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Gaza- “We were displaced for two days and we will return, and a month has passed since our displacement. Oh Lord, our displacement will not turn into a new catastrophe.” With great sadness and oppression, Issaad Abdullah spoke about the experience of her and her family’s displacement from their home in the Al-Nasr neighborhood in Gaza City to Rafah city Far south Gaza strip.
Being away from her home for two days, as she thought, was not a need to carry many things, including winter clothes. She told Al Jazeera Net, “It did not occur to me that our displacement would last this long. It has been more than a month since we were forced to leave our home.”
With light clothes worn by Issad, her husband, and her four children, and a small bag containing important documents, this family was displaced to the city of Rafah, where they reside in one of the schools converted by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) (UNRWA) to shelter centers.
Forced displacement
UNRWA estimates that more than 900,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom are women, children and the elderly, reside in shelter centers inside schools and other facilities affiliated with it in the Gaza Strip, the majority of them in cities in the south of the Strip.
As the air strikes intensified on Gaza City and its north, and the growing Israeli threats to the residents of those areas, Issad saw that the safety of her family required displacement south.
However, her experience and that of other displaced people proves that “there is no safe place in the Gaza Strip,” says Issad, who lost a number of her relatives displaced from Gaza in an air strike that targeted a residential square in the Bureij refugee camp in the center of the Strip.
Despite what she is suffering in the UNRWA shelter center, she is in a better condition and luck than Muhammad al-Masry, who was displaced to Rafah 5 days ago on foot from the agency’s shelter center in the Zaytoun neighborhood in Gaza City.
The road was clear for Issaad’s family to flee in their own car, before the occupation tanks and vehicles took control of the “Martyrs’ Junction” on Salah al-Din Street, and closed the coastal Rashid Street, which are two main streets linking the north and south of the Strip.
Issaad adds, “Things were not clear and that they would lead to what we are living in today, and I blame myself for not filling the car with all our important and necessary supplies, including our winter clothes.”
She continues, “Then I go back and say that the weather was sunny, and no one expected us to stay outside our homes for a long time.” She was silent for a moment and looked around the school room, then continued by saying, “God knows if we lost a home in Gaza.”
Overnight, the situation of Issad’s family changed. They were residing in a two-story independent house, in the middle of a small garden planted with some citrus trees and different types of flowers. Since their forced displacement, they had been sharing a room inside a school containing thousands of displaced people with about 30 other women and children.
“The misery of the years”
The speaker herself does not know anything about the fate of her house, which was only three years old, and she fears that it is one of the thousands of houses that were turned into rubble by Israeli air strikes, killing their owners, either by missiles or by oppression, out of grief over what she described as “the misery of the years.” .
As for Issaad, who comes from a refugee family from the town of Al-Masmiya in the occupied interior, and many of the displaced people, they repeatedly used the word “nakba” to describe what their conditions have become due to forced displacement, and she says, “We are living a new chapter of chapters.” The Nakba extending since 1948.”
Issaad is forced to “wrap” her youngest son, Ahmed (two years old), with a blanket to keep him warm during the extremely cold hours of the night, as the school lacks means of heating inside the rooms, while the men who spend the night in tents they set up in the school yard resort to lighting a fire with whatever paper is available. And small pieces of wood, to overcome the cold weather.
Over the past two days, harsh winter weather has afflicted displaced people in schools, and markets and shops have been crowded with them, searching for clothes to overcome the cold, but they have been faced with either running out of them, or extremely high prices.
Isaad said that after a full day in the market, she had only bought two pieces of clothing for her child, Ahmed, who suffers from an illness that makes him unable to withstand the extreme cold. He was shivering all night, and she had no choice but to wrap him in her only blanket.
Because of the high prices and the lack of anything suitable for her children, Isaad was forced to buy – for the first time – used clothes, and their prices were also not suitable for the majority of displaced people fleeing death without money or property.
But it was not the first time for Muhammad Al-Masry, who searched for these used clothes to clothe his six children, and bought sparingly, when he was surprised by the prices. He surprisingly told Al Jazeera Net, “A piece of clothing whose price did not exceed 10 shekels (two and a half dollars) before the war, its price increased three times.”
After about a month of displacement in an UNRWA school in the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, Muhammad was forced to flee with his family to the city of Rafah after a night he described as terrifying, during which warplanes and artillery joined forces to bomb the school’s surroundings with a barrage of rockets and shells.
Overcame hunger and thirst
Muhammad’s house is only a few hundred meters away from that school, but he did not dare to return there to bring some supplies and winter clothes, due to the intensity of the air and artillery bombardment. He walked with his family, accompanied by crowds of displaced people, on foot, about 10 kilometers, and wondered, “How can we carry luggage for such a long distance?”
He added, “We left asking God for nothing but salvation with our lives, and the sounds of explosions were echoing everywhere.”
He continues, “The destruction was as far as the eye could see all the way from the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, which is one of the axes of the Israeli ground incursion, until after the ‘Martyrs’ Junction’, where Israeli tanks and military vehicles are stationed at the southern entrance leading to Gaza City.”
Muhammad and his family live with thousands of people, most of them from the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood and the town of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, in a government school, after they gave up on finding vacancies in UNRWA schools.
He says, “We live a tragic life without any necessities. We suffer from cold, hunger, and thirst. We spent the first two nights on the floor, with women and children inside the classrooms, while the school corridors were crowded with men, amidst a very cold winter atmosphere.”
According to UNRWA data, it found itself – due to the repercussions of the war – responsible for about two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including indigenous citizens, in addition to its traditional responsibility for about 70% of the Strip’s population, whose number is estimated at about 2.2 million people.
