I no longer recognize many parts of my homeland. Only my memories of them remain.

By Mosab Abu Toha October 7, 2024

On a summer evening many years ago, my father and I sat on the roof of our family home in Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza, and we talked about my grandfather Hasan. I never met Hasan. He died forty years ago, before my father was married, after a lengthy struggle with diabetes that required him to use a wheelchair. I craved stories about him from my father and his sisters. I wanted to know what Hasan used to drink, eat, watch, and wear. I felt like hearing my family’s memories opened up a room in my mind, where I could stand and paint my own portrait of Hasan.
“Did my grandfather ever travel abroad?” I asked.
“Sure, he visited Lebanon and Jordan,” my father replied. But he could not tell me when, with whom, or for how long. We sat there a while, trying to escape the heat of the house. The electricity was off, and it was getting dark.
Recently, I called my father from Syracuse, New York, where I have taken refuge with my wife and three kids. He continues to live in northern Gaza. He told me that he has been trying to grow vegetables in our neighborhood. “I waited for hours to fill some buckets of water for the plants, but no luck today,” he told me. Then I brought up Hasan. “I know it’s not appropriate to ask this now,” I said. “But do you know if anyone from the family has my grandfather’s passport?”
My father laughed. “How can I know? It was a long time ago.”
I expected that answer, but it made me want to weep. Even before Israel invaded Gaza last year, I could not find my grandfather’s grave. My parents had told me that he was buried in a cemetery in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City. How will I ever find it, now that so many cemeteries have been damaged in the war? No one could even tell me Hasan’s birthday. All I knew was that he was seven years older than his wife, my grandmother Khadra, who was born in 1932. The date of his death, too, was like a math problem. I knew that one of my cousins was born two months later, which suggested that he died on October 30, 1984.
Whenever I visit friends in the United States, I see portraits of parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents on the wall, and my heart stings. Why haven’t I inherited such treasures? Was it because Hasan lived and died in a refugee camp? If he saved the documents and photographs that could answer my questions about him, would they still exist now, after all that Gaza has endured?
When I think of how little I know about my grandfather, I think of my three children, and what I myself can pass down to them. When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, three generations of my family lived together under one roof. Five days later, Israeli forces dropped leaflets that ordered us to evacuate the area. We left everything behind except some clothes and food. On October 14th, after an air strike hit my neighbor’s house, I checked on our home and found broken windows, fallen books, and dust covering every pillow, mattress, and blanket. I tried to clean off the couches. I thought my house, my books, and my writing desk would be there for us when the war ended. I took pictures of the damage so that I would remember.
Two weeks later, our house was destroyed in an Israeli air strike. When I risked returning, days after the bombing, I felt compelled to spend an hour or so digging through the rubble, hoping to salvage some clothes or shoes or blankets. It was autumn, and the ghost of winter was looming. All I saved was a notepad and one copy of my début poetry book.
Only recently did I remember something that I was unable to recover: a photo album that contained photos of me, my siblings, my parents, and my grandparents. As soon as I thought of the album, I texted my brother Hamza. “Can you try and see if you could find the photo album in the ruins of my library room?” I felt embarrassed to ask this of him at a time when he can hardly find food for his family. But those photos were precious to us. They were our way of remembering.
My family in Beit Lahia could not find the album or the remnants of the room it was in. To this day, there is no visible trace of our beds, couches, closets, or even the walls of my bedroom and kitchen. Only our memories of them remain.
I’m a person who loves taking pictures. I feel grateful to have a phone with enough storage to save them. My photos from Gaza show my family in lush green fields, and on the beach at sunset. I have a photo of the clay oven where my mother used to bake bread and sometimes roast chicken. I have a photo of my daughter, Yaffa, throwing flower petals on a peaceful street. I have a photograph from late September, 2023, of my youngest child, Mostafa, wearing a Spider-Man costume and jumping off a bench in my bedroom.
For twenty-three years, I had the same neighbors, the same trees around me. I passed by the same schools, clubs, cafés, and graffiti-covered walls. I bumped into the same teachers, coaches, barbers, and baristas. Before October 7th, people rarely moved away. There was this tender relationship between us and things.
I miss my small neighborhood in Beit Lahia. I miss when my mother-in-law, who lived next door, would make maftoul and send us some. I miss when my three married sisters and their children visited us on weekends, and the eldest, Aya, would call me beforehand to ask me to make tea. My sisters loved my tea, and I enjoyed preparing it for them. I miss bringing the kettle and the cups out to a table under the orange or the guava tree. I miss going with my brother-in-law Ahmad to his cornfields. Around the edges, he planted eggplant, peppers, green beans, cucumbers, and pumpkins for his relatives. I vividly recall the time we had a barbecue there, and Ahmad invited each of us to pick ears of corn and put them directly onto the grill.
Over time, it has become hard for me to recognize the places I knew in Gaza. Since October 7th, whole neighborhoods have been levelled. These days, many streets and lanes cannot be seen under the rubble, and there is too little fuel for bulldozers to clear them. When I look at photos and videos in the news, I can’t tell whether I am seeing the remains of a pharmacy, a restaurant, an ice-cream shop, or a kindergarten. We loved these places. Each one is a loss.
I often think of the places I will not be able to show my children or my grandchildren, the memories I will not be able to share: the kindergarten I attended in Al-Shati refugee camp, the nearby field where I did cartwheels as a kid, the streets in Beit Lahia where I used to ride my bike at sunset. The soccer field where I used to play with my colleagues in the evenings, the hall where I had my wedding party. The mulberry tree where I played marbles with my childhood friends. Some of those friends have been killed.
I also think of the new memories I had hoped to make. Yaffa and her older brother, Yazzan, wanted to learn to swim, something that I never did because of problems with my ear. I wanted them to ride their bikes along the beach on Al-Rashid Street, which had been recently paved with asphalt. I wanted to take Yazzan to soccer practice in the summer. I wanted to introduce my students to the Edward Said Public Library, an English-language library that I founded in Gaza. On Saturday, a fellow-teacher told me that my best student was killed while looking for firewood for his family.
I have always loved a line from “Open the Door, Homer,” a song by Bob Dylan. “Take care of all of your memories,” he sings, “for you cannot relive them.” The words made me want to hang on to my memories, and to make good ones. In the past year, I have lost many of the tangible parts of my memories—the people and places and things that helped me remember. I have struggled to create good memories. In Gaza, every destroyed house becomes a kind of album, filled not with photos but with real people, the dead pressed between its pages.
Last May, I got a call from my friend Basel, a tennis player from my home town. He was living in a tent in Rafah, the city in southern Gaza that became a refuge for displaced Palestinians. Israel was preparing to invade the city, despite objections from the international community. Basel was preparing to move his family yet again. He could hear tanks and gunfire in the distance. He and thousands of others were looking for a ride to Khan Younis.
Basel was in the process of dismantling his family’s tent. I listened as he explained the painful process of building toilets and water faucets nearby. His family had not wanted to live there, but now they did. They had learned to tell the difference between their tent and all the others. They had learned how to get around. They had started to make new memories there. “Now we are leaving this for the unknown,” he said. This year, Gazans have done this again and again.
I thought back to the five weeks I spent in Jabalia refugee camp, shortly after the war began. Back then, it was still possible to find an intact apartment or U.N. school where you could take shelter with your family. After a while, I recalled, I became familiar with new shops and pharmacies, with the cafés where you could access the Internet and charge your phone. I learned new shortcuts and developed a routine. Many of those places are gone now. Still, I can close my eyes and imagine them. I can navigate the alleys of Jabalia in my mind. Just as easily, I can imagine the camp in ruins.
On October 13, 2023, my friend Refaat Alareer posted a poem called “If I Must Die” on Instagram.
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
I saw the poem a few days later. It struck me so powerfully that it kept knocking at the gate of my imagination, and of my fear. Refaat wanted to live. He did not write when I die. Rather, he was communicating that if his death must happen, then everyone who lives after him must live to remember—to tell the story of him, of the murdered, of so many Palestinians.
In early November, while I was trying to escape Gaza with my family, I wrote a poem in response to Refaat. I wrote that if I die, I hope that no rubble, no broken dishes or glasses, will cover my corpse. On December 3rd, I was able to cross into Egypt with my wife and three kids. Days later, an Israeli air strike killed Refaat and many members of his family. I didn’t want to believe it.
On my phone, I have a photo of Refaat from the spring of 2022. He is standing in a green field, wearing a blazer and glasses that make him look like the professor he was. Behind him is a blue sky filled with white clouds. He is holding a large wooden box, which is filled with more strawberries than anyone could eat in one sitting. Refaat loved strawberries. We used to pick them together. That day, Refaat filled two boxes, one for his family and one for his parents. In the photo, he is gingerly taking one out of the box, smiling. ♦
Mosab Abu Toha is a poet from Gaza. He is the author of “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear” and “Forest of Noise.”
More: Gaza War Essay Memories