A Dispatch From the Border of Gaza and Egypt

Since filing this copy, the author has been displaced two more times, both in the arid strip of Al-Mawasi, and the first was after narrowly surviving an Israeli raid that killed three others and wounded 15 people. The author’s wife, who is five months pregnant, is gravely malnourished. In one incident, she needed medication which they only managed to find beneath the rubble of a demolished pharmacy. This is a winter/spring dispatch, but as autumn rushes in, the author says that their circumstances have only gotten worse.

June 2024: For months, I had stayed in that displacement tent for no reason other than its location: its proximity from the wall that separates us from Egyptian soil. It’s the closest I can be from an exit from the war on Gaza, from the hell that life has become. Here, there is no mobile network, no connection to life, literally and metaphorically. It was a barren desert. But I could see the light on the other side. 

Until we were forced to move again, when the Israeli army began its ground operation into Rafah. And that hope of being just physically near an escape, although impossible, was lost.

***

I’m thirty years old, and the war has stripped everything around me bare, leaving only the echoes of one defining reality: Losing the house I had spent the better part of my pre-war days dreaming of and setting up to be my shelter and sanctuary, ending with piled up loans of more than $10,000. 

The house was in the neighborhood of Al-Amal in the south of Gaza city. Al-Amal stands for “hope” in Arabic. Every tiny detail in that house was picked with care. The location, the pale shades for the paints and the furniture, and the stark contrast in the plants scattered throughout our home. Down to the small basil plant on the kitchen’s windowsill, which I’d spray with water every day while enjoying the view from our kitchen’s window, that overlooked a kindergarten in the neighborhood. The joyful sight and melodic laughs of the children seeping into our home each morning were just as integral, to me, as the window itself, or the kitchen. It had become part of the house’s personality, and a part of my daily expectation of life. 

But in November, the window shattered. The kindergarten was demolished. The dream house was gone. 

***

You expect circumstances to change as you grow, and your skills to develop. But in a war, what happens to you, on you, around you, is beyond all expectations.

Life as I know it was completely altered. In the blink of an eye, the room that once contained the pampered comfort of an air conditioning system has morphed into a void similar to a messy birdhouse: Every detail was smashed into tiny bits. The details were lost and for that brief time I was in that house before we fled, there was nothing about it I could recognize.

It was in November, after the only truce we’ve had in a months-long relentless bombing. It was instant, life-changing, and ground-shattering. The sound of the deafening bombings engulfed us like lava and so did the debris, yet the high pitches of bullets, sources of which were unknown, still pierced through our ears. 

Life altered course at that moment. And the race for survival began. My wife and I raced out of our matrimonial house which we had only moved into three months before the war, and rushed into the streets. There, my wife suddenly collapsed, having seen a body that had been split into two halves by a concrete rod.

We left everything behind and fled for our lives, to the safety of an area they promised to be safe, in the coastal town of Al-Mawasi. 

I held tightly onto the hands of my father and wife, since I wasn’t sure if any of my other family members had come out alive. In a daze, we stood at a crossroads, my eyes pacing across the faces rushing and hurrying past, looking for a familiar face, or a face of a family member who is still alive. I asked the familiar faces for the faces of loved ones. Everyone was doing the same, looking for surviving loved ones. 

But then this little boy I knew told me that he saw my two brothers and that they’re looking for me. Two of my brothers were alive! Reassured, we kept asking around, and learned that my six other siblings were at a public hospital, sheltering from tank bullets.

Relieved that my family was safe, I had to now think of how we’d survive. I scurried in search of a blanket, a mattress, or a nylon cloth to shelter my wife and father on this rainy day. By the sea, at the end of a day that seemed too long, too daunting, I leaned against a wall by the raging sea as the bitter cold ravaged my drained body. I held my wife’s hand and wept. Wept over a past that was wrecked in minutes, and a future that is exhausting to keep up with. 

At that moment, I thought of our wedding photos we’ve only just received, and how they were lost. 

Ultimately, I found a piece of nylon and brought some wooden logs and boards, the price of which, months into the war, were a fortune: one wooden board costs $10 when it used to cost only $1. We improvised a tent so small that it did not exceed three meters wide, to accommodate nine people: me and my wife, my parents, my siblings, their spouses, and their kids—including two infants. 

In this desert by the sea, the sky was overcast with clouds and the strong winds were blowing away the tent's corners that almost got dislodged. The rain poured down on us and the wind became so violent. The tent did little to shield us from the cold, and with the little clothes we had, we were exposed to nature’s cruelty, alongside Israel’s brutality. 

In January, we moved again, this time to Rafah, right by the border with Egypt. Perhaps that is a good thing: on the other side of the border, there is no war and no bombs. Now we have reached a place of hope. Maybe it is a pseudo-hope, but it does not matter.

We had to improvise yet another makeshift tent in Rafah. Living in a tent is nothing short of torture. The most basic things needed planning. Like cats, we learned to dig holes in the ground to relieve ourselves. And in Rafah, we had to walk three kilometers each day to get 16 liters of water. Power outages were chronic. I almost forgot what lights look like. 

But I saw them on the other side of the wall separating Egypt and Gaza, where only the rich of us can go. 

***

Even in hell, money talks. 

Food has never been this costly. Even to the richest of us, it is too expensive: $3 for one lemon, one tomato is $1, and the same for a potato.

Escaping is not impossible, but only possible if you can afford paying $5,000 per person to cross the Rafah border. The rich were able to get away and make it to safety and left everything behind for the poor to wrestle with.  

I am still waiting for a change in humans’ consciousness, in the way the world sees us. For them to realize we’re humans worthy of a normal life. For them to bring an end to a war, and that I don’t have to travel eight kilometers to get an hour of internet to hear their silence as they watch us get killed.

I long to see a toilet that has running water inside it. The open sewage and trenches have filled our camp, and diseases are eating away at our bodies, and the heat is eating away at our skins, and the smell of death lingers and lurks everywhere. 

But at least in Rafah, there was always the hope of being close to the border. Perhaps one day they’d open the border and let us leave the hell that is Gaza, we thought.

And then on May 6, Israel closed the crossing shut, its tanks drew in, and we were pushed back into Gaza and away from the borders. We no longer can see the lights on the other side of the wall from where we’re now displaced, in Khan Younis. We’re thrust back into the midst of the war, which doesn’t seem to end.

This piece is published in collaboration with Egab.