RAFAH: At age 89, Palestinian Liga Jabr remembers how conflict uprooted her family when she was a child. Now, 75 years later, she says the brutality raging in Gaza is even worse.

“This war is harder than any of the displacements” brought by previous conflicts, Jabr said in Rafah refugee camp, on the besieged Gaza Strip’s southern border with Egypt.

Staying with relatives after her home in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah was hit by a strike, Jabr is among an estimated 1.9 million Palestinians forced from their homes since crisis erupted on Oct 7 in the Hamas-ruled territory. Sitting by a small wooden table in a house crowded with family members, she said she has felt fear like never before as the crisis entered its 100th day.

“To be honest... I’m afraid,” she said. “I have never seen a war like this one. This war is disgraceful.” The violence has spurred concerns that Israel is trying to expel Palestinians, but Israeli officials deny this.

That scenario evokes dark historical memories of what the Arab world calls the “Nakba” or catastrophe — the mass displacement of Palestinians during the war that coincided with Israel’s creation in 1948.

The majority of Gaza’s 2.4 million inhabitants are descendents of some of the 760,000 Palestinians driven out during that war. Some, like Jabr, have now lived through both conflicts.

‘Destroying entire houses’

In 1948 Israeli soldiers “did not kill us in the Nakba”, she said, recalling how her family left on foot from the Palestinian village of Julis, now in southern Israel, just over 10 kilometres north of the Gaza Strip.

“Now the Israelis are hitting people from the air and destroying entire houses,” Jabr added as drones buzzed outside. She lost about a dozen relatives when her house in Deir el-Balah was “demolished” in an air strike, she said.

Rayqa Abu Aweideh, a relative of Jabr who like her had to leave her home in what is now southern Israel in 1948, said the current war is “harder and crueller”.

Seventy-five years after fleeing Al-Majdal with her family and two cows, and eventually settling in southern Gaza’s Khan Yunis, Abu Aweideh was displaced again, taking shelter at her daughter’s home in Rafah.

Born in 1935, Abu Aweideh said the current unrest has extinguished any hope of ever returning to her hometown, and that now she wouldn’t want to flee Gaza. “Even if they tell me, ‘take all the money in the world’, I will never leave for Sinai or anywhere else,” she said, referring to the Egyptian peninsula bordering the Palestinian territory. “I want to stay here even if we die.”

Always ‘afraid’

Juma Abu Qamar, 80, said he wanted to return to the Palestinian village of Yibna where he was born, now in central Israel, but admitted he didn’t believe it would ever happen. “We had a big house with a fig tree,” he recalled.

During the 1948 war, “we didn’t see the Jewish (soldiers). We walked along the shore until we reached Gaza”.

Published in Dawn, January 15th, 2024