‘No Place Left To Go’

“There’s no place left for us to go,” said Malek, a Palestinian father of two in his mid-30s who was displaced to the Mawasi area of Khan Younis after Israel resumed its carpet-bombing campaign in Gaza in mid-March. “Now the occupation army has dropped leaflets ordering people to evacuate almost every place in Gaza. They’re telling us to evacuate everywhere.” 

“So, I know that my family and I will have to move again not before long,” Malek surmised. 

Malek spends his time in a tent encampment where he and his family have stayed for months now. Originally from Beit Lahia in north Gaza, Malek’s family has been displaced seven times since October 2023.

“Displacement has been our constant reality for almost two years,” Malek told Mondoweiss. “My wife and I had an apartment in a residential building in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City, which we had paid for through hard work, and we visited my parents’ house in Beit Lahia regularly — until we were forced to evacuate from there along hundreds of thousands to the south.”

Since the resumption of the Israeli assault on Gaza, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has said that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is now “the worst it has been” since the war began 18 months ago.

Israel not only resumed airstrikes across the Strip at the same rate as the days before the ceasefire entered into force, but has also sealed it off through a complete blockade of humanitarian aid, closing all crossing points into Gaza and provoking the return of famine conditions, a critical shortage of medicine, fuel and skyrocketing prices.

“It has now been a month and a half since any supplies were last allowed through the crossings into Gaza — by far the longest such halt to date,” OCHA said

According to the U.N., some 400,000 Palestinians have been displaced in Gaza since the resumption of the Israeli war on March 18. Most of these Palestinians, like Malek, have already been displaced multiple times since October 2023.

“We stayed for some months in Deir al-Balah, and then the occupation ordered displaced people to evacuate,” Malek said, explaining that Deir al-Balah was one of the few places in Gaza that was not extensively invaded before the ceasefire. “We were forced to flee to Rafah, then to Khan Younis City, then to the Khan Younis coastline. It was the first time we had to stay in a tent instead of under a concrete roof. It was there that my pregnant wife gave birth to our son. Then bombings forced us to the inner parts of Mawasi, and then, within Mawasi, we were forced to move twice,” he explained.

“Today, our residential building has been reduced to rubble, and in the place of my parents’ house, there is a 9-meter-deep crater made by an Israeli bomb,” he exclaimed. “And the only home my family and I now have is the makeshift tent that I thought I wouldn’t have to carry around anymore.”

“But this time is different,” Malek said. “It feels closer.”

“This time, the occupation is accelerating the destruction of Rafah, which is very close to Mawasi, with very heavy weapons, and we hear explosions all the way from Mawasi day and night.”

“Sometimes the reverberations of the explosions are felt for two and a half minutes, and every time my wife and I have to spend half an hour calming the children, who begin to shake and cry in fear,” Malek said.

Children are traumatized

The return of the war has taken its toll on children’s psychology. The number of children killed by the Israeli war has reached 15,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry’s official numbers. UNICEF has called the assault on Gaza “a war against children,” but for those who have survived, the conditions of displacement and life under the renewed war have been impacting them in new and long-lasting ways.

According to a study by the War Child organization, 73% of surveyed children in Gaza showed aggressive behavior, 79% said they had nightmares, 87% expressed severe fear, and 96% expressed the feeling that death was imminent.

“My daughter, who is 3 years old, has become much more aware than she is supposed to be at her age,” said Malek. “She now asks questions about the progress of the ceasefire talks, about the location of each bombing and about the number of people killed,” he said. “I had told her that the war had ended and that we are safe now, but it all crumbled the night our tent encampment was first bombed after the resumption of the war. All that I had told her went away.”

“Bombs began to fall a few hundred meters from our tent at 2 a.m., so we woke up in a panic,” Malek recalled. “My wife and I grabbed our daughter and our 1-year-old son and ran out of the tent, running among the crowds who were equally panicked, not knowing where to go.” 

“My daughter saw people bleeding, some of them killed,” he went on. “She heard the explosions and smelled the smoke and saw her little brother in panic. All of the things we had been trying to make her overcome since the ceasefire had come back at the same time.”

Blockade, prices and hunger

But the impact of the renewed war extends beyond the moments of bombardment. Through all the details of daily life, Palestinians struggle to survive, especially due to Israel’s renewed blockade of the strip and its restriction on the entry of humanitarian aid.

“We had some weeks of calm when food and other goods entered the Strip, and we had some hope that the war had probably ended,” Malek said. “The life conditions never really improved, but the daily struggle to find food and medicine was eased slightly after the ceasefire and the flow of humanitarian aid and goods. Now things are worse than they were before.”

“Water, which is the most essential thing to life, is very difficult to find on a daily basis,” Malek said. “Some days I have to ride three kilometers by bicycle to reach a clean water reserve and get 40 liters of water,” he said.

Right after the resumption of the war on March 18, Israeli warplanes bombed and destroyed the only desalination plant in north Gaza, located in the al-Tufah district in Gaza City. Ten days prior, Israel’s energy minister Eli Cohen announced cutting Israel’s provision of electricity to the Gaza Strip, affecting many water wells.

At the same time, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported that the increase in prices of goods in Gaza in the past six months had reached 283%.

“We can only cook on a wood fire, but one kilogram of wood now costs 10 shekels, and food itself is harder to find every day, and therefore more expensive when found. To make a meal for three or four people, without meat or chicken, can cost up to $100,” Malek said.

“One packet of ground coffee of 250 grams costs 80 shekels now, if one is lucky enough to find it and afford it after having bought water and firewood. A cup of coffee, which cost 2 to 3 shekels before the war, now costs 12 shekels. Cash is even more rare, and more expensive to find,” he said.

“Some big merchants who have capital outside of Gaza take advantage of the lack of cash in the Strip, due to the blockade, and manipulate the rates of money transfer, causing the price of receiving money altogether to increase for everyone,” Malek said. “The rate is currently at 35%, which means that if somebody sends me $100, I have to give up $35 of it to receive the rest in cash, and use it to get food in the market,” he said.

‘How cheap our lives have become’

While the world has become accustomed to flashpoint moments in the news relating to Gaza, the moments in between see a “never-ending hell,” as Malek describes it, for 2 million people in Gaza, half of whom are children. “We’re in extreme survival mode,” he said.

“Every day we are forced to find new ways to survive in a situation where the only thing that has become cheaper is human life,” Malek continued. “You understand how cheap our lives have become when you remember that everything we’ve been forced to live through is man-made? That it could stop right now? And yet it continues!”