GAZA CITY — I had been waiting for nearly 16 months to get back to Gaza City. As a journalist, I had been in southern Gaza covering the bombing, when the occupation army had cut off the road between the north and south of Gaza on the 13th day of the war.
The waiting would finally come to an end on the seventh day of the Hamas-Israel ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement when Israel allowed the displaced people to return to the north on foot via the coastal Rashid Street. Vehicles were allowed to head only northward through Salah al-Din Street after inspection.
After Israel’s delays and procrastination, and the intervention of Egyptian and Qatari mediators, the Israeli leadership decided to proceed with implementing the terms of the agreement and open the road on January 27.
At midnight, Israel announced its approval. I contacted friends and colleagues to arrange what we would do in the morning. I don’t mean returning to my home, but our news coverage.
We left early that day, around 6:30 a.m. We headed to the western Gaza Valley Bridge on the sea road, not knowing what would await us.
On the road
A human stream in front of us; children, women, the elderly and young people, entire families carrying their belongings and walking over the narrow bridge to Gaza City and the northern part of the Strip. The area around us was virtually completely destroyed by the Israeli military’s ground operations and the relentless aerial bombardment.
I was overwhelmed. I wanted to stop working and join the returnees in sharing the experience of heading home. I stood on a high sand hill next to the Gaza Valley Bridge, and took some pictures and videos. I had back tears, and tried hard to focus on work, but the destruction I was seeing continued to occupy my thinking.
I worked for four hours, interviewing other Gazans along the same journey. We turned out to be wise to have chosen to travel by foot, after seeing the long lines of vehicles extending on Salah al-Din Street for more than five kilometers. Egyptian and American security firms were supervising the inspection of all vehicles.
We had chosen to go by foot on the road parallel to the beach. Night fell as we were still walking. There was no lighting, and many families lost their relatives. We began to hear the voices of people shouting: “Hind, where are you, Hind”, “Mahmoud”, “Hussien”. Thousands of people are still walking, turning on the flashlight of their phones to help them navigate the road, as the shouting for the lost people continued.
Utter destruction
With three friends and colleagues, we finally arrived at the edge of Gaza City.
We couldn’t believe the destruction we saw, even if we had seen so many photographs. It’s all so much different through your own eyes. Here is the café where my friends and I used to spend the evenings. Here is my relatives’ summer house on the beach, and there is a tourist resort for other relatives that I loved to visit. Then there are rows of residential buildings and towers that were inhabited by so many acquaintances and relatives.
All of it is now nothing — nothing but completely destroyed concrete blocks. Destruction as far as the eye can see.
Still, somehow it was a mix of feelings: joy for finally returning home, and sadness for what we saw. I stopped many times on the road, recalling all the Gazans I’ve known who have been killed while trying to flee the bombing, dozens of young men who tried to return and were killed by Israeli forces, their bodies were thrown on the road side. And yes, we saw skeletons on our way back.
Finding old cousins
Once inside the city, I wanted to go to my house. I had learned a month before the ceasefire that it had been destroyed by Israeli shelling. I did not want to see the destruction at night, prepared to examine every stone in it during the day. So we spent the night at my friend’s house that had somehow survived the rockets and shells.
In the morning, I parted ways with my two compatriots and began to walk through streets I had walked thousands of times in my pre-war life. They were not the streets I knew after they had been destroyed and vandalized under the tracks of tanks, bulldozers and military vehicles of the occupation.
Most of the buildings were completely destroyed, and those that were still standing were either waiting to be removed after the heavy bombardment, or waiting to be restored after their walls became a witness to the intensity of the Israeli military’s fire.
As for the cars, they were almost absent from the roads except for a few. Israel has prevented the entry of fuel, oil and cooking gas to northern Gaza since the first day of the war, until the moment we returned.
I kept walking, and was getting closer to my house. I was exhausted, but longing and nostalgia gave me the energy to walk. Hundreds of buildings and homes whose details I remember were razed to the ground, shop signs were destroyed, cultural, governmental and historical buildings were asleep in their place on the ground.
Arriving in our neighborhood, I came across my cousins who had not left. I hugged them and almost cried, but I saved the tears for what was to come. We exchanged news of what had happened in the past months and how the neighborhood was empty. There were only sounds of bombing and gunfire.
The house
I continued on my way until I reached the house, or its remains. In this space had been a four-story house, where my father, my brothers, and our family lived. Today it has become four stacked layers of destroyed cement blocks, intertwined with the destruction of my uncle’s house and his sons next door. All were destroyed.
I quickly climbed to the top of the rubble, turning around and remembering where each stone was located in the house, the water tanks, the washing machine thrown in the back area of the destruction with some pots next to it.
Everything here was annihilated.
I ran may hands across all the pieces of rubble and cried silently. I didn’t scream. I stood for more than an hour examining every corner, until I found the remains of what my father and brother used to plant on the roof: seedlings and flowers. I found some of them alive and not killed, as if they were pushing me to dry my tears, and telling me to draw a smile on my lips, even if it was small.
That was the point of hope that every bereaved person might need. I lost nearly 40 years of memories, turned to rubble.
My wife Nour had also continued her job as a journalist in central Gaza, but our two children, Alia and Jamal, had left for Cairo in April. I approached their bedroom, which was covered with cement blocks and rubble. They had asked me to retrieve their belongings and hold on to them until we were reunited. That will not be possible. Everything is gone or destroyed.
When is tomorrow?
After returning to the south, Alia and Jamal called me. They asked about their belongings “Dad, did you bring me the ball?” “Dad, did you bring me the beads?”
I had to answer in general terms: “Sorry, I can’t bring anything now. Tomorrow I’ll bring you other things instead, new things. Forget everything old. Forget your old bedrooms. I will bring you new ones.”
I said “tomorrow,” but is tomorrow too soon? I don’t know.
