“The house is gone…”

My mother said it over the phone, then fell silent.

I don’t know how I pulled myself together or how I made it to her place. There, my siblings, my mother, and the rest of the family held each other. We sat, crying, looking at one another, unable to speak.

How does a family gather to mourn its home? How do we hold a wake for walls? How do we believe that a house that lived within us, and we within it, has suddenly turned to ash?

Our home became our slain one, its insides scattered across the hills and the ground. The cypress trees around it looked pale in its death.

The images we received showed only rubble. But we, who knew it stone by stone and knew how our father built it, stared into them, searching for whatever remained of our life there. Some small detail to tell us that the forty years we lived in it had not all been erased by an Israeli missile.

“This shelter held… Dad was right, the shelter is strong,” my brother Mohammad said, pointing to a support beam beneath the entrance stairs that had emerged from under the debris…

The shelter held, but the house collapsed. “Look, the foundation columns are still there,” as if we were trying to hold on to the bones of the house after its body was gone.

As for my sister Lina, from her distant exile in America, she whispered, “I saw a piece of the swing,” the one we used to race to sit on during our gatherings on the balcony, in the gentle breeze… The swing had worn down and rusted, yet we refused to let it go because it reminded us of our father. Now it, too, has become rubble.

Lina could not cry, her voice barely reaching us. Rabih, for his part, refused to speak about it at all. He had spent the years after our father’s passing trying to preserve the garden and had rushed to repair the house after the last war, to prove to our father that we would protect his home no matter what.

But we failed to keep a promise he never asked us to make.

The house is now rubble. We cannot visit it yet, and all we have are brief videos sent by rescue workers who brought the news. We replay those few seconds over and over, trying to glimpse its body.

This is how we began to touch what remains of the life the house once was: a shelter, a wall, a piece of a swing, the corner of an arch that used to be, a tree we recognize, a patch of shade where we used to sit.

I remember the house when my father built it as if it were yesterday. He oversaw the work every day, as though he were not only building a home but also correcting an old injustice in his life. He wanted a house with strong foundations, spacious enough for his children and grandchildren, and perhaps spacious enough for a childhood that had never found a place to live that felt like home.

And now I see images of our house as a news item on a broadcast: “Intense Israeli shelling in the town of Tebnine.” The images of the house, our house, pass as “damage” without a family name, without an age, without memory, without a long life, sometimes a bitter one. Material damage is how homes are reduced when they are bombed. But a house is not just a matter. A house is the whole story. It is my relationship with my father, my mother, my siblings, who I am, and where I come from.

After all these years, after all that has passed, after the many identities we accumulate and believe we can hide within, I discovered that I am the daughter of this house and that village. I discovered that “Al-Khandaq,” a name few still use even in the village, is my most stripped-down and profound identity.

My father built his house in the late 1980s, on land known as “Al-Khandaq” in Tebnine. There, where fig season meant days his poor mother spent beneath the trees, sleeping in tents with him, a young boy, harvesting the crop and living off its yield. My father grew up, emigrated, lived a hard life, worked tirelessly, and remained consumed by the idea of building a home in his village, on that same land where he had gone to sleep hungry. It was as if he wanted to take revenge on poverty, not with money, but with a house.

He wanted to make up for the deprivation of his childhood and the long years of hardship. He wanted a house where no one would fear need, or rain, or the tightness of space, or having to relieve themselves in the open.

I still remember how he would stand on the foundations himself, watching the columns rise, moistening the cement, following every detail as though he were building a fortress for times to come. He made sure each of us, his sons and daughters, had a room. He cared about the many bathrooms, the corridors, the balconies, all the things we saw as excessive, and he saw as compensation.

We used to complain about how consumed he was by it for long months, as much as circumstances allowed him to complete the “construction,” as he called it. We did not fully understand why the house inhabited him to such an extent.

In his later years, he once told me, his eyes welling up: “I didn’t live in a house with a bathroom until I was fourteen, my dear.”

That sentence came as a belated key to everything I had struggled to understand. I finally understood why the house meant more to him than just a house. I understood why he exhausted us with its details, exhausted my mother, and exhausted himself. He was building what he had been deprived of. He was giving us what he had lacked. In every stone of that house, he was placing an answer to a harsh childhood that had not been fair to him. 

My father built the house. And each time we visited it, sat in its beautiful garden beneath the orange, olive, and apple trees, each time we ate from the walnut tree or the almond tree, we forgave him for every outburst, for every harsh word he had spoken. The house softened him. It made us see his exhaustion instead of his anger, and his love instead of his strictness.

What pained him most was when we hesitated to go to the village on holiday. He would meet us with his familiar line: “For whom did I build all this?”

My father passed away a few years ago, and after him, the house became the identity of my siblings and me, and our families.

When the “war in support of Gaza” began, our home became a constant obsession. I followed the news and images from Tebnine almost daily, searching for the neighborhood, the road, the houses subjected to brutal Israeli destruction. Each time I read about a family that had lost its home, about someone who had lost a lifetime and its memories, I felt a deep ache. I feared for our house the way one fears for a living being far away, unable to save it.

I had never felt that I belonged to that house, that patch of land, and the whole South as much as I did during that war. Nor had I ever felt as grateful to my father as I did then, because in his final days, he insisted on giving me a small, beautiful piece of land near his home, as if he wanted to leave me a thread that would not break, a place to return to when places are lost, even if places themselves have become threatened with disappearance.

As soon as a ceasefire was announced in the previous war, not even twenty-four hours had passed before I rushed early to Tebnine to check on the house. When I arrived, I saw the destruction that had struck the neighborhood. I entered the house to find shattered glass and doors blown off by the force of the nearby shelling. The marks of war were in every corner.

But I did not trace only the impact of the bombardment. I also followed the traces of those who had lived in the house during the war. They had left us, as they had in many homes across the South they had entered, a note saying they had taken shelter in the house, that they aimed to protect the town and the land, and that they apologized for using it. In that moment, I was overcome with conflicting emotions: anger at the repeated violation of our home, and sorrow for the fate of young men driven by their leadership, under the weight of a “fatwa,” to carry out decisions whose cost is their lives and ours…

In that war, the house survived, and I thought about writing of how armed men kept taking shelter in it. But I was afraid that if I spoke, Avichay Adraee might notice and retaliate against them and the house…

In more than one war, fighters stayed in our home. In 1996, in 2006, and in 2024, “war in support of Gaza.” No one asked us. No one sought our permission. No one took our consent to use it… Our home, my father’s home, the home of our childhood and his old age, turned into part of a war strategy.

Each time, we would say: the house survived.

But this time, it did not.

Its fate is the fate of thousands of homes in the South that Israel has destroyed, after they were turned into battlegrounds. Israel bombs and destroys with no regard for people’s lives, their memories, or their right to their homes. The bombing carries a retaliatory, eradicating impulse that goes beyond the aim of defeating an enemy. But Israel is not the only one who stripped the house of its meaning. Before the Israeli missile, some decided that our homes, our land, and our towns were open terrain for their weapons, their tunnels, and their wars, denying us the right to refuse or even to question, lest we be ostracized, accused of betrayal or normalization, and at times even killed, as has happened to some…

The most painful news came after the house was destroyed: a body was pulled from beneath the rubble. Someone we do not know had been inside our home. We do not know his name, his story, how he got there, who sent him, or what he was thinking. When he entered my father’s house, he died, and the house went with him.

Here, the question—one many in the South are asking—becomes harsher than the loss itself: for whom was this sacrifice? Who allowed this person to be there? Who authorized him to turn our home into a position in a war we were never consulted about? A man we do not know died, and an entire family’s home collapsed over forty years of memories. Israel killed him and destroyed the house, yes. But who took him there? Who decided that people’s homes could become frontlines?

I now find myself torn between compassion and sorrow for the young man who was killed, and a question that keeps returning: why has our home been used again and again without us ever being asked or consulted?

This is the harshness of the South today: to be caught between an enemy that sees you only as a target or collateral damage, indifferent to the tons of explosives it pours over homes, land, and people, killing and destroying; and an internal force that treats your land, your home, and your town as a natural extension of its battle, not as the lives of people who should be asked, protected, and respected in their right to decide.

Israel does not care whom it kills. But Hezbollah also has no right to turn our homes into positions, no right to place villages at the heart of fire, then demand silence from their residents in the name of steadfastness, while we watch them vanish in a retaliatory destruction. No one has the right to decide for us that our homes are fit for war, that our losses are fate, that our memory is expendable.

I feel a deep ache after the house’s annihilation and death, as though a part of me collapsed with it. It could have been spared this ending, as could thousands of homes in the South that we now watch Israel reduce to rubble. Many houses could have remained, many memories could have been kept from being buried beneath the earth, had the South not once again been left between an insatiable Israeli killing machine and a decision for war taken without asking those who must live with it.

I had always believed that our relationship to the olive trees and the land was a personal inheritance, but I am living it now in a far more painful way. Perhaps this is what many do not understand about our bond to our villages. As Hana Jaber told me yesterday, “Israelis do not understand the secret of our connection to our land and our homes. Most of them came from distant countries; they do not grasp this immense accumulation of personal heritage, relationships, and memory tied to the house and the land.”

“My child, the house is gone,” my mother said.

And it was not only the house that was “gone.” An entire time went by with it. My father’s lifetime, laid stone by stone with his own hands, was gone. The swing my sister spotted from across the world was gone. The place we returned to in order to know that, no matter how far we wandered, we still belonged to something, was gone.

And yet, perhaps something of the house remains, something no Israeli missile can destroy: its story… The story of my father, who built a house because he had been deprived of one, and our story, we who discovered too late that the house was never outside us, but within us.