Three Stories of Displacement From Israel’s War on Gaza
Gaza, Palestine — “We sleep and wake up in the street living in the same harsh conditions,” said Doaa Abu Jama, a Gazan woman sleeping on the street with her family. In the midst of genocidal acts perpetrated by Israel against the entire population of the Gaza Strip after October 2023, three Palestinian women forcibly displaced with nothing but the clothes on their backs shared their stories with Unicorn Riot.
Continually evacuating from place to place, Mayada Saber Abu Anza cares for her five kids alone after she lost her entire family to Israeli forces. Her brothers and extended relatives were killed and her husband and father are being held captive.
At the time of the interview, Mayada had been displaced over seven times after evacuating from Azzanah to al-Mawasi to elsewhere before finding shelter under the stairs of a repeatedly bombed-out UNWRA school in Gaza City’s Beit Al-Daraj neighborhood.
She said had to clear out the rubble from under the stairs and called the space “her house.” She said that she has to stay awake at night to protect her children from rats, mice, insects, and stray cats.
Standing on a street in Gaza City, Doaa Abu Jama said she and her family “left with nothing, walking without knowing where to go.” She said they “thought it was a normal situation but it turned into an emergency” and they “were forced to leave.”
As of late summer 2024, she had been displaced 13 times after evacuating from a small village east of Khan Younis.
Similarly sleeping on the street, an elder Umm Ahmed also shared her respective story of being forcibly displaced by a hurried evacuation as tanks attacked and bombs from the Israeli military rained down on her neighborhood.
“Women abandoned everything,” she said, “they were busy baking the bread and take care of their kids” until bombing came from all directions with planes, helicopters, tanks and ground troops. She said she got separated from her children, husband, and neighbors while fleeing and as of the time of the interview, “we don’t know anything about each other.”
Israel’s 15-month-long war on Gaza forcibly displaced around 90% of the Palestinian population and killed at least 61,000 — an updated number from the Gaza Government Media Office that includes over ten-thousand missing whom are now presumed dead — in the besieged Mediterranean enclave.
For more from Palestine, click on image below.
Follow us on X (aka Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads, BlueSky and Patreon.
Please consider a tax-deductible donation to help sustain our horizontally-organized, non-profit media organization:
