The cost of freedom

Rafah is all that is left to those still standing.

In the days before, I looked upon the cold winter nights with fondness, days I spent sipping coffee underneath the starlight, wearing my favorite clothes in my favorite place with my favorite people. These days are over now — not just for myself, but for an entire society. Yet even though our realities have now been reduced to bare existence, we won’t content ourselves to aspire for small things. We still want it all — because, to put it simply, we will never stop wanting everything out of life, no matter the series of displacements we’ve had to endure.

The majority of people are staying in designated shelters, either in schools or UNRWA compounds, meaning that most families of a typical size of seven people are separated from other similarly sized families by little more than a sheet of cloth or a nylon tarp. Rows upon rows of families are hemmed in these close quarters.

Obtaining basic necessities like diapers or baby formula can take two days of searching. Al-Awda street, Rafah’s main marketplace, is teeming with people attempting to find food, water, or anything to sustain their families. But simply needing something for survival is not a guarantee that you will get it.

Those who have been displaced to Rafah continue this war even though they aren’t participating in it. Their daily struggle becomes finding a piece of bread, while simple commodities remain dreams. If you were to walk through the crowded marketplaces while carrying a sack of flour, a few bags of chips, or bars of chocolate, people will immediately ask you whether what you’re carrying is for sale. One young man I witnessed was carrying three sacks of flour and waiting by the side of the road for a ride to take the flour to his family, and he had to yell loudly at onlookers as he waited: “Not for sale! Not for sale!”

Price of freedom, price of survival

For those who already live in liberated lands and who mention us in their hopes for a new year, or for those who one day hope to liberate their own homelands, we must tell you all: freedom has a heavy price. 

Yet a freedom that doesn’t mean surviving a fate of humiliation and death isn’t freedom at all — it is death. So why wouldn’t a person who loves freedom escape that death? These are the choices that the people of Gaza now face.

Rafah is the third stage in our displacement, where the army ordered residents to flee yet again. But displacement and flight don’t mean leaving one place and reaching another; it means leaving everything behind and coming to terms with the fact that everything is temporary, that you have no control over your life because the only other option facing you is death, humiliation, and the loss of humanity. At any moment, the area we are staying in might receive calls ordering us to leave. Anyone desiring to live will have to follow those orders because all other results have been decided for us, as everyone coming in from northern Gaza can attest. You will find many who have been displaced once, twice, three times, seven times. You will find those who lead their families behind them in marketplaces, begging for shelter and a place to keep warm and dry. 

Gaza’s different regions have been cut off from one another. Entire cities have been flattened and invaded. Their people have been humiliated at gunpoint, ordering them to strip naked in the cold, killing them with impunity. All of Gaza has received this treatment, and even southernmost Rafah, housing over 1.7 million of the displaced, is waiting its turn. It is one of the last cities in the south that still has not seen the entry of Israeli ground forces, even though the warplanes have already eviscerated large swathes of its urban landscape. People are now searching through the rubble for food and medicine. Tents have been erected in the Salam area nearest to the Egyptian border, as if setting up for their eventual and perhaps final displacement. There are those who will leave at the point of a tank’s barrel, and there are those who would sooner leave before that comes to pass, knowing that those who waited to be driven out have experienced pain and humiliation beyond description.

Yet survival has a price, too, and the price of freedom itself is the loss of your homeland. The fear is that the bloody battles will reach Rafah, pushing Palestinians to leave and become refugees all over again, living in tents in the middle of the Sinai desert. There, UNRWA will be unable to help them, as it has previously stated, and the world will abandon them once again.

It abandoned them the first time when their blood was flowing in Gaza, and the world remembered them only after their blood ran dry. That was when the wiping out of entire families had already become commonplace, a piece of news that passes without incident.

When the world calls this “voluntary displacement,” vowing that the people of Gaza will not be forcibly displaced from their homes, it makes a mockery of the meaning of the word.

“I have lived my entire life in steadfastness and resilience, enduring everything,” one of the steadfast in Gaza says. “Will I be rewarded for my steadfastness by being killed or humiliated in front of my family?”

He refuses this option, resolving that he will now travel to Egypt, the closest country to Gaza. This is what is called “voluntary flight” today, but there is nothing voluntary about it when staying means certain death or humiliation. Leaving for Egypt was always an option that was available to him before the war, but he refused it.

The fighting continues as we approach the new year, and there are no signs that things might change anytime soon. Death is the easiest thing here now, easier than New Year’s parties or my son’s birthday. But it seems that before his first birthday comes, he will already be a refugee in some part of the world.

Amidst all of this, people in Rafah are afraid that what happened in other parts of Gaza will happen here, too. What is going to stop Israel from invading Rafah and ordering its people to go towards Egypt? For Israel, this is a historic opportunity to carry out the second Nakba.

Even so, the resistance in northern Gaza and Khan Younis continues to fight, and the Israeli army is sustaining heavy losses. These losses indicate that Israel has not been able to destroy Gaza’s resistance or to eliminate Hamas, as it claims. As of the time of writing, and during the past two months, Israel has been unable to achieve even one of the goals that it publicly set for itself at the outset of the war. Israel claims that it has taken control of the north, which has been completely flattened, including Gaza City, Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, Jabaliya, and Jabaliya refugee camp. Barely a single house or building has been left standing, and Israeli forces have been operating there for months, including the ground forces. Yet it is precisely from those areas that new barrages of rockets continue to be launched into Israel.

This is why the people of Rafah are convinced that Israel will start to look for easier targets. The expansion of the ground offensive into Khan Younis and southern Gaza, where Israel has committed terrifying massacres, is being viewed as an indicator of what is to come. In fact, the prevailing sentiment in Rafah holds that since Israel has been unable to make significant military headway in gaining ground over the resistance, it will take out its frustration on the people of Rafah. 

And it will avenge its wounded pride through indiscriminate killings, massacres, and the ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza into the Sinai.