Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip – Inshirah Darabeh has just one thought on her mind as she prepares to leave the home of her in-laws near Deir el-Balah and travel to her home in Gaza City: finding the body of her daughter, Maram, and giving her a dignified burial.
“I am not going back to find my home, all I want is to find her grave and put her name on a tombstone,” she says. Inshirah, 55, will walk more than 10km (6 miles) through rubble and bomb craters to reach her home. She thinks it will take at least three hours.
Inshirah is overwhelmed with mixed feelings of dread, pain and relief, she says, as she finally leaves the place she has sheltered in for the past year from Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, which has left more than 46,000 Palestinians dead and many thousands more unaccounted for and assumed dead under the rubble. Most of those killed have been women and children.
In accordance with the terms of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas which came into effect last Sunday, on day seven of the ceasefire – Saturday this week – internally displaced Palestinians will be allowed to return without inspection by Israeli soldiers to their homes in the north, which has been under a deadly military siege since October 2024.
In November 2023, when Israeli ground troops entered the besieged Strip following the first month of aerial bombardment, Gaza was split in two. This military partition – known as the Netzarim Corridor – stretches across Gaza, from east to west, cutting off Gaza City and the towns of Jabalia, Beit Hanoon and Beit Lahiya in north Gaza from Khan Younis and Rafah in the south.
Cut off completely
Since the ground invasion, no one has been able to cross back to the north. According to UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, between 65,000 and 75,000 people are believed to have remained in North Gaza governorate – less than 20 percent of the pre-war population there – before the intensification of military operations and the siege.
People will be allowed to return on foot via al-Rashid Street, a waterfront street west of Gaza City which links the south of Gaza to the north. The passage of vehicles, however, has been a point of contention. According to a report by United States website Axios, Hamas had refused to agree to the placement of Israeli checkpoints along the Netzarim Corridor, a key road south of Gaza City.
The compromise, says the report, was for US private security contractors to operate in Gaza as part of a multinational consortium established under the ceasefire deal with the backing of its American, Egyptian and Qatari brokers “to oversee, manage and secure” a vehicle checkpoint along the main Salah al-Din Street.
Following 15 months of near-incessant Israeli bombing which has left 90 percent of Gaza’s population internally displaced and more than 80 percent of buildings in ruins, survivors like Inshirah are not ready to give up.
She remembers the fateful Sunday in late October 2023, when she received a call at 4am, as if it were yesterday.
“My husband and I were forced to leave our home in the north in the first few weeks of the war,” Inshirah tells Al Jazeera. “We took my eldest granddaughter with us, but my three daughters and their husbands stayed behind.”
On October 27, communications were cut off completely for more than 36 hours.
“I didn’t know that Maram was martyred until the day after, when my eldest daughter called me as soon as communications were restored.”
Maram was 35. Her four-month-old daughter was killed first by the same Israeli air raid on Gaza City in late October that took Maram’s life soon after.
‘All I want is to pitch my tent over the rubble of my home’
Inshirah’s story is similar to that of thousands of women who have experienced the unspeakable pain of losing children, husbands, fathers and brothers while carrying the burden of caring for those who have survived.
Olfat Abdrabboh, 25, used to have three children. Now she only has two: a daughter, Alma, 6, and a toddler, Mohammed, 18 months old.
“Salah, my four-year-old, died in my arms in Deir el-Balah where we were displaced a year ago,” Olfat tells Al Jazeera. Olfat’s father had taken him to Friday prayers when Israel air-raided the mosque on October 27, 2023. “My father lost his legs,” she says.
She took her son home with her from Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, but he had internal bleeding and died the following day.
Olfat’s husband had at first stayed behind at their home in Beit Lahiya, north of Jabalia in northern Gaza, so she took the difficult decision to send his body back with her uncles so her husband could bury him near their home. Now, at last, she can go there herself – and plans to travel on Sunday.
“I haven’t seen my own child’s grave,” she says. “My heart is split in two: One half is with my martyred child and the remains of my home, and the other half is with my two children who have been deprived of their father for months.
“All I want to do,” says Olfat, “is pitch my tent over the rubble of my home and reunite my family.”
‘The torture of living in a tent’
While not all are grieving a dead child or separated by long distances from husbands, women like Zulfa Abushanab feel trapped and anxious, nonetheless.
The 28-year-old mother of two daughters, Salma, 5, and Sara, 10, was displaced in late October 2023 from Gaza’s at-Twam area, northwest of Gaza City, to Nuseirat and then to Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, where she is staying at a friend’s apartment along with other refugees. It has sparsely furnished bedrooms with just mattresses on the floor – one room for the men and the other for the women and children.
“My two daughters and I share a small room with two other women and their four children,” Zulfa tells Al Jazeera, “while my husband is in a separate room. We have been near yet far from each other for over a year; we can’t sit or eat together.”
Even though she has heard from people still in the north that her home was shelled by an Israeli tank, she says she is counting the hours until her small family can return to their destroyed home and once again live as a normal family.
The lines on Hayam Khalaf’s face betray the trauma of the multiple displacements she has endured.
Along with her four children – Ahmed, 12, Dima, 8, Saad, 6, and the youngest, Sila, 5 – Hayam, 33, has been forced to move seven times across Gaza – to Khan Younis, Rafah, Nuseirat, and finally now to a tent in Deir el-Balah – since the start of the war in October 2023.
Her ageing face is a testament to the anxiety of living precariously in makeshift tents for more than a year, battling the elements and struggling to feed her family.
“I can’t describe the torture of living in a tent, full of sand, insects and disease,” says Hayam, who is preparing to return to her parents’ home in Tal al-Hawa, south of Gaza City. They were able to evacuate early on so her mother, a cancer patient, could seek urgent medical treatment in Egypt.
“I’ll sleep on the cold, hard tiles if I must and I’ll take nothing back that will remind me of this cursed tent,” she says.
‘I will bury my son with my own hands’
For Jamalat Wadi – known as Um Mohammed – a 62-year-old mother of eight, the scars of this war will never go away no matter where she travels.
Originally from Jabalia refugee camp in the north, Um Mohammed was displaced to Deir-el-Balah in October 2023 with her husband and seven daughters. Her only son, Mohammed, 25, chose to stay back in Jabalia to protect their home.
“He came to see us during the temporary ceasefire from November 24 to 30, 2023, but then insisted on returning to the north despite warnings that he was risking his life,” Um Mohammed tells Al Jazeera.
She now believes her son is dead and until now has been waiting every day at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the hope that his body will be returned there.
“A few days after he left, a friend of his, a freed prisoner who returned through the Netzarim checkpoint, told me that Mohammed and four other young men were shot at the checkpoint, and that his body was left on the road.”
It’s been a whole year since then, says Um Mohammed – a year of working out how to find out what’s left of her son. She is confident she will be able to identify his body if she finds it.
“I will find him,” she says. “Part of his leg was amputated when he was injured at the beginning of the war. I will walk back the same path; I will find him and I will bury him with my own hands.
“For me, returning to North Gaza only means finding Mohammed’s body.”
This article has been published in collaboration with Egab
