Supported by
After 15 Months of War, Gazans Dream of Returning Home
They daydreamed about the people they would hug as soon as the truce took hold, the graves they would visit and the homes they would rebuild.
Reporting from Cairo and Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip
Follow live updates on the deal for a cease-fire in Gaza.
It is almost over, the end so close they can practically feel the keys they have kept all these months sliding into the locks of their old homes, the doorknobs turning in their hands, the beds they will sink into for their first night’s peaceful rest in more than 15 months — their own beds. Just a couple more days to go.
Two nights before the first stage of a cease-fire in Gaza was announced, Layan al-Mohtaseb, 15, dreamed of being back in her bedroom in Gaza City, cleaning it as she used to before her family fled during the war.
“This time, it feels like we’re truly going home,” she said.
That may be true only for those whose homes are still standing after months of destruction. And there is always a chance the fighting might resume after the six-week initial truce if talks over a permanent one collapsed. But across Gaza, people were daydreaming of the first moments of peace, the people they would hug as soon as the truce took hold, the graves they would visit. They already knew they would be shedding tears, tears they hardly knew whether to attribute to joy or to grief.
If Wednesday night was for celebrating the news that a cease-fire deal had been struck, the following days were for making preparations. As the Israeli security cabinet convened to vote on the cease-fire and hostage release agreement on Friday, Palestinians were calling around for trucks they could rent to move their things back to northern Gaza, or vans, or even donkey carts; they were packing up their tents, wondering where they would live if their houses were no longer there.
Fedaa al-Rayyes, 40, was already buying ingredients to make small festive sweets to welcome the war’s end. But the first thing she planned to do when the bombs and drones fell silent was to search for relatives she hadn’t seen in months, to find out who was still alive and to mourn for those who did not live to see this day.
“It’s impossible to describe this mix of relief and grief,” she said. “I’m happy we survived and grateful for the kind people who helped us. Yet, I’m deeply sad — sad for the relatives and friends we lost and for the neighborhood we’ll return to without them.”
There were practical matters to think of, too. She would remind her children to “stay away from anything that might still be dangerous or explosive,” she said — from all the unexploded ordnance littering Gaza that could keep adding to the war’s casualty count, one accidental blast at a time, for months or years to come.
Most of Gaza’s population of more than two million people have had to huddle into tents and schools and other people’s apartments for much of the war, driven by Israel’s airstrikes and evacuation orders from their houses or the earlier shelters they had tried. Now they could think of little else but going home. Even if those homes were damaged. Even if they were now no more than rubble and ash.
Manal Silmi, 34, a psychologist for an international aid group, planned first to go hug her mother and her siblings and “cry, letting out all the pain we’ve carried for these 15 months,” she said.
Then the trek home could begin. Per the agreement, people displaced from northern Gaza to the south will be allowed to return on the seventh day after the cease-fire takes effect on Sunday. Her family was already looking for a big van to drive all their tents and bedding back up north. Her friends and the few relatives she had left in Gaza City had already called, making plans to meet them at the crossing point dividing northern and southern Gaza.
“We’ll hug, we’ll cry and we’ll thank God over and over for surviving this war,” she said.
Al-Hassan al-Harazeen, 23, a college senior majoring in computer science, knew his family’s house in eastern Gaza City was in ruins, he said. But he would still head straight there as soon as the cease-fire began.
He was imagining spray-painting his family’s name on any brick that was still in one piece, picturing himself sitting on the rubble for a while, he said, “to embrace those broken stones and bricks as if they’re a part of me.”
Then he would visit the grave where they had buried his grandfather at the start of the war to recite the opening verses of the Quran for him.
Even as mediators announced the deal on Wednesday, Israel was still heavily bombing Gaza. Two of Jamal Mortaja’s employees from the solar-panel business he owned before the war were killed the day before. They would be in his thoughts, said Mr. Mortaja, 65, when he headed back to Gaza City to visit what remained of his home before checking on his stores at the al-Ansar roundabout.
Raed al-Gharabli, too, wanted to return to Gaza City, despite his home’s destruction, just to say goodbye before the rubble was removed. He wanted to walk through his neighborhood, Shuja’iyya, greeting neighbors who had stuck it out all these long months. He would take his makeshift tent from the central Gaza city of Deir al Balah, where he had fled with his family, and set it up next to the ruins of his house.
“I can’t wait to see this moment become real,” said Mr. al-Gharabli, 48, a tailor. “If I could, I’d fly straight north and land on the rubble of my home.”
To speed things up, he said his family would leave some belongings with neighbors in Deir al Balah, where they and other displaced people had come to trust and rely on people who had been total strangers at the war’s beginning.
There was even a part of them that was already nostalgic for it, the camaraderie that had formed between them and their temporary neighbors.
After his home in the southern city of Khan Younis was destroyed, Ismail al-Sheikh, 39, a university lecturer, had moved to a tent nearby, where he got to know two men in nearby tents. The new friends spent their evenings reminiscing about life before Oct. 7, 2023, when the war began, and imagining aloud what would happen once the nightmare was over. What they would do. Where they would go.
For Mr. al-Sheikh, who taught at al-Aqsa University, the daydreams were nothing crazy. He just wanted his normal life back, teaching his classes, meeting up with friends at night at the Titanic Restaurant in Khan Younis. The Titanic, which he’d heard had collapsed into rubble.
Now, with the war nearing its close, his new friends were getting ready to return to Gaza City, where they were from.
“I’ll deeply miss those gatherings,” Mr. al-Sheikh said. “It’s truly a mix of emotions — happiness for their return, sadness for the farewells and hope for what lies ahead.”
Vivian Yee is a Times reporter covering North Africa and the broader Middle East. She is based in Cairo. More about Vivian Yee
Advertisement
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment