Letter from Mideast: Gaza -- Nowhere to hide

Gaza, my homeland, has become an open wound -- bleeding, screaming, unanswered.

Two years into the latest conflict, I have become used to images of destruction and desperation, but some keep gnawing at my heart: starving people scrambling for meager food, crying mothers holding emaciated children in their arms, and fleeing men clutching fragments of their homes like shattered heirlooms, Xinhua reported.

Since October 2023, Israel's bombs have not ceased. They have claimed more than 66,000 lives and injured some 169,000 more. Most recently, since Sept. 16, a full-scale Israeli offensive has plunged Gaza City, home to about 1 million people, into a new depth of horror. Neighborhoods have been smashed into dust, and hundreds of thousands of families, carrying whatever belongings they can, have been forced onto the al-Rashid Street -- the bruised artery running through a dying land.

They are heading south, not toward safety, but away from certain death. Yet what awaits them, I gather, may be just another kind of death, still unknown.

This time feels different. This displacement feels eternal: Spreading in the air are whispers of a future Gaza where Israeli settlements rise from our rubble and so-called corridors cut through our land, as if Gaza were a lamb to the slaughter.

I, too, had to choose. On the fourth day of the war, I sent my aging mother, my sisters-in-law and the children south, where it was supposed to be safer. My two brothers, my sister and I stayed. We clung to our home in Tal al-Hawa, a city in western Gaza.

That night, more than a thousand Israeli bombs turned the sky red. Buildings fell like bodies. I sat in the roar, certain it was the end.

By morning, our neighborhood had been erased, and families were scavenging through the rubble for the remains of photos or small items to remind them of their homes. I saw a man carrying a piece of his door as if it were a treasure.

That very same day, the rest of us decided to flee south too, leaving our entire lives behind. Despite currently dwelling in Cairo, my heart remains in Gaza, and that night remains etched in my memory.

This February, when I saw news about families returning to Gaza amid a temporary ceasefire, I thought I had finally seen light at the end of the tunnel. Watching them living in tents, hearts still beating with hope, I told myself then: One day, my fellow Gazans will rebuild what was taken from us, and perhaps I, too, will join them in the reconstruction, brick by brick.

Sadly, that moment of hope proved fleeting, as it had many times before. After about seven months, the same streets became the backdrop for a new exodus under the same intense bombardment, but with faces even more exhausted and distraught.

The coastal al-Rashid Street was packed tighter than ever. Cars sagged under the weight of roofs, doors and other cargoes their owners desperately clung to, while many other people trudged barefoot in the scorching sun. Children lay face down in the dirt, too tired to cry. Their mothers wailed, trying to comfort them with a sip of water or a piece of dry bread.

A man was pushing a metal cart carrying his elderly, immobile mother. Tears welling up in his eyes, he kept repeating: "Where do we take her? There's nowhere to hide."

My friend Samer Abu Samra has sent his family south and stayed behind himself. "I couldn't let my home disappear without saying goodbye. I stay here to guard what remains of the destroyed walls and the pictures still hanging on the walls," he told me when I called him a few days ago.

"I sleep under a half-lost roof, and I hear the planes flying overhead, but I don't want to be like those who left and didn't know if they could return," he said, with a noticeable quaver in his voice. 

He faltered, then added, "Sometimes I feel like I'm going crazy, but the idea that Gaza will be emptied of its people scares me more than death itself."

Still, he knew he, too, would soon be forced onto that al-Rashid Street.

Umm Ahmed, now in Khan Younis with her five children, told me about her flight in a voice thick with tears: "We left in the middle of the night. I carried nothing but clothes for the children and a box of medicine for my sick son."

"The road was hell, and people were running as if they were escaping the end of the world. I didn't look back because I knew my heart would break," she said, her voice breaking as she noted her husband was still there. "I don't know if I'll ever see him again."

Now living in a tent, she found life hardly got any better: "There's no clean water, not enough food. My little son screams from hunger at night, and I only have a piece of dry bread to put in his hand. All I want is for them to sleep one night without rockets, and wake up to drink cold water and feel alive."

Two years on, after so many and still increasing broken faces, broken homes and broken hearts, I have realized that Gaza has already become a permanent stage for displacement: its sky always burning, its earth always scorching, its people always fleeing, and its future always fading.

For those still trekking down the al-Rashid Street, there is no escape -- only an endless flight from one death toward another.

Of course, there are still people trying to keep hope alive. Return, return, return -- they whisper the word to themselves like a prayer, and they teach it to their children as if it were the last thread connecting them to life.

But I can't muster such optimism. Hope is too elusive in a land where death has become routine. Every time the bombs fall, I feel Gaza losing another piece of its soul. And I don't know when -- and whether -- that broken soul could ever heal again.