A love letter to Jabalia

On October 5, 2024, two days ahead of the first anniversary of Hamas’s brief jailbreak of the colonial fence, Israel launched yet another massive ground campaign targeting north Gaza with the clear intention of exterminating the some 300,000 – 500,000 Palestinians who remained there, resisting Israel’s ethnic cleansing orders.

At the heart of this campaign is Jabalia refugee camp. 

As the new invasion inched closer to the camp, my friends nervously urged me to call on my family to evacuate Jabalia immediately. “They will be annihilated in the same way that they [Zionist militias] did in Deir Yassin,” a friend texted me. I was shocked by the analogy, but now I see the resemblance to the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948. During the year of the Nakba, the massacres perpetrated by the Zionist movement were meant to terrorize the Palestinian population and facilitate their flight from their homes. This is what is happening in Jabalia. 

Unlike Israel’s previous campaigns in north Gaza, there is today widespread concern that the endgame is to re-colonize the area after its Palestinian population is emptied out.  

As I am writing this, Israel’s carnage in the north continues to reach an increasingly horrifying level. Israeli colonial forces have completely encircled the 1.5 square kilometers that comprise Jabalia refugee camp, placing it under total siege while relentlessly and deliberately shelling civilians’ homes, burning displacement shelters, bombing hospitals, targeting journalists, arresting medical and Civil Defense personnel, and forcibly ordering people to leave their shelters at gunpoint.

This is invariably a recipe for colonial elimination and ethnic cleansing. 

As I am writing this, dozens of people are still trapped under the rubble of their homes following Israel’s recent carnage in the al-Kholfa compound in Jabalia, where several families were wiped out. Israeli bombs pulverized an entire block, killing and wounding 150 Palestinians. The news of the massacre came out slowly and vaguely, with no media or Civil Defense personnel who can reach the area.  

My memory immediately recalled last year’s massacre in Jabalia refugee camp’s Sanayyda neighborhood (the area is named after the village of Deir Sanad that its residents fled in 1948). On October 31, 2023 — only one street away from where the more recent massacre took place — al-Sanayyda became one of the largest massacres perpetrated by Israel throughout this genocidal war, killing 400 people and annihilating entire families after some 50 residential buildings were leveled in under six minutes. Only a large pile of rubble remains to this day.

In the camp, there is now only death and destruction. Some 80,000 Palestinians remain in north Gaza. Even less remain in Jabalia, living in limbo and cut off from the rest of the world. They continue to endure an apocalyptic extermination campaign, but they stubbornly refuse to leave their homes, whether it’s the bombed-out remains of their former houses or tents and displacement shelters. They know that evacuating to the south would fulfill the Israeli colonial plan to “purify” north Gaza. Leaving means never coming back. 

The Jabalia I know

I grew up in Jabalia refugee camp. I identify myself with its resilient people, who are “samedin,” or steadfast. I grew up listening to my mother’s stories about Jabalia’s resistance during the First Intifada, about its fedayeen (freedom fighters) and its stubborn defiance of the colonial regime.

I am part of the third Nakba generation, even as I am also part of the Oslo generation. My Palestinianism has been shaped around being a refugee, colored by the Nakba, colonialism, and resistance. My national memory reflects that of the camp’s collective memory. 

Jabalia’s narrow alleyways and grey-cemented buildings have stood as a reminder of our Nakba and the misery it wrought upon us generation after generation. No wonder Jabalia has been a birthplace of resistance, deserving the name it has been given — mu’askar Jabalia, or “Jabalia military camp.”

Since 1948, the camp has been a crucial source of recruitment for the Palestinian liberation movement. It was in Jabalia that the First Intifada, an uprising against Israeli military rule in Palestine, began in 1987 after an Israeli vehicle ran over and killed three residents of the camp.

Also read: ‘Jabalia is the birthplace of uprisings’: Israeli army withdraws, but the camp remains.

I witnessed three full-scale attacks on Gaza, but I always felt an unexplained sense of reassurance that the camp was somehow a “safe place.” Even when this genocidal war proved that nowhere was safe, my family would be hard to convince to evacuate and leave the camp. 

In the course of the current genocidal war against Gaza, Israel has launched three massive and lethal ground invasions against the camp. The camp as I know it has been almost wiped out, as my mother laments in every call. “You would not recognize Jabalia and our neighborhood,” she tells me. The camp was ravaged by the constant Israeli bombing. Makeshift tents keep popping up as a violent reminder of the assault. The narrow lanes have disappeared, and roads are littered with craters and debris. A mass graveyard now lies where the old market once stood.

Jabalia and my mother are similar. Both are stubborn and proud. And both are fighters.

My mother is a tough and headstrong woman. Why would she not be? She grew up during the Israeli military occupation, the daughter of a resistance fighter, or fedayee, as she proudly pronounces it. She got married and moved to the Jabalia refugee camp during the First Intifada and never left. It was hard to convince her to evacuate along with my siblings at the outset of the war. It was only during the first ground invasion of Jabalia, when the shells started to fall above their heads, that my family reluctantly evacuated. 

Throughout the ongoing genocidal war, my family, like every single family in Gaza, had to evacuate several times for their lives. But every time, they never fled south. They and hundreds of thousands of camp residents refused to follow Israel’s orders.

After every invasion was over, my family would go back to Jabalia and forge a new life of sorts. I find it quite puzzling how people in the camp can resume life following every massacre. They remove the rubble, rebuild the damaged walls using recycled debris, and plant the roofs of what buildings have been left standing to grow food and avoid starvation. 

None of this should mythologize the people of Jabalia or obscure the human suffering they have endured as normal people of flesh and blood. 

Yet living thousands of miles away from Gaza, struggling with my survivor’s guilt, I can’t help but lean on my mother’s (and the camp’s) steadfastness as a source of inspiration. It is the only way to make sense of my existence as a Palestinian who has now been turned into forcible exile. It is the only hope I can draw upon.