Gaza- I woke up on Sunday morning, May 12, in a tent. I looked around the narrow areas, perhaps to check whether it was reality or imagination. Yes, it was a tent and not a dream. What I had feared since my first displacement from my home in the southern Al-Rimal neighborhood in Gaza City, north of the Strip, had happened. , to the city of Rafah in its southernmost half.
I did not stay in my poor mattress for long, as my back was almost sticking to the hot sand of Al-Mawasi, which reminded me that I have been suffering from back cartilage since I discovered it in the first Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, in late 2008.
I got up and looked through a small hole in the plastic wall of the tent, and my sight fell on hundreds and perhaps thousands of sprawling tents in the Mawasi Khan Yunis area, filled with huge numbers of displaced people, to the point that many of them did not find a place for their tent, so they spread out on the ground and covered the sky with their women and children, and were forced to flee. About Rafah without guidance.
“Good morning,” said Adili Yasser (my wife’s sister’s husband), in whose tent I was a guest. He spent the night there alone after his wife traveled days before the ground military operation in Rafah, accompanied by her sick daughter. He asked me about my first night in the tent. I responded with a colloquial word meaning “tired,” but his response was there to hasten my adaptation, “Thank God, we are better than others who cannot find a tent to cover us.”
Yasser reminds me of what I told him at night: “Don’t forget Saba’s birthday.” I was afraid that the suffering of the first night in the tent would make me forget the day my daughter was born. We were forced to separate for the first time since we left Gaza City with the outbreak of the war last October, and she took refuge with her younger sister and their mother. Her family’s home in Khan Yunis, where the destruction left one room of an apartment, in a 4-storey building, without water or infrastructure.
Where is Khan Yunis?
I tried more than 50 times to contact Siba to congratulate her on her 15th birthday, but to no avail, as there is no mobile phone coverage in Al-Mawasi, for two reasons: the massive population density as a result of the large displacement, and the extensive destruction that occurred to the infrastructure in the city of Khan Yunis, including the communications network, as a result of 4 months. From the ground military operation and the comprehensive invasion.
The decision to go myself to congratulate her was not easy, and I needed to travel by cart drawn by a donkey, then a transport car that looked like a can of sardines with the bodies of passengers stuck inside it, so the last stop would be Nasser Medical Complex, where a car cannot drive on the bumpy roads left by the tanks, so I had to… I walk for about a quarter of an hour.
Roads are not roads. Landmarks have changed and houses, shops, and many of the landmarks of this city, which is considered the second in size and vitality in the besieged Strip after Gaza City, have disappeared.
My friend Ibrahim Qanan says, joking with pain, as he and his family lost a 6-story building that was completely destroyed in the Al-Amal neighborhood, west of Khan Yunis, “We need the people of Gog and Magog in order to rebuild the city again. Do not talk to me about reconstruction with this destruction. Khan Yunis needs Completely removed, as the destruction there is greater than Gaza City.”
Gaza, my city that I lived in a quarter of a century ago, I have never been away from it for such a long period of time before, but I have not returned to it since I left it in the first week of the war, forced, like the majority of its residents, following Israeli warnings to evacuate it and move to cities and camps south of the Gaza Valley.
My destination was the city of Rafah, where I was born, but not to the small house in which I grew up in the Shaboura camp. My sisters had moved there with their children and I no longer had a place there. The first displacement was to a friend’s house in the El Geneina neighborhood, east of the city, where I stayed for 5 months.
I saw death
At dawn on October 23, I saw death, yes, I saw it, and the missile landed on a house adjacent to my friend’s house. The clock had passed six in the morning by a few minutes. I had woken up to perform the dawn prayer, and suddenly a huge mass of fire struck the house of the Al-Khatib family, only 8 meters away. I did not fully realize how the force of the explosion tossed me about two meters, and I hit the ground, with window glass and scattered stones falling on my head.
A few days before that, I was talking to my friend Ziad about the feeling of a survivor of bombing and stuck under the rubble. I had told him, “Death by a missile once and for all is easier for me than the pain of death by suffocation under the rubble of a destroyed house.” I recalled this conversation and did not raise my head for fear of hitting the roof of the house, and I thought it had collapsed on our heads. I only remember from that situation that I was repeating the Shahada, and screaming to check on my wife and two daughters, Saba and Sadaf.
This situation may have lasted a few seconds before I realized that I was alive and that the roof of the house had not collapsed on my head. But an eternity passed before I got up with blood bleeding from my head and limbs. We all survived in the house, and we were more than 30 people. We survived with physical wounds that healed over time, but will memory heal?
Second exodus
We were displaced for a long time with friends in the Al-Jeneina neighborhood, and the month of Ramadan was approaching, and finally the name of my sister and her son appeared on the travel lists to return to her home in the Emirates, and she was the one who came to Gaza on a summer visit during which the war broke out.
“You have a place. Come with us to spend Ramadan together.” We responded to my father and mother, and I stayed with my family in one of the three rooms in the house, which was occupied by my sister and her son before they traveled. I made strenuous efforts to provide the Internet and an energy source in the house, as Gaza relies on solar panels that double Its price is after the occupation destroyed electricity lines and networks, and the only power generation station went out of service, due to the destruction it sustained and the lack of fuel that Israel prevents from supplying to the Gaza Strip.
Ramadan passed quickly without any appearances, and it was the first time that I did not perform Tarawih prayers in the mosque. Hundreds of mosques were targeted by the occupation and destroyed completely or partially. The call to prayer was silent and congregational prayers were absent. Likewise, the Ramadan table, which features various types of food and drink, was absent. The occupation was not limited to war, but He imposed a stifling siege on the sector, preventing the supply of most goods and merchandise, the prices of which had doubled insanely.
Israel put into effect its repeated threats to invade Rafah, and warned the residents of the areas and neighborhoods east of the city to evacuate and move towards what it calls the “expanded humanitarian area” in Al-Mawasi. The displacement movement was rapid and random, and was not limited to those eastern areas, but rather extended throughout the smaller city in the Gaza Strip, where it left. Many of its residents and the majority of its displaced people.
A friend of mine, commenting on the large exodus from the city, says, “People are fleeing death for the unknown, and no one blames them after what they saw in Khan Yunis and the north.” He means killing and destruction.
Tent in Al-Mawasi
I was one of them. My family’s home in the Shaboura camp, west of the city, was not covered by evacuation orders. However, the majority of the neighbors in our neighborhood evacuated their homes and were displaced, and our decision to move was painful. We were separated and dispersed. My father, mother, and sister accompanied my uncle to a small rural house he owned, and my wife and two daughters went to their parents’ home. The devastation in Khan Yunis. As for me, my destination was a tent.
The idea of having to move to a tent has always bothered me, and I have done many reports and humanitarian stories about the miserable life of the displaced in tents that summer turns into “ovens” boiling from the intense heat.
With the lack of basic necessities for life in these tents, the bathroom is the biggest concern, and I found myself lucky with a tent that had water and a bathroom, or as Yasser jokingly describes it, “a 5-star tent.”
When we were children, Al-Mawasi for us meant a sea trip, with which the father rewarded his family for entertainment, but today it is depressing and sad, with dilapidated tents spread out and lacking privacy, and screaming and problems arise from within for the most trivial reasons, as a result of psychological and financial pressures.
Eight months have passed since my first displacement from my residential apartment in the “Zahrat al-Mada’in” tower overlooking the sea, west of Gaza City. It is one of the oldest, largest, and tallest towers. It was built in the mid-nineties of the last century, but like other landmarks and towers of the city, it was destroyed by air strikes and naval bombardment, on the day. Next to war.
Despite the battles around us, while I was in this tired tent, I said to myself, “When the sounds of planes and cannons stop, a different battle will begin with reconstruction, shelter, and restoring life.”