‘My heart is divided into two parts’: Women return homes in northern gaza | News of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Deir el-Balah, Gaza’s belt- Inshirah Darabeh has only one thought in mind while preparing to leave the home of his tazbine near Deir El-Balah and travel to his home in Gaza: to find his daughter’s body, a handkerchief, and dignified her.

“I don’t come back to find my home, all I want to find is her grave and put her name on the tombstone,” she says. Inshirah, 55, will walk more than 10 km (6 miles) through the ruins and craters of bombs to reach her home. She thinks she will last at least three hours.

Inshirah is overwhelmed by the mixed feelings of fear, pain and relief, she says, while she finally leaves the place where she has been abducted by the Israeli brutal war against Gaza for the past year, in which more than 46,000 Palestinians have killed and many thousands of missing for and assumed dead under ruins. Most killed are women and children.

In accordance with the provisions of the Fire Interruption Agreement between Israel and Hamas, which entered into force last Sunday, day seventh Breaks of fire – Saturday this week – internally displaced Palestinians will be allowed to return without inspection of Israeli soldiers to their homes in the north, which has been under a deadly military siege since October 2024.

In November 2023, when the Israeli land troops entered the besieged belt after the first month of air bombing, Gaza was divided into two parts. This military barrier – known as the Netzarim corridor – extends over Gaza, from the east to the west, cutting off the town of Gaza and the cities of Jabalia, Beit Hanoon and Beit Lahiya in the north of Khan Younis and Rafah in the south.

Completely cut off

From the terrestrial invasion, no one managed to move back to the north. According to the UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, it is believed that between 65,000 and 75,000 people remained in the province of Northern Gaza-less than 20 percent of the pre-war population there-before the intensification of military operations and siege.

People will be allowed to return to Al-Rashid Street, the coastal street west of the city of Gaza, which connects the south gauze to the north. The passage of the vehicle, however, was a controversial point. According to an Axios American website, Hamas refused to agree to the installation of Israeli control points along the corridor Netzarim, key roads south of Gaza.

The compromise, it is said in the report, was that American private security guards work in Gaza as part of a multinational consortium established according to an agreement on the interruption of fire with the support of its American, Egyptian and catarrh mediators “for the supervision, management and insurance of” vehicle checkpoint along Salah Main Street al-din.

After 15 months of almost continuous Israeli bombing, which caused 90 percent of the gauze population to be internally displaced, and more than 80 percent of buildings in ruins, survivors like inshirah are not willing to give up.

Fatal Sunday at the end of October 2023, when she received a call at 4 in the morning, she remembers as if it was yesterday.

“My husband and I were forced to leave our home in the north in the first few weeks of the war,” Inshirah told Al Jazeera. “We took my oldest granddaughter with me, but my three daughters and their husbands remained.”

On October 27, communications were completely interrupted for more than 36 hours.

“I didn’t know that a scarf was killed until the next day, when my older daughter called me as soon as communication was established.”

She was 35 years old. Her four -month -old daughter was first killed in the same Israeli air attack on the city of Gaza in late October, which shortly afterwards and carried a headscarf life.

‘All I want is to pose a tent above the ruins of my home’

Inshiraha’s story is similar to the story of thousands of women who experienced the unspeakable pain of the loss of children, husbands, fathers and brothers as they carried the burden of caring for those who survived.

Olfat Abdrabboh, 25, had three children. Now there are only two: daughter Alma, 6, and little Mohammed, 18 months old.

“Salah, my four-year-old, died on my hands in Deir El-Balah where we were displaced a year ago,” Olfat for Al Jazeera says. Olfat’s father took him to prayer on Fridays when Israel fell into the mosque on October 27, 2023. “My father lost his legs,” she says.

She led her son home home from the Martyr Hospital Al-Aqs, but had internal bleeding and died the next day.

Olfat’s husband at first remained in their house in Beit Lahia, north of Jabalia in northern Gaza, so she made a difficult decision to send his body back with her uncles so her husband could bury him near their house. Now, finally, she can go there – and plans to travel on Sunday.

“I didn’t see the grave of my own child,” she says. “My heart is divided into two parts: one half is with my killed child and the remains of my home, and the other half is with my two children who have been deprived of my father for months.

“Everything I want to do,” says Olfat, “is to raise your tent above the ruins of my home and bring my family again.”

‘Torture of life in a tent’

Although they do not regret everything for the dead child or are separated by the long distances from the husbands, women like Zulfe Abushanab still feel trapped and anxious.

The 28-year-old mother of two daughters, Salma, 5, and Sarah, 10, was displaced at the end of October 2023 from the Gaza AT-Twam area, northwest of the city of Gaza, to Nuseiirat, and then to Deir El-Balah in Central Gaza, where she is with other refugees located in a friend’s apartment. It has a scarcely furnished bedroom with only mattresses on the floor – one room for men and the other for women and children.

“My two daughters and I share a small room with two other women and their four children,” Zulfa told Al Jazeera, “while my husband is in a separate room. We were close, but far from each other for more than a year; We can’t sit or eat together. “

Although she has heard from the people still in the north that her home shelled the Israeli tank, she says she counts hours until her little family returns to her destroyed home and lived again as a normal family.

The fight on the face of Hayam Khalaf gives the trauma of the multiple moves she has experienced.

Together with her four children – Ahmed, 12, smoke, 8, Saad, 6 and the youngest, force, 5 – Hayam, 33, she was forced to move seven times over Gaza – to Khan Younis, Rafah, Nuseiirat and eventually in the tent now In Deir El-Balah-since the beginning of the war in October 2023.

Her old face is proof of anxious life in improvised tents for more than a year, struggling with time disasters and trying to feed her family.

“I cannot describe the torture of life in a tent, full of sand, insects and illnesses,” says Hayam, who is about to return to the home of her parents in the Tal al-Hawa, south of the city of Gaza. They were able to evacuate themselves early in order for her mother to be cancer, to seek an ambulance in Egypt.

“I’ll sleep in the cold, hard tiles if I have to have to and I won’t take anything that will remind me of this haunted tent,” she says.

‘I will bury my son with my hands’

For Jamalat Wadi-known as the mind Mohammed-62-year-old mother of eight children, scars of this war will never go away no matter where she travels.

Originally from the Jabalia refugee camp in the north, the mind Mohammed was displaced in Deir-El-Balah in October 2023 with his wife and seven daughters. Her only son, Mohammed, 25, decided to stay in Jabalia to protect his home.

“He came to see us during a temporary interruption of fire from November 24 to November 2023, but then insisted that he return to the north despite warnings that he risked life,” Um Mohammed told Al Jazeera.

She now believes her son is dead and so far she has been waiting for the martyr al-Aqs every day in the hope that his body will be returned there.

“A few days after he left, his friend, the liberated prisoner who returned through the control point Netzarim, told me that Mohammed and four other young men were shot at the checkpoint, and that his body was left on the road.”

Since then, it has been throughout the year, says Um Mohammed – a year of working on how to find out what’s left of her son. She is convinced that she will be able to identify his body if he finds him.

“I’ll find him,” she says. “His part of his leg was amputated when he was wounded at the beginning of the war. I’ll be back in the same way; I’ll find him and bury him with my hands.

“For me, a return to northern Gaza means only finding Mohammed’s body.”

This article was published in collaboration with egab