Palestine Letter: What it’s like to witness your own Nakba

DISPLACED PALESTINIANS ATTEMPTS TO MAKE THEIR WAY BACK TO NORTHERN GAZA TO THEIR HOMES, CENTRAL GAZA, APRIL 14, 2024. (PHOTO: OMAR ASHTAWY/APA IMAGES)

After al-Shifa Hospital, all the places I used to go to in Gaza, whether for work or to spend time with my family, I could see how the Israeli army was destroying them. All the pictures I kept of my family in those places suddenly became too difficult to look at.

Everything was fine a few days before this genocide began. The difficult conditions and suffering experienced by the Palestinians in Gaza created new opportunities and challenges. The Palestinians always invented unique ways to survive. Despite all these difficulties, a short trip to the sea helped people regain their balance and continue with the challenging life imposed by the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip. However, there were no Israeli soldiers and forces in Gaza’s lands. There was some room for life inside the Strip. Now, after the Israeli army invaded Gaza, there is nothing left there except death and the loss of dreams and hopes.

When I was displaced for the first time out of Gaza City, taking my family with me to the city of Khan Younis, none of us imagined that returning to Gaza City would become impossible. Even though we did not carry all our luggage and belongings with us, we thought it would always be possible to return.

This is indeed what we thought. 

These exact words – “we thought we would return” – are all too familiar to me, a journalist who has conducted dozens of interviews with Palestinians in Gaza during the Nakba in 1948. Nakba survivors would always say this exact phrase, even after living out the rest of their lives in refugee camps, never able to return to their homes.

Despite being filled with stories of the Nakba, I never imagined that those same scenes would be repeated in my lifetime. I thought the Nakba would not be repeated. I thought the world had changed since 1948. I never thought it had become worse – that the world would see, and hear annihilation as it is happening, and still be unable to stop it.

At the beginning of the war, I was in Gaza City, and I would leave my family for several hours during the day and go to a place near al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. This hospital was the largest source of information for journalists, and most journalists rented places close to the hospital to ensure quick access to those sources. I used to go back and forth one way, and when I came back, I would find buildings and houses that had just been bombed and on fire.

Everything was and is still changing, in the Gaza Strip from one moment to the next. If you look closely, you will find that it is more than a war, but rather a complete geographical and demographic change, and the annihilation of the population. This is not the first time that we saw places, and the memories we had in those places, destroyed by Israel. But it becomes difficult when every place we live in, and everything we have memories of, is destroyed.

When we left, the entire city of Gaza was under the threat of constant killing and bombing. We began to see all these places that we knew and lived in, spent the most beautiful moments of our lives with our friends and families, and studied for many years in, being destroyed one place after another. Ordinary pictures of our families in the streets and neighborhoods, and on the shore of Gaza’s beaches, suddenly became not just memories, but pictures that carried our nostalgia. They became unrecognizable places, places we could no longer return to. Places we longed for.

Al-Shifa Hospital, which I walked through countless times to conduct interviews with doctors, families, and patients, was later transformed into mass graves and swamps of blood.

After al-Shifa Hospital, all the places I used to go to in Gaza, whether for work or to spend time with my family, I could see how the Israeli army was destroying them. All the pictures I kept of my family in those places suddenly became too difficult to look at.

I keep pictures of my son in different places in Gaza, such as the Bianco Resort on the Gaza seashore. This was one of the first places that the Israeli army invaded. We spent the most beautiful times with the family on those wooden chairs painted white and blue on the seashore. In the same place, next to those wooden chairs, we saw a video of an Israeli soldier standing in that place and saying that they would invade the entire Gaza Strip and that this was just the beginning. That was at the start of the war.

As the days of the long, non-stop war pass, everything we knew in Gaza has been destroyed by Israel, and the destruction is still continuing. Not only our homes, our loved ones, our universities, our schools, and the sea, but even our memories are being destroyed.