RAFAH — After more than 100 days of Israel’s war on Gaza, Hajja Fatimah had only one request: “Take me back to our home,” she said. “Why did you bring me to Rafah?”
Burayr, a historic Palestinian village that Israel has taken over and since renamed, is where Fatimah was born — 90 years ago.
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Gaza residents, the majority of whom have been displaced at least once since Oct. 7, are wondering what will happen now that Israel appears to be preparing a ground assault on Rafah, where more than half of the Strip’s inhabitants are now. At least 100 Palestinians were killed early Monday in and around the southern city during Israeli attacks that were part of a mission to rescue two Israeli hostages.
Across Rafah, fear is mixing with growing impatience. Palestinians have begun to dream of the war ending after all the forms of suffering it has brought, and promises to keep bringing if an accord is not reached.
But beneath it all, everyone shares a burning desire to return to their homes — even if they are demolished.
Hajja Fatima was displaced with her family from Beit Lahia in northern Gaza after the Israeli military forced the Palestinians to flee their homes to the center and south of the Strip. Beit Lahia is less than 15 kilometers away from her original village, Burayr, which has since become the Israeli settlements of Tlamim and Heletz.
Hajja Fatima stayed with her family in an apartment in the southern city of Khan Younis for about two months. On December 1, the family was forced to flee again after the Israeli military announced a ground invasion of Khan Younis.
The 90-year-old woman has since been living in a nylon plastic tent, which her children set up on an open area owned by their friend in the Tal Al-Sultan neighborhood, west of Rafah. There are other tents for her children and grandchildren, including five pregnant women who don’t have access to medical or psychological care, physical comfort, or a safe and warm place to deliver.
History of displacement
Since her displacement, Hajja Fatima has continued to repeat those few words: “Take me back to our home to Burayr. Why did you bring me to Rafah? I want to go back to Burayr.”
Burayr is 21 kilometers northeast of Gaza City. It is the village where she was born and raised and from which she was forcefully displaced, as its people were expelled and a number of them were killed at the hands of Zionist gangs in 1948 during the Palestinian Nakba, or “catastrophe.”
Indeed, Hajja Fatima is one of the few with clear memories of the Great Nakba of 1948; its tragedies and horrors.
As the other, sometimes smaller, catastrophes have continued over the decades, Palestinians still repeat the words of their well-known poet Mahmoud Darwish: “How alone you were, my mother’s son,” as if it defines their eternal fate.
Rafah may be next
Today, more than 100 days after the devastation, the main headline in the Israeli media is Rafah, the latest major Gaza city that Israel has yet to invade. All talk is that it would be the next target after Khan Younis, which has been flattened the past several weeks in a way that exceeded the destruction of Gaza City and the north.
Israel believes that Hamas leaders are now in Rafah, having fled there through their tunnel network. Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be ignoring international calls not to invade Rafah, which hosts over 1.5 million Palestinians, most of whom fled their homes elsewhere in Gaza.
As Israel refuses to allow the return of the displaced to their homes in northern Gaza for fear of “harming the army’s achievements,” the human cost of invading Rafah would be devastating.
What’s left of Gaza
The casualty toll in Gaza is approaching 100,000 including over 27,000 fatalities. Most of the dead are women and children, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, which would make it the highest percentage of casualties in any war in contemporary history.
The area designated on all maps published by the Israeli army as a “single safe zone” is now crowded with tens of thousands of tents sheltering displaced people in deteriorating humanitarian conditions beyond human imagination.
In the past few days, some Israelis and the world were stunned that the Israeli army burned down Palestinian homes in the northern Gaza and Gaza City, during the ground operation.
For ordinary Palestinians like Hajja Fatimah, the latest details of both the human and material destruction add to a long history of attempted annihilation — and prompt them once again to insist: Let us return home.
