On May 15, 1948, my grandfather Saeed was only six years old when Zionist militias attacked his village in Beersheba, forcing his family to flee. His mother wore him while they escaped the horror of explosions and bombings. The nearest refuge was Gaza City. They arrived by expecting to stay in makeshift tents for a few days, some that they would soon return home and their fertile lands.
They did not then know that their temporary stay would extend in decades – that tents would become permanent concrete shelters. The keys to the house to which they cling to rust, transforming into symbols of a right of return transmitted during generations – 77 years and counting.
For most of my life, the Nakba lived in the past, a tragedy that I inherited through the stories of my grandfather. But since 2023, I have experienced my own Nakba in Gaza – this time in real time, under the objective of smartphone cameras and television screens. The militias that once expelled my grandfather have become a state with one of the most advanced armies in the world, working deadly weapons against a besieged civilian population asking for freedom and dignity.
In October 2023, Israel launched a forced travel campaign which was strangely echoing that my grandfather had endured. Residents from northern Gaza have been ordered to evacuate south – only so that these areas are also bombed. Whole families worked for hours, bare feet, only wearing what they could. Again, people found themselves in tents – this time, not plastic but leftovers, fabrics and everything that could protect them from the hard sun or bitter cold. We faced death without bullets. The newborns died of cold and dehydration. Diseases the world had almost eradicated like polio and malaria raised due to unsanitary conditions. Israel has tightened its blockade, preventing food, drugs and basic essential elements to enter. According to the World Food Program, 96% of the Gaza population now suffers from food shortages, ranging from moderate to catastrophic. The World Health Organization has confirmed at least 32 malnutrition deaths in children under the age of five and warns that the toll will increase.
We now live as our grandparents have done: no electricity, no running water, cooking on firewood or in clay ovens. The smoke fills the air and clogs the mothers’ lungs while children sleep with an empty stomach. Donkey carts replaced cars – destroyed or rendered useless by fuel shortages. The occupation has stripped us not only from our land, but also the bases of life.
My grandfather who witnessed the first Nakba did not survive a second. After a year of suffering, hunger and the lack of medical care, he died in October. He had lost half of his body weight in a few months. Its former setting – it had been a proud athlete – was reduced to the skin and bones. In his last days, he picked up strokes and cerebral vascular accidents in bed and silently without drugs, without appropriate food and without relief. I still remember our final embrace on October 11. It was a silent farewell. A tear slipped on the wrinkled cheek of a man who had witnessed too many wars and buried too many dreams. This tear said what words could never: it was time to leave. And I wonder: would he have survived if there had not been a war? Could his last months have been filled with care instead of hunger?
As if all this was not enough, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly called the displacement of two million Palestinians from Gaza. His rhetoric only confirms Israeli plans for several decades, now receiving full support from the United States. Such a plan is masked in the language of “voluntary migration”, but reality is far from voluntary. Life in Gaza was made invited.
According to the United Nations Bureau for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, on July 1, 85% of Gaza health establishments had been destroyed or damaged, including 32 of the 36 hospitals. The education sector is also devastated: UNICEF reports that 80% of Gaza schools and universities are no longer functional and that at least 94 academics have been killed.
The assault even extends to UNRWA, the United Nations agency which has supported Palestinian refugees from the original Nakba. The Israeli Parliament has prohibited its operations on the Palestinian territory while bombing food warehouses and putting pressure on donor countries to reduce funding. For what? Because the existence of UNRWA reminds the world the legal law of the return of refugees. Israel wants this memory – and all physical traces – erased.
Whole refugee camps, symbols of this right, have been flattened by bombs. Camps like Jabalia and Shati in the North and Khan Younis and Rafah in the South were transformed into pits in common. Once that houses generations of dreams and challenge, these camps now only rock the bones of those who refused to leave.
So I ask again: Will my grandfather’s dream be back to his land will he never realize? Or will history continue to turn its cruel wheel, turning new chapters of exile and suffering? And will I one day talk to my own children about our Nakba and our dream dreams-just as my grandfather told me?
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.