It is 6:20 P.M. on Friday, October 27th. My children are playing in the house where we have taken refuge, in the Jabalia refugee camp. “I’m getting hungry,” my wife, Maram, whispers to me. “Let’s eat some snacks.” We sneak into the next room and sit on the stairs, where our children are less likely to see us. We miss these private moments, when we could spend time together and joke.
Outside, a red light flashes in the dark sky, like lightning; it is followed not by rain but by rubble that pounds the roofs of houses around us. Maram stops eating. When I stand to peer outside, the air pressure pushes me back.
I walk over to my father, who is anxiously holding up a radio to his ear. “Al Jazeera says that they have lost connection with their correspondents in Gaza,” he says. “There is no signal.”
I take my phone out of my pocket. For the first time since the escalation, three weeks ago, there is no Internet, and neither of my SIM cards has any service. My older sister, Aya, who has five children, asks us to warn her when we see bombs fall, so she can cover her ears before the blast reaches us. “My ears are aching,” she says.
I remember that my iPhone has an Emergency SOS feature for when there is no signal. But, when I pull it up, it tells me, “You’re in a region where the satellite connection demo is not supported.” I find another option called crash detection—“If you’re in a car crash, iPhone can automatically call emergency services.” I think that Apple should create a feature called bomb detection—but the people who could help us do not live in Gaza.
More bombs are falling. My nephews and nieces try to warn their Aunt Aya before the house shakes. It is a long night.
The next morning, I ask my mother, who’s sitting on the mattress where she slept, where my father is. She tells me that he has biked home to Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza, to collect some olive oil, olives, and sugar for us. I have made the same journey before. After I visited on October 12th, to fetch some bread, I wrote for this magazine about my fear that our ceiling would fall in during an air strike.
My mother does not like it when we visit home. In one of her dreams, our house was destroyed, and she was collecting rubble. But my father couldn’t not go back, because he had to feed his birds and rabbits.
“I was going to ask him to fetch the charger for my electric razor,” I say. The battery died while I was shaving my son’s hair. I try to text my father, but then I remember that there is no signal or Internet.
I have my morning tea. My mother reads from the Holy Quran. My two sisters comb their children’s hair. Maram fills water bottles in the kitchen. I try to keep everyone quiet, so as not to wake those who are still sleeping.
At about 8:30 A.M., my younger brother, Hamza, who is staying with his wife’s family in the area, steps inside. His eyes, behind his glasses, look concerned. “Where is Father?” he asks.
“He’s just returned on his bike to our home,” I tell him.
“I went an hour ago,” Hamza tells us. With his hands, he tells us that the house is gone.
From a photo that Hamza has taken, I can see part of the first floor, where my parents lived. There is nothing to indicate that the house had four floors.
I go to my mother and siblings. In the quietest voice I can manage, I tell them about the destruction of our house. Somehow, my mother is calm. “Thank God that none of us got hurt,” she says.
My brother-in-law Ahmad suggests that we set out on our bikes to find my father. After only three hundred metres, we see him, his head tilted downward while he pedals.
My father tells me later that debris covered every inch of the street that led to our house. He did not feed his fifteen ducks, thirty hens, five rabbits, and six pigeons. “Maybe some are alive and stuck under the rubble,” he says. But, after he saw the bombed house and heard the frightening whirring of drones, he headed back to the camp.
When we get “home,” we all sit on the floor. It’s not until later that I start to realize: I lost not only my house and its rooms but also my new clothes and shoes and watches. My books, too.
I remember how slowly I built my personal library, and how long it took for friends to mail books to Gaza. When I came back from the U.S. in February, 2021, I stuffed a hundred and twenty books into my family’s suitcases; I had to discard some of my shoes and clothes to make space. When I came back in May, 2023, I carried an extra suitcase for about seventy books. Some were signed by friends—Katha Pollitt, Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Hoffman, Ammiel Alcalay, Jonathan Dee. The airport officer thought that my passport was expired because he read it backward, from left to right. On the journey from Cairo, I sprained my shoulder while carrying my heavy suitcases.
Less than two months ago, I was in Philadelphia for a literary festival, and was planning to visit San Francisco. But I had a feeling that the situation in Gaza was precarious, and I decided to shorten my trip. Before I flew home, I asked my friend Hasan to drive down from Syracuse, so that he could give me thirty-five books that I had left with him. They included the five heavy volumes of “The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry.”
Because it is hard to believe what we have lost, I decide to return to our home in Beit Lahia and see with my eyes what has happened to it. As I approach the wrecked area of my house, I stop in a panic—not only because of the scene but also because of the sounds of drones and jet planes and bombs falling on nearby neighborhoods.
I hope to at least find a copy of my own poetry book, maybe near my neighbor’s olive tree, but there is nothing but debris. Nothing but the smell of explosions.
Now I sit in my temporary house in the Jabalia camp, waiting for a ceasefire. I feel like I am in a cage. I’m being killed every day with my people. The only two things I can do are panic and breathe. There is no hope here.
I plan to go back through the wreckage for my books and rescue whatever I can. I will not put them on bookshelves this time. I just want to make sure that the pages are intact. My brother Hamza will do the same thing with his Arabic grammar and literature books, which he has spent ten years collecting. Both of us pray that in the coming days, it will not rain and soak their pages.
On October 31st, we are at home when three big explosions shake us. The windows break. Rubble and dust fly into the living room. We all rush into the two bedrooms, looking at the ceiling. A bomb has fallen seventy metres away. It wipes out a whole neighborhood.
Later, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces appears on CNN and says that the attack on Jabalia was aimed at a Hamas leader. When the anchor asks him about the civilians that the I.D.F. has killed, the spokesperson says, “This is the tragedy of war.”
The next day, I am typing part of this essay into my phone when I feel another explosion very close by. I rush about two hundred metres to the site, which is not far from a school run by the United Nations. I see wounded women and children bleeding from their faces and chests. A big fire is burning. I find a pharmacy, check my body for injuries, and try to help those around me. We survive, again.
Recently, my wife dreamed that she was collecting frozen meat. In her dream, she was saying, “This is my son’s arm. This is my daughter’s leg.”
If not for the war, I would be playing soccer with my friends twice a week. I would be watching movies with my wife. I would be reading the books on my shelves. I would be taking my kids to the playground, and to the beach. I would be riding my bike with my son, Yazzan, on the beach road. But now there are no books and no shelves and no beach road. ♦