Nablus, occupied West Bank — “I want the war to end and for us to return to Gaza,” said Mohammed Abu Seef, a wide-eyed 11-year-old boy, holding back tears.
“Please stop this. We lose our loved ones. »
Mohammed has spent his entire life in the besieged Gaza Strip, except for a trip to the Israeli town of Herzliya to receive medical treatment that has since turned into a nightmare.
On October 7, an unprecedented Hamas attack on Israeli army outposts and surrounding villages in southern Israel resulted in the deaths of more than 1,400 people. More than 200 Israelis – including dual nationals – were taken prisoner and taken to Gaza. Hamas has said its actions are a response to what it describes as decades of atrocities committed against Palestinians and their holy sites.
Since then, more than 9,200 people in Gaza, including at least 3,800 children, have been killed by Israeli airstrikes and, now, a ground invasion.
But the war has also separated thousands of Palestinian family members from each other, including children like Mohammed, who was forced by Israeli soldiers to cross the border into the occupied West Bank from Israel while his family is in Gaza.
The United Nations has estimated that more than 45 percent of homes and a significant proportion of civilian infrastructure in Gaza have been destroyed by Israel’s indiscriminate bombing.
Two hours after Al Jazeera spoke to him at a temporary camp in Nablus, in the northern West Bank, we were informed that Mohammed’s younger brother and sister had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on his home in the Jabalia refugee camp, north of Gaza.
So far, volunteers who run the site housing workers stranded in Gaza have failed to find the courage to break the news to him.
Uncertain future
Mohammed remains in the temporary camp at Nablus Municipal Stadium with more than 200 other people displaced from Gaza.
But the future of the site – like that of many sites in the occupied West Bank – is uncertain. The same goes for the fate of its occupants.
Before October 7, approximately 18,500 people from Gaza had permits allowing them to work in Israel. Since then, thousands have been arrested and others have disappeared – human rights groups and unions have warned that large numbers of workers may have been taken to Israeli detention camps.
Additionally, on October 12, Israel expelled at least 600 workers from Gaza to the West Bank. Today, according to regional sources, more than 5,500 Gazans have been stuck in the West Bank since October 7.
On Friday, Israel began returning Gaza workers who were in Israel to the coastal enclave under threat of death sentences. The exact number of workers still present in Israel remains unknown.
But volunteers at the Nablus municipal stadium confirmed Friday that none of the Gazans sheltering there had yet been sent back.
“I don’t think about growing up.”
But Gaza workers are not the only ones stuck in the West Bank.
For three months, Mohammed has been separated from his family. Initially, he was treated for a serious arm fracture in a hospital in Herzliya.
But when war broke out on October 7, soldiers took him from the hospital and forced him to walk a dangerous passage through military checkpoints into the West Bank.
“I was in the hospital, but they kicked me out,” Mohammed told us. “I went to Nazareth until things calmed down so I could go back to the hospital for treatment, but they followed us there and kicked us out too.
“We started to flee because if they had caught us, they would have kept us hostage. Thank goodness I had my cousins with me. But I haven’t seen my family for three months.
“I miss them so much and talk to them every day. »
Asked about his hopes for the future, Mohammed said: “I don’t think I’ll grow up to be anything.
“I’m just thinking about building a new house for my family. I don’t want my mother to have to move from one house to another again.”
Mohammed’s house and the entire neighborhood of the Jabalia refugee camp, the largest of eight in Gaza, were decimated during the Israeli bombardment of the Hamas-controlled enclave.
His family, he says, currently lives with an uncle. “But my other uncles returned to God.
“One of my uncles built the building where (the other side of) my family was hiding, but the Israelis bombed it without warning and killed my two uncles and their entire family. »
He released a video of his cousin crying next to the lifeless body of his father, Mohammed’s uncle – making him the only surviving member of his immediate family.
“I wish he would have died. I would have liked him to go with his family,” Mohammed said.
A detention campaign
After Israeli military raids and numerous arrests at shelter sites in the neighboring cities of Hebron and Bethlehem, those who took refuge in Nablus are terrified of also being arrested by Israeli forces.
The West Bank raids are part of a wider campaign of detentions that has so far seen at least 1,900 Palestinians arrested since the start of the war.
Most of the 425 people housed in various sites in Nablus are displaced men who held permits to work outside Gaza.
Displaced people in Nablus fear the fate of their family members remaining in Gaza.
“My wife calls me to ask when she and my son are going to die,” said a man who worked in Israel as a nurse on October 7.
His wife and young child lived with their family in Shujaiya, Gaza, before the war broke out. He asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation.
“She tells me that if we see each other again, it’s a blessing, and if not, it’s what God wants,” he added.
“Nothing breaks your heart more than hearing your wife cry and say she’s waiting for her to die.
“His mental health is deteriorating. Every time I call her on the phone she cries and asks me what’s happening to her.
“They’re all waiting to die.”
Volunteers who run the Nablus camp told him and others there that their resources were running out and the camp might not be able to stay open for long.
“Any second they (Israeli forces) could arrest me,” the man told us. He hasn’t committed any crime, he said, but they can still “detain me, torture me or do anything to me.”
“For all of us workers here in Nablus, we are just bodies without souls,” he added. “Everyone is worried about their family and we are very anxious and stressed.
Back in Shujaiya, Gaza, his family now lives in a house that houses more than 50 people, he said.
“They are all waiting to die.”
He said his father was initially “adamant” that he and his family would “die in their own home” after Israeli warnings of incoming bombs.
But after some persuasion from friends and family, he finally accepted that his family would have to move to the house they are in now – just hours before his own neighborhood was razed.
‘I am dead. I have no feelings’
Sulaiman Amad is an academic at An-Najah National University in Nablus and leads a team of 15 volunteers who manage the stadium shelter site.
“I’m dead,” he said. “I have no feelings. Many of my friends were killed by Israel, so when you miss or lose your family, you lose your emotions.
Faced with increasing arrests by Israeli forces in the West Bank, Sulaiman said he was unsure how long the stadium would remain safe as a place of refuge for Gaza workers.
“I was told there could be arrests in this building too. I don’t know,” he said.
But although numbed by the death and destruction flooding Gaza, and increasingly the West Bank, Sulaiman is careful not to do anything that might trigger Gaza’s workers.
“When my daughters come to help me, I make them stay in the car, so the workers don’t remember their own children.”
A 33-year-old business owner from Khan Younis in Gaza who asked to remain anonymous said: “I try to call my family 20 to 30 times a day. Yesterday I tried to call my brother to find out if he had been bombed or not.
He said residents of his family’s neighborhood in northern Gaza had been ordered to move south, near the Egyptian border. At the start of the war, around 1.1 million people in northern Gaza were told they must move or face heavy bombardment and be treated like Hamas fighters during the ground invasion long-awaited Israeli.
“My family lives at the school and the hospital, in the areas where the Israelis asked us to evacuate,” he said.
“But nowhere is safe. Every place they asked them to go was bombed.
“In 2014, Israel bombed my family’s house, so I rebuilt it, and now it has been bombed again.
“I continue to pay my debts by rebuilding it. Now I will have to suffer again.
“There is no real life – no physical or mental rest. »
“I just want to go back and die with my family”
Just before Al Jazeera left the camp, a quiet 28-year-old man from Shujaiya spoke to us, also on the condition that he not be named.
After being asked what awaited him, he replied: “There is no future. I just want to go back to Gaza and die with my family.
“Are they going to be alive? Will I be able to find them? Are we going to be moved?
But the man who worked in Israel as a nurse intervened: “I will not answer like him. I don’t want to wait for death.
“I want my son to grow up and become something useful to society. He doesn’t deserve to die, he didn’t do anything.
“He’s like any other child in the world who deserves to live life to the fullest, so I don’t want to die before that happens.”