North Gaza, Palestine – We didn’t have to come back. And the city of Gaza we knew was gone. But we came back.
Why? Maybe it was nostalgia for our former lives – before October 2023. Maybe the emotions we left before our Moving to the south He stayed, waiting for them to welcome us back.
Either way, the reality that welcomed us was sharp and unknown. I realized how much a stranger I became in my city, where I spent almost 30 years of my life.
I wandered the streets that I could no longer recognize, lost in the midst of irresistible destruction. I struggled to find my path from my family destroyed to the house of my brother -in -law, which, although still standing, wore deep scars of war. I walked on one street, to another – without the famous sights that would lead me.
There are no communication networks, without the internet, no electricity, no transportation – not even water. My excitement about the return turned into a nightmare – ruin and destruction was wherever I turned.
I drank, I wandered the broken remains of family homes. My goal was to reach the place where my home once stood. I already knew it was no longer – I saw the pictures.
But standing there, in front of the ruins of a seven -storey building where I made so many memories with my family, I was silent.
Houses can be renewed
One of my neighbors arrived, who also returned from displacement in the south. We exchanged broken smiles as we looked at the wreck of our lives. She was happier than me – she was able to save a few things, some old clothes.
But I found nothing. My apartment was on the first floor, buried under the layers on layers of debris.
My colleague arrived, photographer Abdelhakim Abu Riash. I told him I didn’t feel shock, not even any emotion. It wasn’t that I didn’t grieve, but that I got into a state emotional numbness -Anesthesia that has been imposed, perhaps the mechanism for survival that my mind has adopted to protect me from madness.
My husband, on the other hand, was visibly angry, though quiet.
We decided to leave and, as I turned my back to my destroyed home, deep pain caught my heart. Now there is no shelter, no place to call our own.
But what prevented us from breaking up was the knowledge that we were not alone – the whole city stood in the ruins.
“At least we survived and we are all safe,” I told my husband, trying to comfort him. And then, the horrific memories of the past 15 months – spent wandering Hospitals and refugee camps – rushed back. I reminded him: “We are better than those who lost their entire families, better than girls who lost their limbs. Our children are safe, we are sure. The houses can be restored. “
We often say that in Gaza, and that’s true. But it does not wipe the weight of the loss of the house.
‘Be careful with water’
Unable to walk further, we headed to my brother -in -law’s house. We were told that it was still standing, but as we approached the scenes of devastation, we could not recognize the building.
We would now live here in what is left: two rooms, bathroom and kitchen.
But once again, there was no room for shock here. The survival required adaptation, no matter how little they had. That was the rule of war.
We found a semblance of relief from the inside. My husband’s brother arrived in front of us, cleaned a little and secured some water. His only warning: “Be careful with water. There are no ones in the whole area.”
That single sentence was enough to reject me the last ounce of hope. I felt a crushing of a mixture of despair, nausea and exhaustion. I could remember nothing but water – just water.
The house sewer system has been destroyed. The walls were open with shelling. The soil and the first floors were completely flattened. Life here is infertile and extremely dark.
And what made him worse was the renewed shock of looking at the balcony of the destruction of how much the eye could see – too huge, too irresistibly to allow escape from the trauma.
My friend who remained in the north often said to me, “The north is completely destroyed. That is unquestionable.” Now I believed her.
My mother’s dresses
The next morning I went to my parents’ home in Sheikh Radwan, scored for what I would find because I knew, our neighbors have already sent us photos – the house was still there, but the fire was taken out.
AND Israeli army They stayed in it for a while before they set it on fire as they retreated, we were told.
We even found a video on Tictok, a soldier who was filmed eating McDonald’s sandwich in my newly minted brother’s living room as he watched the neighboring houses Gora.
I wandered through the house, flooded with a flood of memories that was reduced to ashes and ruins. Only one room survived the fire: my parents’ bedroom. The fire did not touch it.
I walked into my mother’s room. I lost my mom on May 7, during the war.
Her clothes were still hanging in the closet, embroidered dresses intact flame. Her things, her Qur’an, her prayer chair – everything is left, lined only in heavy dust and broken glass.
Everything faded compared to the moment I was standing in front of a late mother’s wardrobe, tears, as I gently retrieved her dresses, rejecting the dust.
“This is the dress she wore for my brother Mohammed’s wedding,” I whispered to myself. “And this one … for Moataz’s wedding.”
I grabbed my phone and called my sister, still in the south, my voice trembled between the soup and the joy: “I found my mom’s embroidered dress. I found her clothes! They are not burned! “
She gasped with happiness, immediately announcing that she would run in the north the next morning to see the things of our mother.
This is how life has become here – ruins everywhere, and yet we look forward to any fragment, any thread that connects us to the past.
Imagine, therefore, which means to find the only tangible traces of our most precious loss – my beloved mother.
No gauze I knew
Two days later, after sifting the wreck and memories, I forced myself to go out of my sadness.
I decided to visit the Baptist hospital in the morning, hoping to meet my fellow journalists, to regain a certain sense of myself and try to work on new stories.
I walked for a long time, unable to find transportation. My clothes were soon covered with dust – all that was left after the buildings were pushed by Israel.
Each passerby was the same, lined with layers of gray from head to toe, lashes that separated the debris.
Around me, people cleaned the wreckage of their homes. The stones were raining from the demolished upper floors as men and women pushed the ruins, the dust passes through the air, swallowing the entire streets.
The woman stopped me and asked where she could fill the phone credit. I hesitated, and then I broke out, “I’m sorry, my aunt, I’m new here … I don’t know.”
I left, shocked by the answer. My subconscious accepted this – this was no longer the gauze I knew.
I used to know the gauze by heart. Each street-al-Jalaa, Shati Camp, Sheikh Radwan, Remal, Al-Jundi. I knew all the back roads, every market, every famous bakery, every restaurant, every cafe. I knew exactly where to find the best cakes, the most elegant clothing, the telecommunication companies, the providers of internet services.
But now?
There are no landmarks left now. No street signs. No reference points. Is that more important?
I continued to walk on al-Jala Street, struggling to put the past to the ruins. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes photographed later to compare it to what it used to be.
North and South
I finally found a car that goes its own way. The driver showed that I was sitting next to a woman in the front seat. There are five more women in the back and a child clenched.
On the way, the driver picked up another passenger, pushing him into the last space available.
Each moment felt like a mistake – a system overload system in my mind.
At the hospital, my memories have returned to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital at Deir El-Balah, where hospitals have become the only refuge of journalist-eating places with electricity and internet since the beginning of the war.
This time, the faces were different, and it is obvious that journalists from the north experienced this war very differently from the way we had in the south.
I shook the corridors in an oslemic, whenever we came across a journalist, I whispered to Abdelhakim, “Is that person from the north? Or were they with us in the south?”
It was a true question. Conversations, knowledge, the weight of the word – everyone felt different, depending on where we endured the war.
Yes, in the south there was death and destruction, Israel did not spare Rafah, Deir El-Balah or Khan Younis. But it was different in the city of Gaza and the northern gauze – people here endured pain to the extent we just didn’t.
Whenever I recognized my colleague from the south, my face lit up and I stopped, eagerly talking, sharing stories about the impossible travel of Al-Rashid Road, asking their first sight of the city, about the moment they saw their family homes.
Then I truly realized: we felt like a party in our own city.
Reconnaissance
The Israeli war not only transformed the landscape of gauze, but also the people within it. This formed a new identity under fire, dividing us in ways we never imagined.
Outraged, painful truth – we lost Gaza, over and over, her people, his spirit, herself.
For 15 months, we thought that the biggest nightmare was displacing – that exile was the strongest destiny. People cried at home, dreaming only of returning.
But now, the return seems far more ruthless. In the south, they called us “displaced”. In the north, we are now “returnees”, the people who continued to blame us for leaving when the evacuation orders came.
Sometimes we blame ourselves. But what choice did we have?
And now, we are quietly embarrassed – a small, unspoken sign that lived in our hearts from the day we left and who see the reflected in the eyes of those who remained.
I imagined that the day we returned to the north celebrated the end of the war, but wandering the ravaged streets, I realized: I still wait for that end, the moment when we can say, “This is the chapter of the bloodshed.”
I long to put the final period, so we could start over – even if the beginning is painful. But there is no menstruation. No closing. There is no end.
I pull forward, the dust stick to the clothes that I do not bother to shake off. Tears are mixed with ruins, and I don’t wipe them.
The reality is that we are abandoned in the open fate, the road without direction: we are lost. We have the strength to renovate. No energy to start over and over.
We lost this city, my friends.
The gauze we loved and knew she had died – defeated, cut off alone.
But despite everything, it still lives in us.
