Every time I hear the Arabic word mukhayyam, or camp, my mind goes back to Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. Although I was born a few miles away in Al Shati refugee camp, Jabalia is where my maternal grandparents were born, where I grew up, and where my mother was. It is the largest of Gaza’s camps and is home to more than 100,000 people, and over time the informal settlement has grown into a dense collection of concrete structures, with families living in rooms with no room. and expanded as floors were added. I studied at Jabalia from 5th grade to 9th grade. I went shopping there with my mom on Friday and then with my wife.
When I was a boy, I saw how the narrow streets inside the camp were transformed into makeshift cafes. On a summer afternoon, someone brought out a chair to escape the heat and humidity inside. Another neighbor will also join in. Soon, a dozen or so people will be chatting on the street about work, soccer, food, border crossings, and family. Each speaks like a political analyst, sports commentator, or food critic. The children listened to the story while sitting on square pieces of cardboard cut out from boxes.
My mother’s parents lived on Khawaja Street, just a 25-minute walk from their home in Beit Lahia. On our way to visit them, we always passed a garbage can so big that people called it a “ship.” Their house had two bedrooms, a living room, and a storage room containing sacks of flour and mattresses for guests like me. The kitchen was smaller than the bedroom and didn’t have a table, so we ate on the living room floor, the sounds of our chewing drowned out by the chatter of people shuffling past.
In Jabalia, almost every wall was spray painted. I remember seeing jokes, messages, phone numbers of cooking gas providers, and names of people killed in Israeli attacks. I once saw a black joke called “Neighborhood for Sale.” When there was a big soccer match, there were fewer people on the streets and in the stores. Every cafe with a TV is filled with Palestinians of all ages. Even if you weren’t looking, you could tell when a goal had occurred by the rumbling that shook the windows and doors. What was special about camp life was that we created reasons for ourselves to celebrate, even if they didn’t last.
Since October 7, 2023, my family has had to flee the Israeli military attack in Beit Lahia and move to a relative’s apartment in Jabalia. Although we all felt like refugees, there was still an old spirit alive in the camp. On October 28th, as I was sitting on the street, I heard one boy telling another that Real Madrid had beaten Barcelona 2-1. They were probably in seventh grade. That same day, the house we left behind was blown up in an airstrike.
Israel also carried out attacks inside the camp. On the afternoon of October 31st, I heard an explosion, followed by my father yelling throughout the apartment to disperse. When the children stopped crying, I went out into the street. I saw two men carrying a headless body. I used my cell phone to film the paramedics desperately trying to revive the young girl. A teenage girl cried, “My eyes!” Then I saw a hellscape. At least 27,000 square feet of land was flattened into a fiery inferno. I had never seen such devastation in my life. When I returned to my family, I said, “There can’t be any more destruction.” I couldn’t imagine anything better.
Photographed here in February 2024, an Israeli military attack on Jabalia refugee camp reduced many buildings to rubble.Photo by Mahmoud Essa/AP
But what’s happening now in Jabalia exceeds anything I’ve seen there. Buildings that have already been bombed are being bombed again. It is as if the Israeli military is taking revenge on the camp itself by obliterating it. In many photos, the camp looks like a landfill. I can’t see people.
Recently, I was scrolling through a Hebrew Telegram account that described a post as a “security update.” In one video, the camera rotates in a circle, showing a 360-degree view of broken concrete and abandoned buildings. You will hear the word “jabalia” in Hebrew. The few structures that still remain do not appear to be habitable.
Another video, apparently taken from a drone, shows a field of debris from above. An explosion shakes the camera and the two only visible skeletal buildings in the entire city block collapse in a mushroom cloud. On social media, someone was taking screenshots and labeling them with Arabic place names. I knew the whole neighborhood. I could see the location of Meisara, an electronics store that I often used to repair wireless routers. In the middle of the photo is Khawaja Street, where my grandparents once lived.
For a long time, I have wondered what my paternal grandparents, Hasan and Khadra, went through when they were expelled from their home in Jaffa by Zionist militias in 1948. After moving to the newly established Al Shati refugee camp on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, did they leave their belongings packed for the day they returned home? How many weeks, or even years, did it take them to fully unpack their belongings and realize that Al Shati was now their home? My father, his brother, and most of my brothers I was born there. Decades later, when Hasan and Khadra died, they were buried in a nearby cemetery.
What if Hassan and Khadra were able to film what happened in their Jaffa home? What if they had footage of their journey to Gaza and the beginning of life in the camp? What if the Palestinians Could it have been prevented if they had live-streamed the beginning of this catastrophe we are still living through? What happened to their house and the mulberry tree in their garden? There are no answers to these questions. But in 2024, I felt like I was starting to understand my grandparents.
A few years ago, 70 percent of Gazans were refugees. In 2024, the United Nations reported that 90 percent of Gazans were displaced. All universities in Gaza have disappeared. Approximately 95% of schools were damaged or destroyed. Entire neighborhoods are filmed being blown up. An airstrike hit the house where one of my aunts lived on the edge of Jabalia, killing 16 of her relatives, including one of her daughters. My grandmother’s sister, Umm Hani, whom I called Sitti, or Grandma, was also killed. Her body still lies under the rubble.
My wife’s family has moved into a soccer stadium in Gaza City, but they are living in tents without enough clothing or bedding to survive the cold winter conditions. My father and some brothers are in northern Gaza. My mother is in Qatar with one of her sisters who is sick. My wife, children, and I left Gaza in December 2023 and are now nearly 6,000 miles away in Syracuse, New York. We were all removed twice from where our grandparents once lived, as we all had to be evacuated from refugee camps to find shelter. More than a year after October 7, Jabalia has very little family left. There are no roads for people to gather, and there are hardly any chairs to sit on.
In 2023, despite all the horrors around us, the devastation of the Jabalia camp will endure. Gaza also had a kindergarten, university, and clinic, but these too were turned into evacuation centers and came under attack. The hope that we would return to some kind of normal life after the ceasefire we had been waiting for never disappeared. We kept saying to ourselves, “It will pass.” I’ve never forgotten that nine years ago, my neighbor’s house was destroyed in an airstrike and the wall in my bedroom was blown off. We survived the cold winter, stayed home and built new walls.
Now there is less hope. They don’t want us to go back to normal life or go back to where we were before. The most important thing is that the people I care about survive and see me again.
On the morning of December 19, Human Rights Watch, following in the footsteps of Amnesty International, concluded in a thorough report that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Later that day, I looked at recent satellite images of Jabalia in Haaretz and the Guardian newspaper. When I searched for the same location on Google Maps on my iPad, it showed me what the camp looked like back then. In both the before and after photos, I recognized the Abu Rashed rainwater pool that I used to pass by on my way to my grandparents’ house. I followed the familiar streets to the location of the Kadamat Javaria Club. I often played soccer there with colleagues and friends, and people watched our games from the windows there. I found the location of Fallujah cemetery. We buried some of our uncles and aunts there.
New photos showed only piles of concrete, blurred by dust, probably from constant bombing. There were no green spaces, no soccer fields, no colorful buildings, no roofs. Only roads and vacant lots were visible. As I looked at the photos over and over again, the image of a cemetery expanding rapidly came to mind.
