For more than 700 days, Israel has waged a devastating campaign against Gaza – a war whose scale and brutality leave little hope or sign of ending. One need not scrutinise statistics or reports to grasp the consequences; there is simply nothing left of the place I once called home.
I was born and raised in the al-Zaytoun district of Gaza City. We shared our neighbourhood with refugee families forced to flee by the Nakba of 1948 – the catastrophe marked by Israel’s occupation and the expulsion of countless Palestinians from their towns and villages. The Nakba was not a chapter that ended in 1948, but an ongoing reality for every Palestinian, rooted in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and perpetuated by decades of displacement, occupation, and denial.
