Mass for the refugee camp

Whenever you hear the Arabic word CampOr the camp, my mind jumps to the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. I was born in Beach refugee camp, a few miles away, but Jabalia is where my maternal grandparents were born, raised, and where my mother gave birth. It is the largest of Gaza’s camps, a place that more than a hundred thousand people call home, and over time its informal settlements have evolved into a dense collection of concrete structures, expanding as families add rooms and floors. I studied in Jabalia between the fifth and ninth grades. On Fridays, I would go shopping there with my mother, and then with my wife.

When I was a boy, I saw how a narrow street in the camp could be turned into a makeshift café. On a summer afternoon, someone would bring a chair to escape the indoor heat and humidity. Another neighbor will join. Soon dozens of people were talking in the street about work, football, food, border crossings, and family. Each person will speak as a political analyst, sports commentator or food critic. The children sat on cardboard squares cut from boxes and listened.

My mother’s parents lived on Al-Hawaja Street, just a twenty-five-minute walk from our home in Beit Lahia. On our way to visit them, we always passed a garbage can so large that people called it “the ship.” Their house had two bedrooms, a living room, and a storeroom, which contained a bag of wheat flour and bedding for guests like me. The kitchen was smaller than the bedroom and had no table, so we ate our meals on the living room floor, our munching drowned out by the sounds of people shuffling their feet.

In Jabalia, almost all the walls have been painted. I remember seeing jokes, messages, phone numbers of cooking gas suppliers and names of people killed in Israeli raids. Once I saw a black joke: “A neighborhood for sale.” When there was a big football match, the streets and shops were empty. Every café with a TV is filled with Palestinians of all ages. If you weren’t watching, you still knew when there was a target by the rumble of sounds that shook the windows and doors. The special thing about camp life is that we created our own reasons to celebrate, even if they didn’t last.

After October 7, 2023, my family had to flee the Israeli raids on Beit Lahia and move to a relative’s apartment in Jabalia. We all felt like refugees, but the camp was still alive with its old spirit. On October 28, I was sitting in the street when I heard one boy telling another that Real Madrid had beaten Barcelona 2-1. They were probably in seventh grade. On the same day, an air strike blew up the house we left behind.

Israel was also carrying out raids on the camp. On the afternoon of October 31, we heard explosions, followed by my father shouting at us to disperse throughout the apartment. When my children stopped screaming, I went out into the street. I saw two men carrying a headless body. Using my phone, I filmed a responder desperately trying to resuscitate a little girl. A teenage girl was crying, saying: “My eyes!” Then I came to the sight of hell, at least twenty-seven thousand square feet, flattened and burning. I have never witnessed such devastation in my life. When I returned to my family, I told them: “There can be no more destruction like this.” I couldn’t imagine anything worse.

But what is happening in Jabalia now exceeds anything I saw there. Buildings that have already been bombed are being bombed again. It is as if the Israeli forces are taking revenge on the camp itself, by wiping it out. In many photos, the camp looks like a garbage dump. There are no people in sight.

I recently scrolled through a Hebrew-language Telegram account that describes its posts as “security updates.” In one video, the camera pans in a circle, showing a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of broken concrete and destroyed buildings. A voice speaking in Hebrew says the word “Jabaliah”. The few buildings still standing do not appear habitable.

Another video, which appears to have been filmed with a drone, shows a field of rubble from above. An explosion rocks the camera, and two skeletal buildings—the only ones visible in the entire building—collapse in a mushroom cloud. On social media, someone took a screenshot and put Arabic place names on it. I knew the whole neighborhood. I was able to see the website of Maisarah, an electronics store where I was getting my wireless router serviced. In the middle of the picture is Al-Hawaja Street, where my grandparents once lived.

For a long time, I wondered what my grandparents, Hassan and Khadra, lived through in 1948, when Zionist militias expelled them from their homes in Jaffa. After moving to the newly formed Beach refugee camp, on the banks of the Mediterranean, did they keep their bags ready for the day they returned home? How many weeks or years did it take for them to unpack forever, realizing that the beach was now their home? My father, his siblings and most of my siblings were born there. Decades later, when Hassan and Khadra died, they were buried in a nearby cemetery.

What if Hassan and Khadra were able to film what happened to their home in Jaffa? What if they had footage of their trip to Gaza and the beginning of their life in the camp? If the Palestinians had live-streamed the beginning of the catastrophe we are still experiencing, could it have been prevented? What happened to their house and the mulberry tree in their yard? I don’t have answers to these questions. But in 2024, I felt like I was beginning to understand my ancestors.

A few years ago, 70% of Gaza’s population were refugees. In 2024, the United Nations reported that 90% of Gaza’s population had been displaced. Gaza’s universities have all disappeared. About ninety-five percent of schools were damaged or destroyed. Entire neighborhoods are filmed being blown up. The house where one of my aunts lived, on the outskirts of Jabalia, was subjected to an air strike that killed sixteen of my relatives, including one of her daughters. My grandmother’s sister, Umm Hani, whom I called CityOr the grandmother – she was also killed. Her body is still under the rubble.

My wife’s family moved to a football field in Gaza City, where they live in tents without enough clothing or bedding for the cold winter conditions. My father and some of my brothers are in northern Gaza. My mother is in Qatar with one of my sisters, and she is sick. My wife, children, and I left Gaza in December 2023, and we are now nearly six thousand miles away in Syracuse, New York. We have all had to flee refugee camps in order to find refuge, and so have been turned away twice from the places where our ancestors once lived. More than a year after October 7, there are almost no families left in Jabalia. There are hardly any streets where we can meet or chairs to sit.

In 2023, despite all the horror surrounding me, it was possible to live with the devastation of Jabalia camp. Gaza still has kindergartens, colleges and clinics, even if they too are turning into shelters and under attack. The hope of returning to some kind of normalcy, after the ceasefire we have been waiting for, has never faded. We kept telling ourselves: “It will pass.” I’ve never forgotten how, nine years ago, an air raid flattened our neighbor’s house and smashed the walls of our bedrooms. We had a cold winter, stayed in our house, and built new walls.

I have less hope now. I do not hope that we will return to normal life, or that we will return to these places as they were before. The most important thing is that the people I care about will survive so that I can see them again.

On the morning of December 19, Human Rights Watch, following Amnesty International, concluded that In an accurate report That Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Later that day, I looked at recent satellite images of Jabalia Haaretz and Guardian. On my iPad, I looked up the same places on Google Maps, which showed the campground as it was before. In my collection of before and after photos, I recognized the Abu Rashid rainwater pond, which I used to pass on my way to my grandfather’s house. I followed the familiar streets to the site of the Jabalia Services Club, where I played soccer with co-workers and friends, and where people watched our matches from their windows. I found the site of the Fallujah cemetery, where some of my aunts and uncles are buried.

In the new photos, I could see nothing more than piles of concrete, blurred by dust that may have come from the incessant bombing. There were no green areas, no football fields, no colorful buildings or roofs. Only streets and disinfection can be done. I looked at the pictures over and over, and an image of a cemetery growing and growing formed in my mind.