Gaza City, Gaza — The Abu Shahla family remained resolute in their home in central Gaza City for two weeks after the Israeli army launched its ground operations in the city.
All the while, their walls shook repeatedly and their hearts were filled with fear. Eventually, they had no choice but to leave what was once their decades-old home.
“My grandparents were forced to flee their home and belongings in 1948,” said Amal, 24, referring to the forced displacement of 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel, a period known as the Nakba or “disaster”. “And today we, the younger generations, are living a microcosm of their experience of forced displacement. »
Recalling the horrific days before the family evacuated their home in October, Amal told Tel Aviv Tribune that knowing it would likely be destroyed and therefore unable to return meant losing “everything” for She.
“It was like recapping every day we lived here, ate with our friends, danced with our mother, slept with our babies, cried after a bad day, studied for a school quiz, innovated in the kitchen and made our favorite dinner and everything was erased.. All together in seconds.
However, the family refuses to leave Gaza City. About 20 family members live in Amal’s aunt’s one-bedroom apartment with 15 other neighbors.
Israeli tanks dominate the streets of the besieged strip’s largest city. The Abu Shahla family can only move when there is no fighting around the house where they have taken refuge. They have little access to food and assistance, including medical care.
Yet the family says that even if they could leave Gaza City safely, they would not go south or anywhere else. Nowhere is safe in the entire Gaza Strip, with Israel bombing the southern town of Rafah and its tanks shelling Khan Younis, also in the south, they say. And even if it did, the fear of being permanently displaced again – as their ancestors did in 1948 – is reason enough to “stay true to our country and face uprooting,” said Abu Rushdi, Amal’s grandfather, aged 64.
“We can build another house. We will do it. But we cannot have another land where we could call home,” he said. “We only have one, and that’s Palestine.”
Still, the prospect of their home being demolished by Israeli bombings or bulldozers is a source of “sorrow,” Amal said.
“I wish leaving the house meant losing just a few walls that together make up rooms and property,” she said. “But it begins a painful journey of additional trauma, amounting to a sense of loss of any sense of familiarity and belonging to our own neighborhood, our city, our homeland.”
Her younger sister, Ruba, had just started working on her undergraduate thesis in the humanities this semester, before the war started.
“When we learned that Israeli tanks were approaching our neighborhood after our escape, we had the impression that someone had torn up our identity cards and considered us refugees, once again after that of our grandparents in 1948,” said Amal.
As winter approaches, families in Gaza are more vulnerable than ever, especially with the week-long truce that brought a temporary end to fighting in late November.
Yet Abu Rashdi, Amal’s grandfather, refuses to give up – and has no plans to leave, even though Israeli authorities have tried to push the Gaza population into a small patch of land in the south of the Strip. .
He said his family was one of many in Palestine “insisting that we stay on our land, despite the fear that surrounds us.”
“They (Israel) have much more power and strength to continue doing what they are doing to us, but we all have the right to live and enjoy the basics of human life in Gaza and throughout Palestine. once this nightmare is over. »