Deir el-Balah, Gaza – One insight I have gained over the past two decades is that trauma is not just experienced, it is encoded in our genes, passed down from generation to generation, shaping our collective memory, identity and attitude.
About 17 years ago, I received my first laptop as a family gift. It came with a black laptop case, among other accessories.
Although excited about the gift, I requested a backpack instead of the case because “it’s easier to carry in case I have to flee.”
At the time, I had never experienced forced displacement. Today, as I sit in my third shelter in Deir el-Balah, more than ten months after I was forced to flee my home, I realize that my plea may have been a whisper from the past, echoes of my grandparents—evicted from their home in Jerusalem to make way for the creation of the State of Israel in 1948—reverberating across decades.
Lifelines to a distant home
As a Palestinian, one of the things you inherit is the persistent and ever-present fear of losing your home without warning.
You are constantly trying to protect your past, present and future, perpetually on the alert, always preparing for the possibility that you might have to flee at any moment.
This feeling of being on standby is a constant reminder of a past that our generation never experienced physically but experienced genetically, morally and emotionally.
It is the threat of a new Nakba, an endless vigilance against the loss of what is dear to you.
Over time, this fear fosters a deep sense of attachment to your oldest possessions, while new things inspire a growing sense of dread.
Your grandparents may have bought a modern villa in their place of refuge, but they still don’t feel “at home” there. They remain forever nostalgic for their humble old place.
On October 13, I woke up around 3 a.m. and received a phone call. It was a recorded voice message from the Israeli occupation army, ordering residents of Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip to immediately leave their homes and head to southern Wadi Gaza, designating my neighborhood as a “dangerous combat zone.”
Reluctant to leave my home, I finally gave in to family pressure to evacuate at sunrise. Thinking my move would only last a few days, I packed a few essentials, threw on a striped shirt and black pants over my pajamas, and headed to what would become my “first shelter.”
Since moving to my second, then third shelter, these objects have become lifelines connecting me to a home I can no longer reach.
The area where my home is located is now completely isolated, cut off by Israel from the place where I now seek refuge.
Nowadays, the only time I don’t wear the now-tattered striped shirt I wore when I escaped is when I have to wash it.
For months, I clung to that one piece of clothing, refusing to buy anything new. It was a fragile link to my familiar life, a comforting relic amid the chaos.
But eventually I had to face reality: I couldn’t go on forever with just one shirt.
However, I still take meticulous care of the only bag I managed to salvage and persist in using the same shoes, glasses, prayer mat and clothes.
During the eighth month of my displacement, I thought I had lost my sunglasses, a pair I had bought in Gaza City a few years ago.
I walked down the street, crying silently, vowing to myself that I would never buy another pair of shoes from my safe haven. The loss felt like a piece of my identity was slipping away, a scent of home was fading. My heart ached physically.
In a final act of hope, I called my family at the shelter and asked them to look for the sunglasses. “Yes, we found them,” it was as memorable an experience for me as the news that we would be allowed to go home.
Over time, these attachments take on even stranger dimensions.
For the past nine months, I have refused to cut my hair as I regularly did at home. I hadn’t really thought about why until recently.
I realized that I didn’t want to cut my “house hair” and let “shelter hair” grow in its place.
Inestimable sacrifices
At the start of its devastating war on Gaza, Israel declared a “complete siege” on the enclave, which had already been under blockade for 17 years, blocking the entry of essential goods including food and water.
Since then, water has become scarce and often unavailable, worsening the crisis. Israeli attacks on water sources throughout the Gaza Strip, including wells and infrastructure, have worsened the situation.
By the end of the first month of displacement, where I found shelter with about 70 people – two-thirds of them women and children – we began to understand that the water crisis would last for months.
We went days without clean water and celebrated the passing of a water truck in front of our shelter every four or five days.
In an era where we had to ration every drop of water and literally count the sips we drank each day, we didn’t have the luxury of showering every day, or even every week.
This led many women in my shelter — and, I later learned, all over the Strip — to cut their own and their children’s hair, so as not to use a lot of water to wash, or to minimize the risk of getting lice when they had to go weeks without being able to wash it.
As I reflect on the deep emotional significance of my own hair, I can only imagine the emotional toll it must have taken on those women who had to sever one of their last ties to their old, normal lives.
Depriving themselves of a part of their identity and facing unfamiliar reflections in the mirror – faces that no longer resemble those they once were – must have been a profound and painful sacrifice to face a harsh reality that seems increasingly foreign to them.
I cannot say how many women have resorted to this practice since then, but one thing is certain: when we finally return home to Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip, as soon as we set foot in our homes, no woman in Gaza will keep her hair long.
We all make an unspoken promise to ourselves that once we return, we will finally cut our “shelter hair” short, allowing our “home hair” to grow back, nourished by the peace we have long yearned for.
