The first title of this piece was “Return to Gaza: When the City No Longer Resembles Its Old Face.” I dated it July 10, 2026, but I didn’t publish it for fear that the postponed moment would come—the moment of displacement once again. It seems fate insisted on summoning it. Displacement has become one of our rituals in Gaza.

Displacement is not merely departure; it is the soul being torn from the body. Every step is heavy with anguish and worry: What do we take with us? What do we leave behind—blankets, mattresses, utensils? Where do we go? And the world watches as if it were witnessing a passing camping trip. Today, half of Gaza is under the control of the Israeli army, while the specter of a sweeping “final” decision looms on the horizon.

We are preparing for forced displacement toward the south of the Strip, into the unknown, after my family’s homes in Rafah were completely destroyed and my brothers and sisters scattered across the Mawasi area of Khan Younis. As for me, I still cannot find a house—or even a tent—to take refuge in.

On February 2 of this year, I returned to my city, Gaza, after an absence of eight months. I returned to a place I thought I knew by heart—its streets and alleyways, the smell of its sea, even the faces of its weary people. But I found another city, one that resembles Gaza in its general features but betrays it in the details.

I walked down some streets I thought I could never forget. I recognized parts of them and imagined the contours of others, while the rest felt alien to me, as if I were a stranger there. Nothing was as it had been… even the ruin had changed; even pain had taken on a new form.

The city was no longer as I had left it. And I was no longer as I had been. The pain, the loss, and the breakdowns I endured through two years of successive tragedies made me a different person; Gaza, for its part, shed its old skin and turned the color of ash.

Yet the greatest loss was not in the demolished neighborhoods or the destroyed homes; it was within me. I lost Bassel, my eldest son, the first light of my life. He left behind his wife and two little daughters whose wide eyes seem still to ask: Where is my father?

Every corner in Gaza reminds me of him, as if the whole city has become his image and his shadow. I would walk and see him walking beside me. I would hear his laugh, that laugh that balanced seriousness with warmth. I would see him sitting before the cup of coffee he brewed himself each morning, as we talked politics or waited for a Barcelona match he loved so much.

Bassel was not merely my son; he was my friend, my companion, the voice of reason in our home. He loved the sea and swimming, running like a happy child whenever he neared the water. He wrote literary texts and mature political analyses that reflected a rare awareness and a brave stance. His articles were an extension of the national and human upbringing he received, and of his steadfast faith in the homeland despite the fractures.

Nor was Basel’s departure the only wound. My house was destroyed too—the home that held me, my family, and my memories no longer exists. I could not bring myself to visit the site or see what remains. My heart cannot bear to witness its own memory shattered beneath the rubble. I left everything there: my photos, my papers, my books, my children’s laughter, and the sounds of our long evenings gathered around the dinner table or watching the news when Basel would put on Fairuz and Marcel Khalife, or play them through the car speaker on the way to Rafah, reciting Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “Ahmad al-‘Arabi.”

That house was not just walls; it was my little homeland, built with my own hands. My neighborhood—elegant, quiet, and beautiful—was part of it. Today its calm has been stolen, and its features have turned into gray lines in a memory burdened with pain.

And today, after all this time, I am still displaced without a home to shelter me, without walls on which to hang a picture or a deferred dream. This displacement within the homeland, within the city that I belong to, is the harshest thing a human being can live through.

And yet, something small slips in that resembles hope, not a loud hope, but that faint light at the end of the tunnel. It is our love for this land, which has not been uprooted despite all the loss. It is the look in my granddaughter’s eyes as she tries to understand and smile despite her father’s absence. It is the sea which, even in its sadness, still stretches out and tells us: life has not ended yet.

We who remain carry the memory of those who left—their homes, their laughter, their voices—and we walk with it among the rubble, not to forget, but to remember that we still have a story here that has not ended, and that this land, despite everything, is still our home.

And today, we are leaving Gaza again. In the eight months since returning, we felt a kind of temporary stability. We tried to make a home within a home that was not ours, to gather what was left of our souls. But once more we are forced to flee my beautiful city, whose streets, alleyways, and cultural and civilizational heritage I know by heart. I no longer exhaust myself thinking about what is to come, because what is to come is clear: the occupying state will seize what remains of a city half destroyed; what is left are ruins and houses fighting not to fall.