Sabah Abu Ghanem and her family made the long trek back to Gaza City after Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire this month, leaving a crowded tent encampment in the south of the territory with the goal of finally going home.
When they arrived, they found that their neighbourhood had been destroyed, like most of Gaza City. But the cement skeleton of their home was still standing, so they decided to live in one of its damaged rooms.
“At least, this piece of land is ours,” said Abu Ghanem, 26. “This rubble I can call mine.”
For some, the destruction was too much to face. Majdi Nassar, 32, came back to look for his home in Jabaliya, near Gaza City, but returned to Deir al-Balah, in the south, within less than 24 hours. He said he would stay away until clean drinking water had been restored. That could be a long time.
“I could not find any trace of the building where I had an apartment, not even the rubble,” he said. “Everything is gone.”
Gaza was densely populated before the two-year war that was ignited by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The city has been hollowed out by the flight of its residents to southern Gaza after the Israeli military launched a ground offensive there last month.
Food supplies are limited. The electric grid has been down for two years, since Israel cut off supplies in the first days of the war. Clean water is hard to find.
This past week, the UN said “real progress” was being made to increase aid deliveries, but the World Food Programme said it would take time to reverse conditions that led a UN-backed panel of food experts to report that areas in and around Gaza City were suffering from famine in August.
Israel has said there is no famine and blamed food shortages on Hamas, looters or aid groups that it says are incompetent.
The future is deeply uncertain. The ceasefire has stopped the fighting, but it is not clear if it will end the war. The Israeli military has pulled back to a new deployment line in Gaza, but it still controls half of the enclave’s territory.
For some residents, like Abu Ghanem, the conditions are so grim that they say they want to leave Gaza.
One of the first things she did when she returned to Gaza City was to walk through the shattered remains of her neighbourhood to see if she could recognise anyone or anything.
“There was no one at all around,” she said. “There were no services, no water or electricity, and, of course, no markets to buy food.”
Abu Ghanem was once a celebrity of a sort in Gaza. She was a surfer who appeared in foreign newspapers and documentary films, like Gaza Surf Club. Social pressure led her to stop surfing, and she got married and had three children. She still swam, though, and used to dream of starting a club to teach girls how to swim and surf.
Now, she said, her dream is to leave Gaza for the sake of her children. “I want them to enjoy a much better life than mine,” she said. “Gaza is not a place for life or dreams.”
But others who returned to Gaza City said they were committed to staying.
Fatima Abu Steita, 27, returned with her husband to look for their home in the Zeitoun neighbourhood. But they never found it because it was “completely erased”, she said. She now lives with relatives in the Shati neighbourhood, “10 souls under one cracked roof”.
For Abu Seita, returning to Gaza City felt empowering, no matter what state it was in. “It’s a return to nothing, yes,” she said. “But it’s also saying: ‘We are still here.’”
New York Times News Service