Tea and cheese sandwiches are on the breakfast menu for the children of Taghrid al-Najjar. This should be an everyday moment, but their home in Gaza is now largely in ruins.
Walls collapsed and furniture and appliances were buried under concrete.
Until the war, this 46-year-old mother had never left her farming village located along the border with Israel, in the southeast of the Gaza Strip.
Since Friday, a truce has suspended fighting between Israel and Hamas, allowing them to return to a neighborhood in ruins.
“It’s only here that I feel good,” she says.
Al-Najjar fled when Israeli bombing began on October 7 in response to a Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis. For weeks, she lived with nine members of her family in a school in Khan Younis that had been transformed into a makeshift camp for displaced people.
At least 15,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Israel’s war in Gaza, and al-Najjar said dozens of people from his extended family had died.
As soon as the truce took effect on Friday, she began walking home to Abasan.
“I found out my house had been completely destroyed – 27 years of my life building it and everything is gone!” ” she says.
“For two days I couldn’t eat, then I told myself I had to continue living.
“My house is destroyed but my children are alive, so we will rebuild it. We’ve done it once, we can do it again.
Every night, the family sneaks through a window to sleep in the only room whose walls haven’t completely collapsed.
Once there is a permanent ceasefire, Najjar said, they will pitch a tent, but only for “as long as it takes to rebuild the house.”
The main concern of his neighbor Jamil Abu Azra, 64, was his four young grandchildren.
“They can sleep anywhere, the problem is they are scared and traumatized,” he said. “Even we adults are afraid, but we pretend in front of the little ones.”
“The war really scared us”
Across the street, Bassem Abu Taaima looked at the destroyed building where his family and those of his four brothers lived.
“We are all farmers or taxi drivers. We really have nothing to do with the resistance,” he said, “so we don’t understand why all this is happening to us. »
Wearing a jacket given to him by a neighbor and shorts despite the bitter cold, he said he would wait until the war was over before pitching a tent and starting clearing and rebuilding. He scoured the debris for warm clothing, though everything he found was burned or torn.
Nearby, Naim Taaimat, 46, was building a shelter for his family with wood, fabric and a few nails.
“This is where I will live with my wife, our seven children and my mother after the war,” he said.
More tents will be needed because his brothers – each with seven children – “also lost their homes,” he added.
The brothers “shed blood” to build the houses where the family’s belongings are today buried under the rubble.
Taaimat’s priority was to find the trousseau of her daughter Nivine, who was to get married next week. He used a hammer to try to break the concrete blocks before searching with his bare hands.
“Now she has lost her house and her fiancé has lost his as well. So I have to find something so that she can still be a little happy.
Abdessamad, 12, interrupted him by running, shouting: “We found an electric lamp and we have logs for the fire!”
Sitting with his friends on a dirt floor near the United Nations school where he studied, now partly destroyed by Israeli bombing, he laughed, sang and joked.
“The war really scared us and it was horrible, but there is good news,” said his friend Nabil, eight years old.
Laughing and hoping his parents can’t hear him, he explains, “The school is destroyed and we won’t be able to go back for a while.” »