Defiant Gazans reject Trump’s resettlement plan after enduring 15 months of conflict
Malak A Tantesh in Gaza and Emma Graham-Harrison in Jerusalem
Saaed Salem’s eyes filled with tears as he surveyed the remains of his north Gaza neighbourhood on a freezing February morning. He was resting in a chair that had somehow survived the war, surrounded by grandchildren and rubble, his hope for the future and the ruins of his past.
His family had lost one home in 1948, when they fled Hirbiya village, now the site of Zikim kibbutz inside Israel, to escape shelling and reports of atrocities by Israeli forces.
“We locked our house, took the key, and walked toward Gaza, believing we’d return in a few days,” said Salem, who was then five. Waiting at the end of an exhausting trek was a new reality of tents and refugee camps and permanent exile in the north of the Gaza strip.
“When the truth became clear, that we had abandoned our homes and others had taken them, we wished a thousand times that we had stayed and faced death instead. The regret never left us.” He was one of about 700,000 Palestinians forced from their homes in the “Nakba”, or catastrophe, during the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel.
So when Israeli troops moved into Gaza in October 2023, more than seven decades later, Salem and his family defied orders for civilians to evacuate to the south of the strip. “We had sworn not to make that mistake again,” he said.
They stayed in north Gaza during the war, with about 400,000 others, even as a blockade within a blockade meant the north got even less aid than the south. A global watchdog warned of impending famine there last year.
“We endured famine, thirst, bombings, fear, everything. We lived among corpses, under ruins, eating food that wasn’t fit for animals. But we never left northern Gaza,” he said. “Each time the Israeli army ordered an evacuation before a ground invasion, I moved only to a nearby neighbourhood. And as soon as the invasion ended, I was the first to return.”
Barely a week after Salem got back, Donald Trump announced he wanted the US to “own” Gaza and resettle its Palestinian residents elsewhere, describing the enclave as an “unlucky place” that should be rebuilt as a “Riviera of the Middle East”.
His proposal sparked international outrage, a warning against ethnic cleansing from the UN secretary general, António Guterres, and disbelief among the people of Gaza, who somehow clung on in their homes over 15 months of war.
Salem lost more than 90 friends and relatives early in the war when an airstrike on his brother’s house killed everyone who had taken refuge there. He knows the dangers of staying in Gaza, particularly if a ceasefire doesn’t hold, but nothing could tempt or frighten him away now.
“We will not leave. We will not repeat the Nakba. We will not abandon Gaza as we abandoned Hirbiya. This time, we stay, no matter the cost.”
Israel launched its war on Gaza after Hamas launched cross-border attacks on 7 October 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking a further 251 hostage.
In the 15 months that followed, more than 48,000 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks, including more than 13,000 children, and more than 111,000 injured, according to health authorities in the strip.
Nine out of 10 homes were damaged or destroyed, while over 90% of Gazans were displaced and permanently hungry. Hospitals were repeatedly attacked, crippling the healthcare system, and there was little access to clean water and sanitation.
One of Mazouza Abu Hindi’s sons was among the dead, after he was killed trying to find food and firewood for his family. The other son has vanished into Israeli detention. Her home was among the buildings levelled by Israeli attacks.
For now, she shares a burned-out school classroom with three daughters, with tattered cloth stretched over the empty window frames in a vain attempt to keep the rain and wind off the mattresses where her grandchildren sleep. It is their tenth shelter since the war began, and at 60 Abu Hindi looks so thin and fragile it seems almost impossible she survived the deprivations of the war.
The family fled back and forth for 15 months across the north trying to escape Israeli offensives as food dwindled. “We lived like animals. We ate poultry and rabbit feed,” she says.
Possessions and money can be replaced but who can compensate for the souls we have lost?