Before the war in Gaza, thirty-nine-year-old Sahar’s life in al-Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza City followed a steady rhythm. She lived alongside her parents and her sisters’ families. Mornings were quiet. Evenings ended predictably. She spent her days teaching English. The walls of their home felt solid and permanent—something that could not be taken away.
Then, one night in October 2023, the life Sahar’s family knew broke apart. The family woke to what sounded like thunder, but was actually the sound of explosions so loud they couldn’t think. The family of seventeen ran without packing anything. No documents. No winter clothes. No final look at the rooms that held their memories.
“We thought we would be gone for a day or two,” Sahar says. “We thought we would come back.” But they never did. Within days, their home was destroyed by Israeli bombing, prompting the family to begin a southward journey to Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city that borders Egypt.
They first found refuge in al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza City. At the hospital-turned-shelter, their lives shrank to a narrow strip of floor in a crowded hallway. They slept in the hospital’s corridors. The air smelled of antiseptic; the atmosphere was filled with fear. Their time was spent waiting—for the bathroom, for bread, for silence, and for a reprieve from the unceasing bombing.
Sahar’s mother, who is elderly and living with a leg amputated below the knee, had nowhere to rest at al-Shifa Hospital, as her wheelchair barely fit in the corridor. Sahar’s father, worn down by age and stress, woke before dawn each day to stand in endless lines for food. Outside, the bombing never stopped.
When Israeli tanks drew close to the hospital a few weeks later, they fled again, this time on foot. Alongside Sahar’s mother, who was in a wheelchair, the group walked more than twelve miles south to the al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, surrounded the entire time by other displaced families, including children, elderly people, and the injured. Sahar, who had sustained a minor injury before the war, walked on crutches. Every step caused her body pain.
After arriving in central Gaza’s al-Bureij in late November, they slept on the floor of a library, lined up between books. Winter had arrived, but they only had thin summer clothes to wear. Cold settled deep into their bones.
In search of better, more safe conditions, the family moved again to the nearby Nuseirat refugee camp, which was filled with overcrowded homes and schools packed beyond capacity. They stayed briefly with relatives, then in shelters. They no longer had any privacy, and their dignity diminished.
“I can’t say which moment was the hardest,” Sahar says. “Each one felt heavier than the last.”
In Nuseirat, the sound of distant Israeli engines reminded them that they were never far from danger. In al-Sawariha, a friend opened their home to the family—brief kindness in a long chain of loss.
Eventually, they reached Rafah. There was no shelter of any kind; seventeen bodies with nowhere to go. Everywhere they went in Rafah, they encountered Israeli bombing and aggression. They were forced to move repeatedly, from one school to another, from one place to the next. Local authorities and NGOs promised them help, which never came.
“Everyone abandoned us,” Sahar says.
Later, they walked again, this time north to Khan Yunis, where they stayed for months in a remote area known as Bir 19, or the “desert of Khan Yunis”—a barren hill with no water, shelter, markets, or any services at all. Every day, they had to walk more than half a mile just to find water for drinking and cleaning. They had no containers to store it, so men and women alike had to repeat the journey daily. Food came only from charitable kitchens, when it came at all.
Sahar’s family wasn’t alone—all the displaced families around them shared the same story of displacement, abandonment, fear, and lack of basic necessities.
In February 2025, they returned briefly to Gaza City and stayed in what remained of their home for nine months. It was damaged, but still standing. Then, in September, Israel forced the people of Gaza City to evacuate for a second time, promising to turn the city into ashes. This time, Israeli attacks were more violent, more deadly. Their entire neighborhood in al-Shati was marked for destruction.
Now, just a few months later, their home is gone completely. The family currently lives in a makeshift tent in Khan Yunis—less than sixty-five square feet for seventeen people, including young children and a mother with a permanent disability. It barely even qualifies as a tent, so much as scraps of plastic sheeting tied together. Life inside the tent strips away dignity.
Sahar spends her days gathering firewood, cooking over open flames, and washing clothes by hand, a painful, exhausting process that leaves her back aching. Sand fills and covers everything, including their mattresses, clothes, and food.
“In a tent,” she says, “you cannot live a clean life.”
In early December 2025, during Gaza’s winter season, heavy rain began to fall. One day, the family stood all day holding down the plastic sheets to keep their tent from collapsing. They kept the children in the center, using their own bodies as shields against the wind and rain. They did not sleep that night. The cold was fierce. They had no blankets.
Sahar’s mother, who also lives with diabetes and vascular disease, struggles to access medicine to treat chronic illness. Some treatments that she depended on before the war are unavailable. Others take months to arrive, if they arrive at all.
“Can you imagine waiting two months for life-saving medication?” Sahar says.
All Sahar wants, she says, is to return to her old home—the house where she grew up, where every memory lives.
“My mother was born there,” she says. “She married there. She had her children there.”
She remembers the happy moments of home every day. Losing the house feels like losing an entire lifetime in one instant. Sometimes she cries.
“But we remain,” she says. “We are still standing on our land.”
Her message to the world is clear: “We will not forgive this betrayal. You see Gaza. You hear its pain. And still nothing changes. How many innocent children must die? Every free human being has a responsibility to confront injustice. Everyone must ask themselves: Which side of history are you on?”