The Nakba. It is a concept that accompanied me from birth until I live it for the past two years.
I was born a refugee in the Khan Younis camp, known by the city residents as the largest gathering of refugees expelled from their land during the Nakba, when Israel was founded in 1948.
Whenever someone asked me for my name, he has always been followed: “Are you a refugee or a citizen?”
“What is a refugee?”
As a child, I would ask: “What is a refugee?”
I frequented a school led by UNRWA, the United Nations Agency for Relief and Works for Palestine, and my documents should always include the proof that I was refugee.
I have received treatment in UNRWA clinics, always needing to bring this refugee card.
I spent a lot of time trying to understand what a refugee meant. How did my grandparents fled their land to Beit Daras, a village north of the Gaza Strip which no longer exists? How did my grandfather end up in this camp, and why did he choose this place?
Before the War of Israel against Gaza on May 15, or the day of the Nakba, the day the Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, was a unique opportunity. Everyone paid attention to it, looking for people who had experienced it to hear their stories.
When I started working as a journalist in 2015, Nakba Day was one of the events I was looking forward to covering. That year, I went with colleagues from the Shati camp, west of Gaza City.
It would be my first writing on the Nakba and my first visit to a refugee camp in 13 years, because we had moved from camp life to the life of the village in Al-Fukhari, south of Khan Younis.
When I entered the camp, the memories of my childhood in Khan Younis came back: the little crowded houses, some newly constructed structures, others still original.
It was good that the commemoration fell in May with good weather.
Elderly men and women sit near their doors, just as my grandmother did when I was a child. I loved sitting with her; She seemed to open spaces, such as her house before 1948 in Beit Daras.
We sat with elderly women, every 70 years. They talked about their homeland, the stability they had in their land, their simple life, the food they have grown and eaten, and the sorrow not to be able to come back.
We met a lot – by Majdal, Hamama and Al -Jura, all villages and cities depopulated by Israel in 1948. Each time I met someone Beit Daras, we share memories and laugh a lot, speaking of the Mafttoul (Palestinian couscous) for the city.
The visit was light, filled with laughter and nostalgia, despite the people who were forced in the life of the camp after the occupation led them from their cities in a horrible manner.
Shift
I started to understand these Nakba stories more deeply when my grandfather started telling me his own story. He became the central character of my Nakba reports each year, until his death in 2021.
He estimated that he was about 15 years old at the time. He was already married to my grandmother and had a child.
He would describe the scenes when I sat with admiration, asking myself: How could the world have stood silently?
My grandfather told me that they had a good life, working their farm, eating their harvests. Each city had a specialty and they exchanged products.
Theirs was a simple kitchen, with a lot of lenses and wheat bread, they wet in stone mills. Until this terrible displacement.
He said that the Zionist militias forced them to leave, ordering them to go to Gaza nearby.
My grandfather said he had closed the door of his home, took my grandmother and their son – a few months – and started walking. Israeli planes hovered over their heads, shooting people as if to drive them to move more quickly.
The baby – my uncle – did not survive the trip. My grandfather never wanted to go into details, he would only say that their son died of the conditions when they fled.
After hours of walking, they reached Khan Younis and, with nowhere where to go, he launched a tent. Finally, an UNRWA was set up and gave it a house, the one I remember from my childhood. It was so old; I spent years visiting them in this asbestos roof house with its elderly walls.
This memory of being forced to exile has become their injury. However, the idea of return, the right to return home, has been transmitted through generations.
Memories have made the flesh, blood and anxiety
The Nakba was a memory transmitted from the elderly to young people.
But in the war that Israel began to lead to Gaza on October 7, 2023, we lived the Nakba.
We were forcibly moved under the threat of weapons and air strikes. We saw our relatives arrested before our eyes and tortured in prisons. We lived in tents and seek basic arrangements everywhere to save our children.
My grandfather told me that they had fled under the threat of weapons and planes – so much.
He said they were looking for flour, food and water while trying to protect their children – we too, at the moment in the 21st century.
Perhaps in 1948, the media was more primitive. But now, the world is looking at what’s going on in Gaza in many formats – written, visual and audio – and yet, nothing has changed.
I never imagined that I would live from an existential war – a war that threatens my presence even on my land, just as my grandparents lived.
The repeated displacement scenes are so painful. They are a cycle, the one we were cursed to live as a Palestinians over and over.
Will history record this as Nakba 2023?
In years, are we going to talk about this Nakba as we talked about the original for 77 years? Are we going to tell stories, keep commemorations and make close memories of the return dream that have stayed with us since childhood?
Since I realized what it meant was called a refugee and learned that I had a homeland, I dreamed of coming back.
This pain can never be forgotten. I still remember the camp and my life there.
I will never forget the moment when Israel destroyed my house and made us homeless for two years, 24 years ago.
Now we are living in painful days in search of security, fighting to survive.
We will talk about future generations on this war, the war of existence.
We resist hunger, fear, thirst and pain so that we can stay on this earth.
The Nakba has not ended. The 1948 NAKBA continued in 2025.