One breath of home in Gaza City; then back to exile

Throughout the 470 consecutive days of Israel’s genocidal war, I longed to return to Gaza City, my birthplace, my cradle, the soil where I grew, fell in love, and became a father. It was also the place I was torn from, barred by the iron fist of the occupation army when they severed the road between north and south on the 13th day of the war, while I was in the south, chasing stories as a journalist.

464 days later, on the seventh day of the ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement between Hamas and Israel, displaced people were finally allowed to return to the north—on foot via the coastal Rashid street or by vehicles through Salah Al-Din road, after undergoing inspection, and only in one direction.

After Israeli delays and the intervention of Egyptian and Qatari mediators, Israel decided to proceed with implementing the terms of the agreement and opened the road on January 27th of this year. The approval came at midnight, so I contacted friends and colleagues to plan for the morning. I don’t mean returning home, but rather to coordinate for our fieldwork.

We left early that day, around 6:30 a.m., and headed to the western Gaza Valley bridge on the coastal road.

On the road

A human flood stretched before us—children, women, the elderly, young men, and families carrying fragments of their lives on their backs, all crossing the narrow bridge towards Gaza City and the northern Strip, which stood Israeli ground military operations and relentless aerial bombardment throughout the war.

Nostalgia tugged at my soul, eventually I abandoned my camera and joined them. I stood on a high sandy hill next to the Gaza Valley bridge, capturing photos and videos. My tears nearly spilled from the intensity of longing, but I held them back.

I tried hard to focus on work, but images and videos of the destruction that had struck my home and family about a month before the ceasefire kept clouding my vision and my mind.

I ignored everything I saw and tried not to think about the returnees heading back to their neighborhoods, streets, and homes, most of which were destroyed— until the wireless internet flickered to life, pulling me back into the rhythm of journalism.

We worked for over four hours, my photographer friends and I, then we agreed to fetch our equipment, some clothes, and join the returnees walk in the evening. When we reunited at the same spot, we realized the wisdom of our decision to take the walking route.

The line of vehicles stretched along Salah Al-Din road for about five or six kilometers across six lanes. The cars were tightly packed, and the passage was narrow.

The vehicles began returning to Gaza at 10 a.m. Egyptian and American security companies inspected the cars using X-ray machines to ensure no weapons were being transported, as per the agreement with Israel, before allowing them to proceed in four lanes without inspecting passengers.

We chose to walk along the road parallel to the beach. Our journey began at 4:15 p.m. on Monday, January 27. We were three young men—colleagues, friends— uniting with the human flood that poured continuously since the morning hours. People kept joining, even those who had said earlier that they wouldn’t return on the first day found themselves carrying their belongings and families back.

The road, which had been developed in recent years, was now a wasteland. The asphalt was torn, the infrastructure shattered. Sand barriers and concrete blocks littered the path. The light poles and high-voltage lines were all lying on the ground, and the sidewalk tiles had been ripped out and destroyed.

Destruction had reached all the homes and political institutions along the road, which stretched over seven kilometers, up to the first entry point into Gaza City, where scenes of devastation continued along the city’s coastal road.

Night began to fall, and there was no lighting on the road. Many families got separated, and we began to hear voices shouting, “Hinnnnnd, where are you Hinnnnnd?” “Mahmooood!” “Hussssseein!” Dozens of names echoed as people lost each other in the dark until we reached the Nablusi intersection southwest of Gaza City. There, we saw the trenches—deep gashes dug by the occupation army, which we had to cross to enter the city. I crossed then looked back.

Thousands were still walking, holding their phones flashlights, but the cries for the lost ones continued. My friends and I continued the rough road, unable to grasp the scale of destruction we were seeing for the first time with our own eyes. Yes, we had seen pictures, but witnessing it firsthand was a greater tragedy.

Here was the café where I used to spend evenings with my friends. There was my relatives’ summer home by the sea. There, used to be a resort owned by other relatives that I loved to visit, where we often held conferences and workshops in its halls. Beyond them, residential buildings and towers where many acquaintances and relatives lived.

All of it was gone—there was nothing but piles of destroyed concrete blocks. Destruction stretched as far as the eye could see.

Feelings of joy at returning were mixed with sorrow at what we witnessed. I stopped several times along the way. Once for remembering the hundreds of Gazans who were killed trying to flee the horrors of the bombardment. Another, when I remembered the dozens of young men who tried to return north after being unable to bear displacement, only to be killed by Israeli gunfire, their bodies left on the sides of the road until they turned into skeletons, some were still on roadsides as we walked back.

A glimmer of hope

Upon crossing to the south, there was still no transportation, so we continued walking. At that moment, I wanted to head home, but I didn’t want to see it at night. I wanted to examine every stone in daylight, so we spent the night at a friend’s house, which had survived the missiles and shells.

In the morning, my two friends decided to go out on filming assignments, which I declined, and I separated from them to visit my relatives who had survived so far before visiting my home—or rather, the rubble of my home. I walked through streets I had walked thousands of times in my previous life, but they were not the streets I knew; devastated, sabotaged by the tanks, bulldozers, and military vehicles of the occupation the streets were.

Most of the buildings were completely destroyed. Those still standing were either awaiting demolition after severe bombardment, or repair after their walls bore witness to the intensity of the gunfire. As for cars, they were almost entirely absent due to Israel’s ban on fuel, petroleum, and cooking gas entering the northern Strip since the first day of the war, up to the moment of our return. I had to keep walking.

I was exhausted, but longing and nostalgia gave me energy. Hundreds of buildings and homes, I once knew by heart, were leveled to the ground. Shop signs were destroyed. Hundreds of homes and buildings I once knew were just rubble. Shop signs were shattered. Cultural centers, government offices, and historic sites lay in ruins.

I reached my home by the afternoon. But before that, I met my cousins, who had stayed behind. We hugged, and again I held back my tears. We shared stories of the past months and how the neighborhood had been quiet except for the sounds of bombs and gunfire.

I walked on, reaching my home—or what remained. Here once stood a four-story building where I, my father, my siblings, and our family lived. Now, it was four layers of broken concrete, tangled with the ruins of my uncle’s house next door.

I climbed the rubble, looking around and remembering where each stone in the house had been—the water tanks, the washing machine lying in the back area next to some pots, and the zinc sheet that had turned into a crumpled heap instead of lying flat.

Everything here had been killed.

I hugged pieces of the rubble, crying silently without a sound. I examined every corner for over an hour until I found the seedlings and flowers my father and brother had planted on the roof. Surprisingly I found some still alive, as if urging me to dry my tears and to put a smile on my face.

It was a glimmer of hope, the kind every broken heart needs. And I had lost nearly 40 years of memories and details to the rubble.

I stood there alone without my wife, Nour, who is a journalist covering the center towns of the Strip, and without my children, Alya and Jamal, who had left for Cairo last April. I approached their bedroom, now buried under debris. I remembered how they had begged me to save their belongings, but I couldn’t—and will never be able to.

Those things were gone forever.

Alya and Jamal called me and asked about their belongings. “Daddy, did you get my ball?”, they asked. “Daddy, did you find my beads?”

“Sorry, my loves," I answered vaguely, "I couldn’t get anything. Tomorrow, I’ll buy you new stuff. Forget everything old, even your bedrooms—we’ll get new ones.”

I said “tomorrow,” but who knows when tomorrow will come? I don’t.

I bid farewell to the rubble and the seedlings and walked away without the surviving pots. I left them as I found them, and spent the night at my friend’s house before deciding to return to the displacement zone in the north. I couldn’t bear sleeping in Gaza city in a house that wasn’t mine. I couldn’t bear being close to it, but unable to return to it. Then I walked and walked until I found myself in Deir Al-Balah in the middle of the Strip after 48 hours.

The journey back was less arduous, as municipal crews had, in a temporary and rudimentary effort, smoothed the entrances to the road from both directions and filled in the trenches gouged by the Israeli army during its year-long occupation of the Netzarim axis before its eventual withdrawal.

Yet, the path ahead remains steep with tasks and preparations. Foremost among them is securing a place near the ruins of my home—a temporary haven from which I can begin to rebuild, to truly return to Gaza, to the sanctuary where my heart finds its solace and my spirit its peace.

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A version of this article first appeared in Arabic on February 4, 2025