I always found it hard to understand why my family left our small village in 1948 and sought refuge in Gaza.

No more. In the past six months, relatives, though not my immediate family, have been forced to relocate from house to house several times to escape Israel’s genocidal violence.

It was like a new Nakba.

Our circumstances seemed to replay the black-and-white images on the website of the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), except we carried mobile phones and laptops.

Gaza and our village are very close, but we are unable to go there, Israel won’t allow it.

I was raised as a refugee. I went to an UNRWA school.

I lived in a refugee camp. Even this hasn’t stopped me now experiencing firsthand the reality of displacement.

My grandfather, who fled to Egypt in 1967 without his children, never returned. The reality is that Palestinians seldom come back home once they leave.

Indeed, after the Nakba of 1947-49, Israel made sure to preclude refugees returning by writing a law confiscating their properties and lands. This is why my father adamantly refused to move to the southern Gaza Strip during the current genocidal war, despite the Israeli army bombarding us with thousands of recorded messages instructing us to relocate.

Many of our neighbors did migrate southward. During this war, I developed a habit of working out who had left their homes from those who stayed, based on their laundry lines.

The Abu Mahmoud family, for instance, left their clothes hanging out, yet they had relocated.

I still don’t know if staying was the correct decision because the Israeli army has punished us for not complying with orders with starvation and continued destruction.

Seeing my friends’ Instagram stories, where they express their longing for the Gaza City they left to move south, breaks my heart. The city they reminisce about is not the city I see from my window – it’s utterly devastated, a shadow of its former self.

The entire city has been wiped out, its material history erased, and the hope of ever recovering has vanished…..more