Following the ceasefire in Gaza on October 10, everyone needed time to absorb the idea that the war had ended, that they’d no longer have to follow the daily announcements of evacuation orders from one area to another, that they would no longer lose their loved ones every day, that the images of tiny bodies wrapped in shrouds that have no business being this small would finally recede into memory.
This has been everyone’s daily reality for two years of horror, unlike anything the Palestinian people have ever witnessed.
When a war ends, the thing that occupies the mind of every displaced person is the home they left behind. It is the strongest feeling that drives them, the eagerness to return. The end of this way didn’t offer that respite.
People came back to piles of rubble. Many of them knew what they were coming back to, but they went anyway, making a now-treacherous journey from the south that took some people five days before reaching Gaza City. Even those who had managed to rent apartments in the few buildings still left standing abandoned their shelter on the second day of the ceasefire once the roads had been cleared. They were going home.
Everyone was determined to return. Even those who moved from a tent in the southern Gaza Strip to a tent in Gaza City. At some point, the rubble of a person’s home itself has become an object of yearning. In Gaza today, people no longer ask one another, “Have you returned to your house?” The first question they rattle off is whether they had managed to salvage anything from the rubble. It was a different sort of right of return.
Rubble became a symbol of what can one day be rebuilt, even if after many years, even if they only used their own hands. The rubble was a promise, so they returned to the ruins, because they became ruins of return.
Over the past two years, I have written many stories about families who refused to leave their homes and refused to obey the Israeli army’s orders to evacuate their areas. Some of those who refused were killed in their homes, while others, when the danger became too great, eventually left. Now, as I witness the return of these same families to their homes and how they celebrate anything they can retrieve from under the rubble, I understand why Palestinian families prefer to stay and die in their homes rather than leave and lose everything.
Those who returned explained that they searched through the rubble for anything that reminded them of what life once was. Some burnt clothes, a few personal items, cooking utensils. A lucky family might find some of their belongings still intact, as if they had been preserved under the layers of concrete that have turned to dust.
I spoke with some of those returning to Gaza City after the war ended, those who lost their homes. I did not talk to anyone who still had their house intact, because they didn’t exist. All the houses were destroyed, and people were pitching their tents next to them. And they all say the same thing to me: “As long as it’s a tent — whether in the south or in Gaza City — let it be beside our homes and neighborhoods. Let us replace our destroyed house with a temporary tent until we can rebuild it.”
It’s still home, even if it’s a tent.
