‘I saw my Gaza homeland rebuilt before but this time’s different’

“I rode a camel with my grandmother, along a sandy road, and started crying.” Yunus describes living as the worst moment of his life, and he still considers it that way, even though it has been 77 years and he has lived through many horrors since then.

It was 1948, when the First Arab-Israeli War was raging, and Ayesh was 12 years old. Ayesh and his entire large family were fleeing their homes in the village of Barbara – famous for its grapes, wheat, corn and barley – in British-ruled Palestine.

“We were afraid for our lives,” Ayesh says. “We had no way to fight the Jews, so we all started leaving.”

The camel took Ayesh and his grandmother seven miles south of Barbara, to an area controlled by Egypt that became known as the Gaza Strip. It was only 25 miles long and a few miles wide, and had just been occupied by Egyptian forces.

In total, an estimated 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes and became refugees as a result of the 1948–49 war; It is believed that about 200,000 people crowded this small coastal path.

Ayesh says: “We had pieces of wood that we propped up against the walls of one of the buildings to provide a shelter for them.”

Later, they moved to one of the huge camps established by the United Nations.

Today, Ayesh, 89, is once again living in a tent in Al-Mawasi near Khan Yunis.

In May last year, seven months into the two-year war between Israel and Hamas, Ayesh was forced to leave his home in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip after an evacuation order from the Israeli army.

The four-storey house, divided into several apartments, which he shared with his children and their families, was destroyed by what is believed to have been Israeli tank fire.

Now the house is a small white canvas tent, only a few meters wide.

Other family members live in nearby tents. They all had to cook food over an open fire. With no running water, they wash themselves using bottled water, which is scarce and therefore expensive.

“We’re back to where we started, back to the tents, and we still don’t know how long we’ll be here,” he says, sitting on a plastic chair on the bare sand outside his tent, while clothes are dried on a clothesline nearby.

A walking frame was placed next to him and he moved with difficulty. But he still speaks the clear, melodious Arabic of someone who studied literature and read the Qur’an daily as the imam of a local mosque.

“After we left Barbara and lived in a tent, we eventually succeeded in building a house. But now the situation is more than just a disaster. I don’t know what the future holds, and whether we will be able to rebuild our house again.”

“And in the end, I just want to go back to Barbara, with my whole extended family, and taste the fruits I remember from there again.”

On October 9, Israel and Hamas agreed to the first phase of a ceasefire agreement and the release of the hostages. The rest of the 20 hostages held by Hamas were returned to Israel, and Israel released nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees and prisoners.

But despite the widespread jubilation over the ceasefire, Ayesh is not optimistic about Gaza’s long-term prospects.

“I hope that peace will spread and that it will be calm,” he says. “But I think the Israelis will do whatever they want.”

Under the first phase of the ceasefire agreement, Israel will retain control over more than half of the Gaza Strip, including Rafah.

One of the questions Ayesh, his family, and all Gazans are pondering is whether their homeland will be successfully rebuilt.

Back in 1948, the Egyptian army was one of five Arab armies that invaded British-controlled territory in Mandatory Palestine the day after the creation of a Jewish state, Israel. But they quickly withdrew from Barbara in defeat, prompting Ayesh to decide to flee.

Ayesh became a teacher when he was 19, earning a degree in arts from Cairo under a scholarship program.

He says that the best moment in his life was when he married his wife, Khadija. Together they had 18 children. This, according to a newspaper article that once appeared, is a record – the largest number of children with the same mother and father in any Palestinian family.

Today, he has 79 grandchildren, two of whom were born in the past few months.

The family moved from their first tent to a simple three-room concrete house with an asbestos roof in the refugee camp, which they later expanded to nine rooms – thanks in part to the wages they were earning in Israel.

When the border between Israel and Gaza opened, Ayesh’s eldest son, Ahmed, was one of many Palestinians who took advantage of it, working in an Israeli restaurant during his vacation, while studying medicine in Egypt.

“During that period, in Israel, people were paid very well,” he says. “This is the period of time when the Palestinians made most of their money.”

All but one of Ayesh’s children have university degrees. They became engineers, nurses and teachers. Many of them moved abroad. Five of them are in the Gulf countries, and Ahmed, a spinal cord injury specialist, now lives in London. Many other Gazan families are similarly scattered.

Younes’ family, like many Gazans, wanted nothing to do with politics. Ayesh became the imam of the Rafah Mosque – and a local chief (or mukhtar) responsible for settling disputes, just as his uncle had been years earlier in the village of Berbera.

He was not appointed by the government – but he says that Hamas and the Fatah political movement, the dominant party in the Palestinian Authority, respect him.

But that did not save the family from tragedy during the street battles in 2007, when Fatah and Hamas fought for control of the Strip. Ayesh’s daughter, Fadwa, was killed in an exchange of gunfire while she was sitting in the car.

The rest of the family survived the wars between Hamas and Israel in 2008, 2012 and 2014 – as well as the devastating war sparked by Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Then came the evacuation order by the Israeli army, which said it was carrying out operations against Hamas in the area, forcing them to leave their home in Rafah and spend more than a year living in makeshift tents.

Ayesh’s life has come full circle since 1948. But his greatest desire is to go back in time even further, to return to the village, now in Israel, that he last saw when he was 12 – even though it no longer exists.

Aside from clothes, cooking utensils and a few other necessities, the only possessions he carries with him in his tent are the titles to his ancestral land in Barbara.

Ideas are now turning towards the reconstruction of Gaza.

But Ayesh believes the extent of the damage – to infrastructure, schools and health services – is so great that it cannot be fully repaired, even with the help of the international community.

“I don’t think Gaza has any future,” he says.

He believes his grandchildren could play a role in the reconstruction of Gaza if the ceasefire is fully implemented, but he does not believe they will be able to find jobs in the Strip like the ones they have or could get abroad.

His son Haritha, an Arabic language graduate who has four daughters and a son, also lives in a tent. “This war has destroyed an entire generation.

“We are unable to understand it,” he says.

“We used to hear from our fathers and grandfathers about the 1948 war and how difficult displacement was, but there is no comparison between 1948 and what happened in this war.

“We hope that our children will have a role in rebuilding, but as Palestinians, do we have the capacity on our own to rebuild schools? Will donor countries play a role in that?”

“My daughter went through two years of war without education, and two years before that, schools were closed due to Covid,” he continues. “I used to work in a clothing store, but it was destroyed.

“We don’t know how things will develop or how we will have a source of income. There are a lot of questions that we don’t have answers to. We simply don’t know what the future holds.”

Nizar, one of Ayesh’s sons, a trained nurse who lives in a nearby tent, agrees. He believes that Gaza’s problems are so great that the younger generation in the family will not be able to play a major role, despite their high level of education.

“The situation is unbearable,” he says. “We hope that life will return to how it was before the war. But the devastation is enormous – complete destruction of buildings and infrastructure, psychological devastation within society, and the destruction of universities.”

Meanwhile, in London, Aish’s eldest son, Ahmed, reflects on how it took the family more than 30 years to build their former home into what it eventually became – money saved over the years expanding it, he explains.

“Do I have another 30 years to work and try to help and support my family? This is really how it is all the time – every 10 to 15 years, people lose everything and go back to square one.”

However, he still dreams of living in Rafah again when he retires. “My brothers in the Gulf bought land in Rafah so they can come back and settle as well. My son and my nephews and nieces want to come back.”

He adds silently: “I am naturally very optimistic, because I know how determined our people in Gaza are. Trust me, they will come back and start rebuilding their lives again.”

“Always hope for the new generation to rebuild.”

Image source: AFP via Getty Images

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