Conflicting emotions during displacement

Today is the 19th of November which marks day 44 of the war. I’d like to express the different conflicting emotions that I’ve been having during all these days since the start of this conflict. When we first had to flee from our home in Gaza City we went to stay at my sister’s house and I didn’t feel so impacted by the displacement because my sister and I are so close and we understand each other so well - we know the things we like and don’t like. I also had my privacy…but now that we’ve all had to flee from Gaza City to Rafah it’s so different. We now feel like refugees as we are living in an environment with different social traditions and we have had to adapt to new customs.

Since the war on Gaza started, we cannot sleep with the doors and windows closed simply because if you do the air pressure from the bombardment will smash the glass and will take the doors out from their place. So we sleep with them all open. Since it’s winter now it’s really cold, especially at night. We are freezing.

Last night I woke up four or five times - each time to the sound of air strikes, and sometimes naval bombings. Every time I wake up it’s terrifying, my heart beats really fast and I feel like my organs are shaking and moving inside my body because there’s a huge air pressure resulting from the strikes. 

Even though it’s winter I don’t have my winter clothes with me as I really didn’t think we’d be gone for this long. Now I have to go and buy some clothes to get ready for winter. But because we have such little water I can’t even shower before wearing the new clothes - that’s IF I get the chance to buy them today.

When I couldn’t sleep last night I kept on thinking, ‘for God’s sake I feel so embarrassed being hosted by a family, as they are having to provide space for me and they are constantly looking after us. I feel so shy from our host family because they don’t let us share in the house chores, like cleaning.’ 

Also at home I used to have a place for my pets. I have three beautiful, lovely cats. At home I would put their food and their litter box on the closed balcony and I’d keep the door open. Over here the balcony is open and I can’t keep the door fully open as it is winter - well I have to keep it half opened and half closed in order for the air strikes not to destroy the room and also in order for the cats to be able to get to their stuff - although I feel very sorry and sad for them that they have to go out to the balcony. Especially tonight, I’ve had to keep their things inside the room because it’s raining.

The best time of year for me used to be during the winter time - when I used to look at the sea when the waves were so high and the sea looked so vast and powerful. I loved looking at it when it was this way. I used to have big windows and I’d put the heater next to me and I’d have a book in my hand - all that doesn’t exist anymore. My house was partially damaged during the 2020 war and so I waited for two years to have that beautiful view of the sea back. I only just started living in it again on the 15th of May this year and it was just after another little war finished in Gaza - a 7 day war. I was so looking forward to the winter to arrive, to have that view again. 

How could someone who’s a complete stranger take over your home and ruin it and destroy and bomb it. Or get into it and live in it. That is what has historically been happening with us as Palestinians. Just the fact that we are being hosted makes me feel like I am sucking our host family’s resources and I’m not feeling comfortable about it. I wish to have a place to rent and go to but there are no places to rent now in Rafah. If I could I would go. The word occupation means much more than taking over a land that belongs to people and their resources. It also means that the occupying forces have no understanding of what being human means.

How could someone on earth do this to other people’s homes - what is their psychological composition? What do they have inside them that is making them do this to a whole population, to a whole people, to take over their homes and do this to them? 

How could the occupying force, Israel, kill children? Supposing Hamas was taking civilians as human shields - although we haven’t actually seen it happening in Gaza but supposing it was true - when you have someone who’s threatening to kill you and is taking someone else as a human shield and you take the decision to kill them both - no one has the right to do that to anyone. 

We wake up in the morning here and we all have our own rituals. I do pray to God, I do speak with God and I do all the things we are supposed to do as Muslims. But how many times have I said ‘shehadeh’ which are the last words a Muslim would want to say before dying - how could someone like me be at the point where I’m saying the ‘shehadeh’ five times in a night? I said it five times last night as there were five points at which I genuinely thought I was going to die - this isn’t the first time this happened and I know it’s not going to be the last.

Most of the people living in this building are women and children. There are a few men as well. We’re around 60 people and we all know each other. We know that we’re all civilians and we have nothing to do with this war that is going on now. But how come people like us are being killed in our homes?! When the war started I was mentally stronger but now I don’t feel the same power or strength. It’s because things are continuing to get worse. Now I wake up with mood swings - sometimes I wake up and I’m extremely sad and angry and I have to hold myself from getting into arguments with people. But there are other times that I wake up happy for no reason. And I know both are not good. Having extreme feelings is not good but I can’t hold it inside me.

We also have a baby staying with us in the same room, with all the other women staying here. When we hear a bombing or airstrike the first thing that my nephew’s grandmother does is just jumping over him and hiding him with her body, just in case, because she prefers to be killed rather than the child. Of course he wakes up and he wants to cry  but we immediately have to shift our feelings and act happy, laughing and smiling and dancing so that he feels nothing of the stress we’re experiencing, hopefully.

When we go shopping I am fed up with the words “I don’t have this product” and I’m speaking about basic products, like tahini or olive oil. There are very few functioning bakeries and you have to stand in long queues to get bread. People start queuing at 4.30am and are often there until 4pm, just waiting for some bread to feed their families. Spending the time looking for basics is just taking up everyone’s time and efforts. I feel so fed up and angry and I’ve had enough of hearing ‘we don’t have this or we have that’. We have children with us who don’t understand why we don’t have certain things. There are basic things that they need. Flour to make bread isn’t even available, although I saw an UNRWA storage house and there were trucks full of packets of flour with police protecting them. We don’t know where that flour goes because there are very few bakeries baking bread and we have to go by taxi to a place far away to reach them.

I’ve started to feel that I’m never going to get to go home. Since day 1 of the war all that I dream about is going back home. It’s been a long time now that I’ve been displaced. I just want to be at home but it’s not possible. And this is really hard. It’s so hard to be hosted by another family - you can’t stay with people forever. And even the prices to rent a place are five times more than usual. A flat which you could rent before for 200 USD is now 1000 USD. Prices across the board are skyrocketing - everything is five times the price it was before the war.

You know for a lot of people, one of the major feelings that we’ve felt during our stay in Rafah is that we don’t want to buy things - we don’t want to buy winter clothing, we don’t want to rent a home, we don'tt want to get anything additional to the stuff we had brought with us from home because we didn’t want this to turn into a similar situation like what happened in 1948. We will not accept this as a permanent situation. I didn’t want to and I still don’t want Rafah to be my home because I live in Gaza City and my home is there in Gaza City. A lot of people feel the same way. One of our friends is living in a shop with his wife and children and he didn’t want to fix the door of the shop because he said that when his grandfather was first living in Gaza as a refugee the first thing he did was to fix the door of the place where he lived. Our friend didn’t want to feel like history was repeating itself.