They say, “houses die when their inhabitants are absent.” That phrase kept echoing in my mind as I gazed at every detail of my home in my city during the final hours before being forced to leave again. Yes, I have been uprooted and displaced again, from Gaza, which I love.
What is happening here is not migration but forced displacement. What I, what we, have seen is not a choice. It is uprooting under the bombardment and explosions, the smell of blood. A reaction to a world which has lost faith in the value of human life, allowing this madness to persist without end.
I left My Home on 12 September, just days after the Israeli Defense Forces issued evacuation orders for the entire city of Gaza, on 9 September. Threats of occupation had loomed for months. I didn’t believe them seriously. I didn’t believe this could happen after I returned to my city, after more than a year and a half of displacement, of death and killing and every imaginable form of destruction. After I returned to Gaza on 30 January, I experienced warmth, belonging, love, even amidst the devastation, the killing, the famine, and the ever-present voice of death. Our solace was that we were home. I thought I could bear anything because I was in my city. I would not complain, I would endure.
On the morning of 9 September, I woke to dozens of calls. I knew a catastrophe had struck. My first dreadful thought: evacuating Gaza City. And it had come true. I spent hours, days unbearable thought: should I stay and die on my land, with the last breath I take filled with the dust of my collapsing home? Or should I leave, for the sake of my kids? A friend said: “Fill your eyes with Gaza, you may never see it again.” His words cut me like a blade, and I began to look at everything as if it were for the last time.
I could not decide. I told those around me I needed to think; as did everyone. How to abandon my home, my land, after my heart had already broken once to return? The air raids intensified. Residential towers collapsed around us; towers dear to our hearts, built before our eyes, where we grew up, filled with memories: homes, schools, gyms. And each time a tower fell, our safety shattered, and our hearts crumbled with it.
“I tried to carve all of it in my memory”
I stepped outside to walk through the streets I love, to see every corner one last time. I looked at my house, each room in it. I held on to every detail of my Gaza: its nights and days, its sun and moon, its beauty and its destruction, its scent and warmth, its safety and its fear. I tried to carve all of it into memory. I ran my fingers along the walls and doors, the folds of my bed, the trees in the yard, the walls of my neighborhood. I visited my favorite stores, even under bombing and fear. I left carrying what I could hold in memory, and I realized a part of me would stay: tied to the walls, the sidewalks, the very air of the city. But what I could not carry: my happiness, my childhood memories, the laughter, the faces I love; even the echo of my being here. I left with a face full of grief I cannot describe.
Displacement is repeated loss, the greatest of losses, a delayed death that returns each time. Bombardment and fear fill the soul: fear of more loss, fear for my children, grief for what they must live through. The bombs shake the ground, shake your very heart. And under the thunder of explosions, I was forced to leave, with my children, with my family, once again.
But even fleeing here has become a luxury most Gazans cannot afford. To displace means to search for days for shelter or even a tent, find transport from Gaza to its southern parts across harsh, long roads, find money in a reality where prices have gone mad. I asked myself: Where will more than a million people go? To the south already destroyed.
Médecins du Monde provided strong support for its staff by securing a piece of land and setting up tents to help them withstand displacement. It was a lifeline for colleagues. But what about the rest of the people, those who have no one to ask about them, left to struggle for the bare minimum of shelter and dignity?I must pack my bag again; my “bag of displacement.” Can one carry a home in a bag, or only in the heart? How does one decide in hours what to take, what is essential, what to leave behind?
I gathered some summer and winter clothes; past experience taught me the agony of lacking warmth. I told my children: each take a bag with what matters. My heart broke as they asked: “Should I take my toy? My cards? My piggy bank? My photos? My Mickey Mouse?” There was no space for it all. I told them: take what you love most. I will give up what I love for you.
I had to choose between things I love: gifts from my martyred friends, photo albums, mementos of graduation, my daughter’s birthday, gifts that still carry the scent of my late father. I had to choose, because there is never enough space in a displacement room for all that your heart holds.
“It is one of the strangest payments in the world: a brutal fee for being expelled, for being forced into the street”
I began to see other people’s suffering in displacement. If you want to flee, you need a car; transport costs nearly $2,000. Renting a plot of land for your tent, about $500/month. And the tent itself; over $1,000 if you find one. If you are fortunate to find a small apartment, you pay $2,000/month, plus bathroom construction, purchasing water, and all else.
How can people in Gaza pay these amounts after two years of war that destroyed their lives and drained their money? It is one of the strangest payments in the world: a brutal fee for being expelled, for being forced into the street; if not, to be besieged, killed, or die with children. All this happens as the world watches. Spectators. Monitors of these crimes in all their stages. In all their pain. On live broadcast. Clinging to silence.
We carried our belongings and left. I walked again for hours under the sun, saying goodbye to every part of my city, breathing its air with all I had. Will my memory help me retrieve what was lost? I don’t know. That day I truly understood heart’s shattering.
“Why must we say goodbye to everything we love to survive?”
We arrived in Deir al-Balah, middle Gaza. Displaced again, broken. I felt detached from reality, as if seeing myself from outside. I couldn’t absorb that this was repeating. I met my colleagues. After two days of continuous crying, I went to work. I saw them; and I broke down, crying with all my heart. For days I couldn’t stop my tears. Deeply sad. My heart is broken. Anxious for those who remain in Gaza under heavy bombardment. I call them night and day, frightened for them.
Médecins du Monde had to suspend our clinics in Gaza City; too dangerous, too many air and ground strikes. We feel constriction and guilt: we belong to these people, to this land, to those we serve. We wished we could continue serving them. But how, when our clinic in Gaza was almost destroyed by bombing?
I carry inside me profound anger, oppression and sorrow. Why must we say goodbye to everything we love to survive? Why spend two years as displaced people: fearful, hungry, deprived, abandoned? Why stripped of all essentials of life? Why are people thrown into the streets with no shelter, no protection from summer heat, winter’s cold? Why are more than 50,000 children orphaned? Why lose others? Why have more than 65,000 died? Why are so many missing, under ruins, unaccounted for? Without any restraint? Does the world see us? Does the world hear us? We said farewell to our city again. I said farewell to you, my beloved, my all; not knowing if I will see you again. I left Gaza; but Gaza will never leave me. As Ibrahim Tuqan in his poem Mawtini, I wonder about Gaza city: “Will I see you? Will I see you in peace and well-being, in triumph and with honor gleaming? Will I see you, in your heights, touching the sky; My homeland, my homeland.”
Nour Z. Jarada, a Gazan Mental Health Manager at Médecins du Monde