Haneen Al Ghazali and Nada Thabet Doghmosh both fled Gaza after the war erupted on Oct. 7, 2023. Now that a ceasefire has been declared in the Strip, each has different aspirations for the future.Aly Hazzaa/The Globe and Mail
Thousands of Palestinians are marching northward en masse, mostly on foot, back to what’s left of their homes in Gaza, while those who fled across the border to Egypt have no idea when they will be allowed to go back.
The Rafah crossing on the Egyptian frontier remains closed, meaning the 100,000 or so Palestinians who had left Gaza for safety when the war began in October, 2023, have to stay put.
As Palestinians begin to absorb the scale of the wreckage of their homes, neighbourhoods and towns, and contemplate how they will rebuild their lives, I interviewed two young women from Gaza living in Egypt about their future.
Opinion: A young life in Gaza, shattered
I had met both women in Gaza City in mid-2022, more than a year before the war between Hamas and Israel erupted, when Hamas raids killed 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Since then, Israeli attacks have killed more than 47,000 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. However a January report in the Lancet, a British, peer-reviewed medical journal, stated that the number of deaths is much higher. In the first nine months of the war alone, 64,260 Palestinians died, according to the report.
One of the women, Nada Thabet Doghmosh, is desperate to go back to Gaza City to be with her family. The other, Haneen Al Ghazali, does not want to return, at least not yet, because she thinks she cannot build a life in the rubble. Nada is being led by her heart; Haneen is taking a more pragmatic approach to her future.
Here are their stories.
Nada: ‘I need to return to help Gaza grow from the ashes’
Nada longs to return to Gaza soon, especially following the recent ceasefire between Israel and Palestine.Aly Hazzaa/The Globe and Mail
Nada was 23 when the war started. On the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, she headed toward the beach in Gaza City, where she was an interior design student at Al-Aqsa University, when she heard what she thought was the rumble of thunder. The noise in fact was from the explosions of Hamas rocket attacks on Israel.
At that instant, her life, and the lives of her family – she has seven brothers and sisters – were overturned. They went through hell. Along the way, Nada was the sibling who saved her wounded father’s life in a harrowing journey that led them to an Egyptian hospital.
Nada enjoyed her life in Gaza. She had never left the territory. She loved her extended family – her father, Thabet Doghmosh, 65, has thousands of relatives in Gaza. Nada was making plans for a career that would focus on designing sustainable housing in intensely packed Gazan cities and towns.
Unlike many residents of Gaza City, she and her family remained in their home early in the war as entire neighbourhoods were eradicated in Israeli missile attacks. On Oct. 25, 2023, her best friend, Nesreen Nasr Jarada, was killed. Less than two months later, on Dec. 19, her family’s apartment in a seven-storey building was destroyed and her father’s right leg was severely wounded by missile shrapnel as he rescued neighbours trapped under mounds of concrete. Miraculously, no one else in the family was killed or wounded.
As Thabet’s infection worsened to the point that his leg was at risk of amputation, Nada took it upon herself to save her father. Their 35-day journey south to the Rafah crossing was distressing as cities, villages, roads and hospitals imploded around them. With the help of a GoFundMe campaign organized by two sisters overseas, they bought exit visas and entered Egypt on Feb. 16, 2024. Several surgeries in Egyptian hospitals saved Thabet’s leg.
Nada and Thabet settled in a house owned by the Egyptian family of Thabet’s son-in-law in a village in the Nile Delta. Unable to walk and in pain, Thabet required near full-time care. “Nada was my nurse,” he told me. Against all odds, since her university was levelled, she was able to finish her degree and will graduate in the spring. The surviving university professors put their courses online.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians streamed along the main roads leading north in Gaza on Monday, jubilant to be returning home after months of living in temporary shelter but fearing what might remain of their homes amid the bombed-out ruins. Lucy Fielder has more.
Reuters
Now, all she and her father can think about is returning home. Four of Nada’s brothers, one sister, their children and Thabet’s wife – 13 of them in all – are living in a small garage in Gaza City. They have lost a lot of weight from malnutrition, she says, but are otherwise healthy. Nada says she is fully prepared to live in a tent in the rubble for years if necessary to be with her family and help rebuild Gaza City using her design skills.
“I need to return to help Gaza grow from the ashes,” she says. “My family is there and I want to visit the grave of my best friend.”
Haneen: ‘Our destiny is not under our control’
Haneen dreams of building a new life in Dubai after leaving Gaza. She hopes to care for her 80-year-old father, who lives abroad, by securing a job outside of Gaza.Aly Hazzaa/The Globe and Mail
Haneen was lucky, incredibly so. Three days before the start of the Oct. 7 war, she left for Egypt as a representative of the Palestinian Ministry of Youth and Sports. She and her Egyptian counterparts met for a conference, which included a Nile cruise.
She told me that a weird foreboding told her to go. “My intuition told me something bad was going to happen before too long and my father said the same and that I should go.”
When the war started, she wanted to return immediately to be with her family. “But my father did not want me to go back,” she says. “I was crying on the cruise.”
Trapped in Gaza, her 80-year-old father, a former interior designer, sustained a pelvis injury during the war and cannot walk. He and his wife, Haneen’s mother, who also suffered from lack of medication, live in a tent after having moved for their safety from various camps. An uncle, two cousins and about 30 members of her extended family were killed. Her brother has had some close calls. He “went into diabetic comas several times because there was no food or medicines,” she says.
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Haneen is 36. Before the war, she had a career in sports and was the general-secretary in Gaza City of the Palestine Sailing and Rowing Federation, which was formed in Cairo in 1996 and opened a Gaza branch in 2021.
Haneen found work in Cairo as a market researcher for a Dutch company, Omnivent Techniek, that provides agricultural infrastructure products. But she has no legal residency in Egypt. Her employer has offered her a position in Dubai at the company’s Indian affiliate and she plans to leave Egypt soon.
She, like Nada, feels Gaza is in her blood and soul and wants to return – but not now. She thinks it will take many years, decades even, to rebuild the shattered strip. “I have no home any more in Gaza, so I have no place to stay,” Haneen says. “There are no opportunities for jobs in Gaza at the moment. In the 2014 war, one building near us in Gaza City came down and it took five years to rebuild it. How do you rebuild all of Gaza?”
Still, she says, she will return one day. “Donald Trump wants to push us into Egypt or Jordan, but no one will go,” she says, referring to the U.S. President’s recent suggestion to “clean out” Gaza by removing Palestinians. “We are holding on to the idea of having our own country, but our destiny is not under our control.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include additional information about Palestinian casualty estimates.