the targets that were bombed.

The targeted four-story building belonged to the Siam family. The attack killed over fifteen people, the majority of them women and children. One elderly woman emerged from the devastation, wearing her house clothes, covered in dust, her hand half-severed, but she was still alive. She was standing on her feet, screaming. 

“Save my children!” she begged people in the street who had rushed to the scene. No one dared enter yet for one simple reason: the Israeli army now targets buildings twice, first with an initial strike that destroys the home and then another to kill the maximum number of people possible. This practice has become so commonplace that people in Gaza are used to waiting for the second strike before going in to look for survivors.

The elderly woman kept screaming, begging, and grabbing onto people near her as she bled. Our decision to leave Khan Younis was made that night. The Israeli strategy of terrorizing us into fleeing was working. 

The strike was intentional, a way of telling us: this is what will befall you if you choose to stay behind. 

Life in Rafah

We frantically packed everything we could manage to carry with us, grabbing food and water, some flour, rice, and lentils, the things that are no longer available in all of Gaza. We took what we took and forgot what we forgot in our frantic evacuation.

One of us called a friend who owned a truck. Within the hour, we were putting everything into it, not only my family and my father-in-law’s, but the entire three-story building, including my brother and uncle, all of us crammed into the truck. That image alone scared us because we knew the warplanes and drones might target anything that moved or appeared suspicious.

The trip to Rafah was devastating. Countless people were walking on foot, carrying all their lives in their arms, many trying to flag us down and begging us to take them with us. But there was no room, as all of us were already crammed on top of each other with our belongings. 

The main road between Khan Younis and Rafah, Salah al-Din Street, had already been bombed by the Israeli warplanes early on Friday morning, so people fleeing Khan Younis had to take frightening detours that led them through agricultural fields and unlit dirt roads, walking at night in pitch black darkness.

My father-in-law called his sister in Rafah City, who lives in Yibna refugee camp, asking her if she had a house for us to stay. She said that she herself had fled her home to somewhere safer after a residential block near her was hit in an airstrike that caused the door to her house to blow open and the frames of her windows to fall and shatter, breaking the tile underneath. But we had no other option but to go to this abandoned house, or risk going to the overflowing shelters in Rafah.

We arrived in Yibna’s emaciated landscape. Half the buildings in the camp were destroyed, and the other half of the residents had fled in fear, and that’s where we were going to stay. The entire area was desolate, and it felt like we were the only people in the world, trapped in a hellish existence. 

The house we were staying in was no longer a house. The windows were ripped from their frames. Rats and mice filled the house, and we slept beside them on the first night. Water — which we had been able to obtain in Khan Younis after waiting four hours in long lines — was an impossibility here due to the inaccessibility of the bombed-out narrow streets for supply trucks. We had brought some drinking water with us, but the arduous journey left us parched. We drank when we arrived, not knowing that we would not be able to access more water.

We realized this the next day. We started rationing what little we had. All of our families had to share three liters of water between us. It was a miracle that I could secure some boiled water to use for my infant son’s baby formula, having ventured into Rafah City carrying a liter of water and a tea kettle, searching for any merchant that had access to a fire to use it to boil the water I had. I had to wait for half an hour until the water boiled, after which I walked back to where we were sheltering and was able to pour the water into a thermos to preserve what little heat remained in the water.

I left behind family in Khan Younis, sisters and brothers. Some resided in safe parts of the city near the European Hospital, but my sister was staying in the Qarara area, one of the first targets of Israel’s strikes. I called her to check in on her, and she told me that she was living on the streets now. She left Khan Younis with her family and reached Rafah by foot, but when she got there and asked about shelters, people led her to an overflowing school that had no place for her or her family. They set up a tent in the street outside of the school.

Our new Nakba

In the little time I had to access news, I read that the residential block where we stayed in Khan Younis had been totally leveled. If we had remained, none of us would have survived. I also recently heard over the local radio that Egypt might be forced to allow some Palestinian refugees to enter. This was the same issue Egypt considered non-negotiable at the beginning of the war. Now, it is being openly spoken about by some Egyptian officials. 

It appears this will be our fate in the coming period. After they are done with Khan Younis and have killed everyone who refuses to leave their homes, the Israeli tanks will turn their sights on Rafah. The Palestinian people will be ordered to flee toward the Egyptian border, and with that, Israel will seek to create new generations of refugees.

Here we are, documenting our new Nakba with our own hands before it even happens, anticipating its next steps in the knowledge that we will lose our lands and our homes. The houses we have left behind in Gaza have now been reduced to rubble, but for us, that rubble will remain more precious than all the land in the world. We will find no comfort in whichever foreign land we may go to next. This is the land that we love, and this is the land we are being forced to leave in our rush to escape death.

Our Nakba is being recorded by us in real-time for the entire world to see. Everyone can witness our slaughter and our collective death. We, the carriers of simple dreams, of living in dignity in a house on our land among our loved ones and families — even this simple dream has been destroyed by Israel, for no greater sin than being born under occupation.