Requiem for a Refugee Camp- In October, 2023, I could not imagine anything worse than the destruction in Jabalia refugee camp. But what is happening now outstrips anything I saw there. By Mosab Abu Toha December 31, 2024 in The New Yorker

Palestinians survey the destruction after an Israeli strike in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip, in November, 2024.Photograph by Omar Al-Qattaa / AFP / Getty

Requiem for a Refugee Camp

In October, 2023, I could not imagine anything worse than the destruction in Jabalia refugee camp. But what is happening now outstrips anything I saw there.  By Mosab Abu Toha

 

December 31, 2024

 

 "..... For a long time, I wondered what my paternal grandparents, Hasan and Khadra, experienced in 1948, when Zionist militias expelled them from their homes in Jaffa. After they moved into the newly formed Al-Shati refugee camp, on the banks of the Mediterranean, did they keep their bags packed, ready for the day when they would return home? How many weeks or years did it take them to unpack for good, realizing that Al-Shati was now their home? My father, his siblings, and most of my siblings were born there. Decades later, when Hasan and Khadra died, they were buried in a nearby cemetery.

What if Hasan and Khadra could have filmed what happened to their homes in Jaffa? What if they had footage of their journey to Gaza and the start of their lives in the camp? If Palestinians had live-streamed the start of the catastrophe that we are still living in, could it have been prevented? What became of their house, and the mulberry tree in their yard? I don’t have answers to these questions. But, in 2024, I felt that I started to understand my grandparents.

A few years ago, seventy per cent of Gazans were refugees. In 2024, the U.N. reported that ninety per cent of Gazans were displaced. All of Gaza’s universities are gone. About ninety-five per cent of schools have been damaged or destroyed. Whole neighborhoods are filmed as they get blown up. A house where one of my aunts lived, on the edge of Jabalia, was hit by an air strike that killed sixteen relatives, including one of her daughters. My grandmother’s sister, Um Hani—whom I called sitti, or grandma—was killed, too. Her body is still under the rubble.... ".... READ MORE   https://www.newyorker.com/culture/essay/requiem-for-a-refugee-camp

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