Israel's West Bank assault displaces 26,000 from Jenin and Tulkarm camps

February 5, 2025

Lubna Masarwa and Heba Nasser

The Israeli military has displaced 26,000 Palestinians from their homes in Jenin and Tulkarm since launching its major assault on the occupied West Bank last month.

 

 Smoke rises over buildings in Jenin refugee camp during an Israeli forces assault, 2 February 2025 (Mohammad Mansour/AFP)

Farha Abu al-Haija, a member of the Popular Committee in Jenin Camp, said 17,000 people have been forcibly expelled from the Jenin camp, home to over 24,000 registered Palestinian refugees.

For the past two weeks, the Israeli army has besieged, invaded and bombed the camp and its surroundings.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, has said that large parts of the camp have been completely levelled in a series of detonations, estimating that at least 100 houses have been destroyed or heavily damaged.

On Sunday, Israeli forces simultaneously blew up nearly 20 buildings on the eastern side of the camp after rigging them with explosives, the Palestinian state news agency reported.

Israeli forces have prevented movement inside and residents have been forced to flee under shelling and explosions.

Abu al-Haija said the Israeli army has also expelled families living in the vicinity of the camp, where they also blew up a building composed of 20 flats, leaving 200 residents homeless.

The Palestinian health ministry said Israeli forces have killed at least 70 people in the West Bank since the start of the year.

Abu al-Haija told Middle East Eye that displaced residents have fled the violence to different places in Jenin and its countryside, which have also been affected by the military campaign.

Palestinian families are now hosting up to 20 displaced people in their homes amid a lack of basic amenities such as electricity and water.

“Both the displaced families and the families who are receiving them are financially strapped. Prior to the Israeli military campaign, the camp was besieged by the Palestinian security services for 48 days. People have been without work for three months and have been unable to secure their basic daily needs, including food,” Abu al-Haija said.

Weeks before the Israeli operation, the Palestinian Authority launched a large-scale security campaign in Jenin that involved besieging the city, shooting at unarmed civilians and clashing with local fighters.

Abu al-Haija, who also works with an organisation that provides psychological support to women and children, said that due to the Israeli siege, no one knows the full extent of what is happening inside the camp or the damage being caused.

Jenin's residents, who have endured repeated military raids for the past two years, said the violence and intensity of the current assault exceeded even the notorious invasion of the camp during the Second Intifada in 2002.

“The families in Jenin are in shock by the magnitude of the raid. It is similar to what happened in Gaza, only this time it's an area of ​​just one square kilometre," said Abu al-Haija.

Living in constant fear

The ongoing incursion has been particularly devastating for children, who have been unable to attend school since early December.

Unrwa spokeswoman Juliette Touma stated that 13 Unrwa schools in the camp and surrounding areas have been closed, affecting around 5,000 children.

Abu al-Haija reported that children are suffering from heightened stress, anxiety and fear, with many struggling to sleep. Some have developed conditions, which include involuntary urination and episodes of hysterical screaming.

Samah Hawasheen, a resident of the camp, said her seven-year-old daughter had been particularly affected.

Hawasheen said she and her husband and three children had fled their home during the PA’s security operation in the camp.

The family had tried to return to their home in the Al-Hawashin neighbourhood but there was no water or electricity and no one responded to their requests for help.

“I spent years building my house, but the amount of bullets that penetrated its walls and furniture is indescribable. I found some bullets in my children’s beds. If we’d stayed they would have been killed immediately,” Hawasheen said.

However, her daughter continues to experience overwhelming fear that has been difficult to alleviate.

"My daughter covers her ears whenever she hears the sound of bullets. I try to comfort her, but nothing helps," said Hawasheen, fighting back tears.

"I feel heartbroken for my children because they aren’t experiencing their childhood. When we were displaced, I couldn’t believe the sight of them playing outside."

Abu al-Haija also highlighted another worrying psychological effect the military campaign has had on children: a bleak outlook on their future.

Many, when asked what they thought they would become when they grow up, responded, "A martyr or a prisoner."

"The residents of Jenin are cramped in small apartments, and their children cannot go outside to play for fear of snipers. Now, our only wish is for them to be able to play in the sun," she said.

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, at least 10 children, including a two-year-old girl, have been killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank this year.

Tulkarm: Infrastructure destroyed

In parallel with its military operation in Jenin, the Israeli army is also conducting an incursion in the Tulkarm refugee camp, which has so far displaced at least 9,000 Palestinians from their homes.

Displaced residents have sought shelter in halls, clubs and centres in the city of Tulkarm, or in the homes of their relatives.

Suhail Salman, an activist and political figure in Tulkarm, said the Israeli army has been deliberately targeting the fabric of daily life in the camps by destroying civilian infrastructure, residential buildings, cutting off basic services like water and electricity.

Salman emphasised that this tactic aims to attack the right of return for Palestinian refugees, a central issue that has long been a barrier in negotiations between Israel and Palestine.

"The evidence for this is that the genocide in Gaza, the assault on the camps in the West Bank and the attack on Unrwa are all happening simultaneously with the goal of evacuating the camps and creating an uninhabitable environment for the population by halting any development of life within them," Salman told MEE.

Two Israeli laws went into effect last week that ban Unrwa's operations in Israel and in "areas under Israeli sovereignty," as well as prohibiting any contact with the agency. This move has been supported by former US President Donald Trump.

The UN agency, which has been operating without US funding for almost a year, provides aid, health and education services to millions in the Palestinian territories, as well as the millions of Palestinians living in refugee camps in the neighbouring countries of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

“The spearhead of this attack on Unrwa is the Americans, and we heard Trump’s latest statements about the displacement of the people of Gaza to Egypt and the people of the West Bank to Jordan. So the process of displacement is ongoing,” Salman said.

Salman believes that the destruction, bombing and sabotage campaign in the West Bank is designed to force camp residents to leave.

The activist stressed the need for Palestinians to put their internal affairs in order and agree on a political programme that would counter Israel's plans.

"When the Israeli army blew up 20 buildings in the Jenin camp, it was filmed and broadcast on satellite channels. This is a blatant challenge to the whole world and the human rights system,” he said.

“It is clear that the world is reformulating itself so that Israel has the upper hand in the region."

 

Trump’s Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza Is a Brutal Form of Colonial Capitalism

Michael R. Allen

 

Standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at joint press conference on February 4, U.S. President Donald Trump laid bare a subtext in his rhetoric about Gaza. According to Trump, the U.S. will “own” Gaza, Palestinians will be forcibly resettled in Arab states, and there never will be an independent Palestinian state. While the American state under Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden provided necessary material and rhetorical support for a slow genocide of the people of Gaza, Biden and his underlings never openly expressed a desire to colonize Gaza. The logical conclusion had been that Israel would complete its own colonization of Gaza, with the U.S. running diplomatic interference.

Now, the U.S. will not only violate the sovereignty of the Palestinian people, but Israel won’t even have a seat at the table: “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too… and get rid of the destroyed buildings [and] create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing,” Trump told reporters as Netanyahu stood by. As a consolation to Bibi, Trump seemed to indicate that the U.S. would soon be backing Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Trump now has outdone Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton as the most brazen recent president to conceal an imperialist project rejecting self-determination in the language of a foreign policy averse to intervention and informed by popular antiwar sentiments.

Human rights activists already had been seething with outrage over newly-inaugurated Trump’s comments about Gaza upon commencement of the cumbersome, drawn-out supposed cease-fire. Trump suggested that Palestinians in Gaza could be relocated to Egypt and Jordan, echoing the rhetoric of dispossession long uttered by the Israeli fascist right. According to Trump, Gaza was had already become a “demolition site” through the genocidal bombardment that he and his MAGA allies staunchly cheered on. Why not move the people out, and rebuild the area free from the democratic desires of the people?

Trump’s statements are far from the ideological provocations that they seem. And Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has taken real steps toward being poised to make a fortune “rebuilding” Gaza with Saudi capital in his pocket. This is the art of the deal, not an Itamar Ben-Gvir racist fever dream.

Unfortunately, for Palestinians, there is no real operational difference between the Trumpian and Israeli far-right visions of Gaza’s future. Both amount to forced dispossession and relocation—which some human rights scholars call “ethnic cleansing” but others deem genocide. Both are fully colonial in the domination and subjugation of a people with the express aim of stealing their land. Perhaps both come back together as a closed circle when it comes to generating profits for the possessors, but Trump’s is the vision based wholly in naked real estate capitalism.

Consider Trump’s expressed idea of forcible relocation after the inauguration: “I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change.” This is a developer’s callous materialism openly stated: Identify crisis that creates an opportunity to generate capital, offer an attention-grabbing promise (“peace”), find development partners (who will supply the capital), and collaborate with the racialized genocide in order to have a project. Palestinian agency, like the agency of American residents of neighborhoods that Trump and other developers have bulldozed or gentrified, is neither addressed nor acknowledged.

Unfortunately, Trump’s words don’t seem to be abstract ramblings but a cryptic disclosure of actual developments. (A majority of Trump’s critics mistake his overblown rhetoric for deliberate ideological bravado, when in fact it is garrulous self-disclosure of venal actions and desires.) Just before the “cease-fire” began, Israeli authorities permitted Jared Kushner’s private equity firm Affinity Partners’ purchase of a nearly 10% ownership stake in Israeli company Phoenix Financial and Insurance.

Phoenix is the major funder of illegal West Bank and Golan Heights settlements, and the locus of how the racism of the religious extremists creates opportunities for capitalists whose financial motives lead them into consort with the far-right. Kushner has never been a rabid MAGA ideologue, and even is attributed as the lead influence on Trump to sign into law the criminal justice reforms of the First Step Act. His work on the Abraham Accords resonates well with Israeli and American Zionists but also with Arab elites who lately espouse support for the Palestinians. He epitomizes the sorts of capitalists who gladly collaborate with far-right regimes but whose ideological bearings are often unarticulated or even avowedly contradictory to the far-right.

Kushner’s firm is now loaded with $2 billion in equity from the Saudi sovereign investment fund. Thus Trump’s statement about development of new housing with an Arab nation partner has a bearing in potential reality—his own family already has the relationship to make such a project reality. Furthermore, Israeli Channel 12 chief political correspondent Amit Segal reported in late January that Trump’s expressed vision for colonial Gaza may have significant support within Netanyahu’s government. Perhaps Netanyahu’s appearance in the U.S. on February 4 shows an endorsement, with a quid pro quo on the West Bank.

The real estate vision of Gaza—in which its inhabitants are first punished by isolation, then killed through conditions designed to eliminate them, and then lastly relocated away from their land after their have dare to survive—essentially is the modern Western colonial project. Clearly colonization builds its constituency through an invocation of racial superiority than dehumanizes occupants, but what it ultimately does is create land where the colonizers can generate worth capable of creating surplus value. There are many deplorable people who will rejoice if Gaza is cleared of every last Palestinian, but then there are the people who want the clearance in order to reap the profit from the new private property of the land.

As scholar Brenna Bhandar writes in the Colonial Lives of Property (2018): “The ways in which we understand, practice, and perform modes of subjectivity that are rooted in possession and domination are intimately bound to the juridical apparatus of private property. One cannot be undone without dismantling the other.” Trump, the real estate developer president, understands better than the ethno-nationalist zealot Netanyahu that the real basis for colonization is dispossession and the creation of new property for the colonizers.

The colonial creation of private property from stolen land is the American way, from the theft of Indigenous people’s lands to the urban renewal clearance projects that built the modern New York City in which Donald Trump was able to thrive and build wealth. There can be no shock that the developer president’s first public words on Gaza would celebrate the old method of generating “demolition sites” (terra nullius, or empty land). In a way, Trump actually is daring those of us who support Palestinian sovereignty to understand the interdependence of capitalism and genocidal colonialism. There must be a people, and there must be a land. One without the other presents a windfall to the developers.

 

Palestinians reject Trump’s vision for Gaza: ‘If they offered me an entire city instead of the rubble of my home, I would not accept it.’

Tareq S. Hajjaj

On Monday, President Donald Trump told reporters that the U.S. would take over Gaza and permanently relocate its Palestinian residents to neighboring countries like Egypt and Jordan. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the man responsible for Gaza’s devastation, sat beside him and grinned as Trump answered a reporter about whether Palestinians would be allowed to return: “Why would they want to return? The place has been hell.”  

 

But after 15 months of displacement, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have already made their long-awaited return to their homes in northern Gaza. Most of them had only rubble to go back to, but they insisted on making the long trek on foot, many of them vowing never to leave again. Residents arriving in the north told Mondoweiss they were fully aware that barely any structure remained intact in northern Gaza and expected to enter into a new chapter of suffering. They also said that they would not trade what remained of their homes for anything Trump had to offer.

“The clear goal of this war is to make as many Palestinians as possible in Gaza homeless, because this destruction is deliberate and planned,” Alaa Subaih, a resident of the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, told Mondoweiss. “The aim is to make us suffer from lack of shelter so that we leave our country and move.”

In direct response to Trump’s statements, Subaih said, “Even if this land is hell, it is my land. I do not want to live elsewhere. I returned to revive and rebuild it.”

“If the American president wants to help Israel, the best solution for him is to take all the Israelis to his country, America, not to transfer the owners of the land. We are attached to our land and will not go to any other country. Our country, Palestine, is the most beautiful country on earth,” Subaih added.

‘They returned us to Gaza, but they did not return Gaza to us’

In al-Shuja’iyya, residents are cut off from electricity, water, sewage, and internet lines. Most families have to walk over half a kilometer carrying empty plastic gallons so that they can fill them up at the nearest water supply point, as water trucks cannot reach most areas that have not been cleared of rubble.

According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, which previously announced that the Gaza Strip was classified as a disaster area, the Israeli occupation is delaying the implementation of the agreed-upon stipulations of the ceasefire that would see the influx of aid and humanitarian relief to Gaza as part of the ongoing first phase of the ceasefire agreement.

The statement also provided an overview of the scale of the destruction Israel caused in Gaza over the past 15 months, stating that 450,000 housing units were damaged or destroyed — 170,000 of them were “completely destroyed,” 80,000 were “severely damaged,” and 200,000 were “partially damaged.”

“This is not a livable city,” Subaih said after spending nearly a week camped out beside the destroyed remains of his house. “It’s just heaps upon heaps of rubble. We can’t get any basic necessities; there is no water, no housing. It’s as if the war only ended to open a new one.”

But this doesn’t mean he wants to leave it.

“When a city is destroyed, its people return to it to rebuild; they do not leave it,” Subaih said, in response to the U.S. president’s vision for forcing Palestinians to resettle outside of Gaza. “If Trump wants to give me a castle in Egypt or Jordan, or even in America, I would not replace it with the rubble of my home,” he added.

Despite the ubiquitous destruction, signs of life are beginning to return to the area. Near Subaih’s residence in al-Shuja’iyya is Omar al-Mukhtar Street, a once-bustling market in Gaza City adjacent to several historic sites, including the Zawiya Market, the Great Omari Mosque, and the Qaysariya Market. All of them were bombed during the war, but people have now revived these areas and cleared them of debris as best they could. The markets offer a variety of foods, such as vegetables, fruits, dairy, canned foods, and clothes. Prices are still high compared to their prewar levels, but they have begun to go down.

Residents have also organized themselves into groups of volunteers and worked on different sections of neighborhoods to manually clear roads of the rubble. Any serious rehabilitation of Gaza’s urban spaces must await the entry of construction materials and equipment, including cement, iron, bulldozers, trucks, and fuel needed to operate them.

Subaih said that the difficulties Gazans continue to endure deprive them of the joy of returning to their homes. Pointing to the side of the street where his home used to be and where thirty of his relatives and neighbors were killed, he said, “They returned us to Gaza, but they did not return Gaza to us.”

‘We will remain here above the rubble until we rebuild it’

In Jabalia refugee camp, residents returned to neighborhoods that were leveled entirely. Jabalia was the hardest hit by Israel’s relentless bombardment and demolition campaign throughout the implementation of what was known as the “Generals’ Plan” — the failed effort to empty north Gaza of its people during the four months before the ceasefire took effect. Like in Gaza City, families in Jabalia have already begun to remove the rubble and set up camp beside their destroyed homes.

Sanaa Mousa, 29, returned to her home in Jabalia after being displaced to Gaza City for the past four months. The residential block she lived in was completely blown up.

“This massive destruction is meant to force us to leave our country,” Mousa told Mondoweiss. “But we will overcome. We’ll recover and rebuild our homes and celebrate our survival. We’re staying here on our land.”

Mousa and her family tried to find shelter upon their return, but there was no standing structure they could use in the area. This prompted the family to set up a makeshift tent out of nylon tarps, which has become a common sight in Gaza as people camp beside their destroyed homes.

“Life is difficult,” Mousa explained. “We cannot get the minimum requirements for survival and safety. There are no hospitals. Some food is available in the market, but we do not know where and how to cook it. There is nothing here; we cannot get water, and there is no sewage drainage. It is a difficult life, but we will get through it.”

In response to Trump’s comments, Mousa said that she endured all manner of suffering just to be able to return to her home. “It was the happiest moment of my life, even if my home was destroyed,” she said, adding that she wanted to embrace every grain of sand in Jabalia. She added that Trump wasn’t the first Westerner with no connection to the land to try to decide its people’s fate. “It’s like the Balfour Declaration,” she explains. “Trump wants to uproot us for the sake of an occupier.”

But Mousa believes that no such plan will succeed. “We will remain here above the rubble until we rebuild it,” she says. “Nothing worse can happen than the war of extermination we have already experienced, and even it did not succeed in removing us from our land.”

“If they offered me an entire city instead of the rubble of my home, I would not accept it,” Mousa added emphatically. “Homelands cannot be replaced. Homelands are like your blood and soul…Palestine is our land and our country, and we will not leave it under any pressure or plans.”

 

Gazans dreamed of returning to Rafah. The reality is a nightmare

Ruwaida Kamal Amer

February 4, 2025

Eight months after Israel invaded Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, forcibly displacing over 1 million Palestinians, the ceasefire has enabled some of the city’s former residents to return home. But unlike in Gaza’s northern sector, where the relatively swift and complete withdrawal of Israeli forces made it possible for tens of thousands of displaced residents to go back to their devastated neighborhoods, the army’s continued presence in Rafah along the border with Egypt and its ongoing attacks on returning civilians means that only a small number have attempted to make their way back.

According to the Health Ministry in Gaza, Israeli forces have killed 80 Palestinians in the Strip since Jan. 19, the date the ceasefire began. Sixty of those deaths occurred on that first day, when Israel delayed the implementation of the deal for several hours, and it is unclear how many were killed before or after it technically went into force. Out of the 80 casualties, half have been in Rafah alone.

Among them was 24-year-old Hassan Issa Abu Sharkh, from Rafah’s Al-Shaboura neighborhood. His cousin, Amani, said that Abu Sharkh had advised the family to wait a few days before going back “because the [Israeli] army always betrays us,” but decided to return on the third day of the ceasefire in order to check on their home and prepare it for the family’s return. “The house was very badly damaged,” Amani told +972. “Only the columns and the roof were left intact, but all the walls were destroyed.”

It was during that visit, Amani recounted, that Abu Sharkh was shot dead by an Israeli sniper in circumstances that remain unclear to the family. He was rushed to hospital in critical condition and succumbed to his wounds the next morning. “We are all in shock,” she said. “He was his parents’ eldest son, an ambitious young man. He worked very hard as a private English teacher to help his family.”

After Abu Sharkh’s killing, the Rafah Municipality warned other residents against returning to the area for their own safety. “Unfortunately, we don’t know which places are dangerous because of the army’s [continued] presence,” Amani said.

Rafah’s mayor, Dr. Ahmed Al-Sufi, told +972 that Israeli forces stationed near the border were still firing at Palestinians attempting to return in recent days. “There are still Israeli military vehicles in some areas, and they are shooting at civilians, so we have urged people not to return until the situation stabilizes,” he said. He also warned that the “complete lack of infrastructure” further endangers those trying to come back.

Highlighting the immense challenges ahead in rebuilding Gaza, Al-Sufi reported that Rafah’s western area had suffered “more than 90 percent destruction,” while the southern border areas had been “entirely wiped out.”

“There are approximately 150,000 homeless people from Rafah,” he said. “We need to construct 50,000 housing units to accommodate them, which will take at least five years,” he added, emphasizing the urgent need for temporary solutions such as mobile housing units.

“We have started working independently and with limited capabilities to open the streets closed by rubble,” Al-Sufi continued. “We need fuel and spare parts in order to continue our work, as well as heavy equipment in order to remove heavy roofs [of buildings that collapsed]. We need to repair infrastructure, especially water, so that citizens can return to their homes. All the electricity and communications poles are completely destroyed. We need help from other countries in order to bring life back to the city of Rafah.”

Dr. Muhammad Al-Mughair, a senior official in Gaza’s Civil Defense, explained that even areas that were fully evacuated by Israeli forces remain extremely perilous. “After the withdrawal of the Israeli army, our crews spotted many suspicious objects in the streets and [unexploded ordnance] in large quantities,” he told +972 Magazine. As a result, his team were forced to pause their efforts to recover the bodies of those killed in Rafah following the Israeli invasion of the city last May. “Most of what we recovered were charred skeletons,” he added.

+972 approached the Israeli army for their response regarding Abu Sharkh’s killing, but a spokesperson said they would be unable to comment unless we provided the exact coordinates of the incident, which we were unable to obtain due to the danger that the army poses in the area.

‘We saw the end of the world’

Despite the dangers, some residents of Rafah have still made the journey home since the ceasefire went into effect, hoping to take the first step toward rebuilding their lives. The extent of the destruction they discovered in the city, which was home to nearly 300,000 Palestinians before the war, has left many of them stunned.

Among them was Manal Salim, a 49-year-old mother of eight, who left her home in Rafah with her family shortly after the Israeli invasion began. As soon as the ceasefire came into effect, her 20-year-old son, Issam, went back to check on their home. “I called him to tell him to return quickly because the area was still dangerous, but all I could hear was him weeping,” she recounted. “He told me, ‘The whole house was destroyed,’ and asked me to stay on the phone with him because he felt pain in his heart and [feared he] was going to pass out.”

After speaking with her son, Salim decided to go with her other children to see for herself what remained of their home. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she said. “I couldn’t believe that this was the area where I lived. The entire house was destroyed. Nothing was left of it.”

Like other returning Rafah residents and Gazan officials who spoke to +972, Salim reported witnessing Israeli army fire from soldiers deployed along the border with Egypt — known as the Philadelphi Corridor — that stretches southwest of the city. “The Israeli army is still in Rafah,” she said. “We heard the sound of shelling when we went to check on our house.”

Salim, whose husband died of COVID-19 during the height of the pandemic, mourned the loss of both her family’s cherished memories and her children’s future. “As a mother, I am tired of crying so much,” she said. “I worked for more than 25 years to build that house. I opened a beauty salon where my daughters worked and a bridal gown rental shop where my sons worked. I believed I had secured their future, giving them a path to build their lives. Now I’ll [need to] go back to work under impossible conditions.

“When my 11-year-old daughter, Sarah, saw the house, she couldn’t stop crying,” Salim continued. “When we were displaced, we left our belongings in one room; when we returned, we found a deep hole with the belongings in it. My children tried salvaging anything they could and were happy that they found a few items.”

Tel Al-Sultan, the neighborhood in which Salim’s home once stood, is among the worst hit in Rafah. “The neighbors were all in shock,” she said. “The [Israeli] occupation left no meaning to life in this area. There are no schools, no universities, and no infrastructure. What did we do to them? We are civilians with a life and a future and they destroyed it. We saw the end of the world in Tel Al-Sultan.”

Amid the terrible shock, Salim and her family put up a tent next to the rubble of their home, but the rain soon forced them to return to their displacement camp at Al-Aqsa University near Khan Younis. Still, Salim affirmed that their intention is to return to live in their old neighborhood.

‘The army is still targeting civilians’

Maha Issa, 37, was also displaced from Tel Al-Sultan and returned to check on her family’s house on the second day of the ceasefire. “I thought the suffering I experienced for more than seven months in tents would end when I returned, but when I went back I was shocked by what I saw,” she told +972.

Issa, a mother of two who was living with her family in a displacement camp in the coastal area of Al-Mawasi since the start of Israel’s Rafah invasion, said that seeing the condition of her neighborhood left her “in a state of shock and depression.”

“My house, my husband’s family’s house, and our neighbors’ house were all completely destroyed,” she lamented. “My children’s future was destroyed because of an occupation that hates us as Palestinians. I feel lost and don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t know if a future exists for us or if we have the strength to keep going.”

Upon returning to the area where they lived, Issa recalled, “my children, who are under 7 years old, were frightened when they saw such devastation. They were pulling me by my clothes, wanting to return to the tent.”

Issa also reported witnessing ongoing attacks by Israeli forces, despite the ceasefire. “The army is still firing shells at Tel Al-Sultan and targeting civilians who are checking on their homes there. I don’t know what they want from us.”

Unlike Salim, Issa told +972 she does not intend to return to Rafah long-term after what she witnessed there. “I will stay in the tent,” she said. “Tel Al-Sultan looks like it was hit by a powerful earthquake or a nuclear bomb. There’s no water, nothing. The streets are full of rubble.

“The area where I was born, raised, and gave birth to my children has become foreign to me — I do not know it,” she continued. “I lived the worst days of my life in the tent and I was patient in order to return to my home, but this dream has become a nightmare.”

‘I will live on the rubble of my home’

Aya Al-Mudallal, 33, told +972 that she and her family “never got used to living in a tent” after they were displaced from Rafah following Israel’s invasion last May. They attempted to return on the very first day of the ceasefire, but what they encountered along the way disoriented them. “I didn’t recognize the roads because of the extent of the destruction,” she recounted.

When they reached Rafah, Al-Mudallal said, she and her family heard intermittent gunfire. “I didn’t feel like we were in a ceasefire. The army is on the Philadelphi Corridor firing on all areas of Rafah. We want the army to tell us clearly where the safe areas are.”

The danger to their lives forced the family to make the painful decision to move back to the displacement camp in Al-Mawasi, but Al-Mudallal emphasized that she wishes to return as soon as possible. “My house was destroyed and the land was bulldozed by the army, but I want to go back and stay in Rafah,” she said. “Why were the people of the north able to reach their homes, while we, the people of the south, can’t reach ours at all?”

Salem Asraf, 50, also returned to his home in Tel Al-Sultan after the ceasefire took effect, only to find it — and the rest of the neighborhood — reduced to rubble. “I endured months of displacement, clinging to the hope that I would return home, rest in my own bedroom, and reclaim my stable routine,” he said. “But I came back and found nothing but destruction. I hugged my neighbor and together we cried bitterly over what we saw.”

The devastation was so extreme that Asraf said he almost wishes the war hadn’t ended so he wouldn’t have returned to see it. “Years of hard work vanished in an instant,” he said. “I haven’t found any trace of my home; I’ve searched but I can’t find it. Is this hatred? Or revenge?

“Houses are not just stones; they are memories, a future, safety and stability — and we’ve lost all of this,” he continued. “I’m trying to support my five children and grandchildren so they can bear this disaster, but I haven’t been able to console myself. I’m waiting for there to be water, and then I will live on the rubble of my house until it is rebuilt. We want the international courts to prosecute Israel for this destruction.”