In January, families from northern Gaza — among the areas most devastated by months of Israeli bombardment — were allowed to return to their neighbourhoods for the first time.

In places like Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Gaza City, people picked their way through crushed concrete and twisted metal.

Homes, reduced to rubble, the UN has stated 92 percent have been destroyed. Water and electricity networks are shattered, and schools and clinics are no longer functioning.

Yet, despite the carnage, thousands returned to their homes. The ruins, at least, were theirs.

“It felt like returning from exile,” one resident said at the time. “Even from death itself.” Mothers searched the debris for photographs and clothing, and children traced paths through collapsed alleys they knew by heart. For a brief moment, the return was its own form of survival.

But this fragile reprieve lasted just six months.

On August 7, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a significant escalation in Israel's military objectives. After a meeting of Israel's State Security Cabinet, Netanyahu declared that Israel would establish “full security control” over Gaza City, a plan that included displacing its population to designated “humanitarian zones” in the south.

The announcement, swiftly condemned by the UN and human rights groups, was seen by many Palestinians as the prelude to mass expulsion.

For those who had only just returned to their shattered homes in the north, the declaration was another blow — a reminder that their presence in Gaza City remained precarious, and that displacement might return at any moment.

Five displacements, one destroyed home

Mohammad Awad, 38, lives in Tal el-Hawa in northern Gaza. His home and neighbourhood were destroyed in the January attacks, part of Israel’s military destruction of northern Gaza, which left tens of thousands homeless.

Rebuilding has been impossible: water, electricity, and medical services remain largely cut off, and humanitarian aid is severely restricted. 

Awad sits in the single remaining room amid the rubble of his family home. He has been displaced five times across the enclave. When he speaks, his words break like new debris.

"Every time we were displaced, I said to myself: this is the last time. But displacement here is like a chronic illness - it comes back just when you think you're cured."

He no longer knows how to prepare for another flight. There is no fuel, no vehicles, not even the strength to carry what little he has left: a few blankets, a few pillows, and the lives of his children, who are now more afraid to walk than to fly.

When asked if he will leave Gaza this time, he pauses for a long time before answering: "Leaving Gaza would be a betrayal of my father, who is buried here. But staying is also a threat to my children. Which should I choose? To be honest, I haven't decided yet.”

The nights give him no rest. Will he again flee on foot? How will he carry his family? How can he convince his children that the South is not another grave?

Awad’s fear is grounded in real danger.

Israel’s threatened transfer of nearly 900,000 people from northern Gaza to the south would push families into areas like Rafah and Khan Younis, already devastated in earlier offensives.

With infrastructure in ruins, aid agencies warn of unbearable overcrowding, collapsing sanitation, and worsening food shortages that have left tens of thousands malnourished.

For him, the threat is not a passing news story - it is a wound in the mind. "They want us to get used to the idea that displacement is normal. But nothing is normal. Every time we are uprooted, something is broken that never heals."

As Awad grapples with the impossible choice between staying and fleeing, other Palestinians face similar dilemmas, each compounded by past loss and the ongoing threat of further destruction.

A land destroyed

Amina Al-Hawajri, 32, is a mother of five living in Darag, northern Gaza. She stayed behind during previous displacements to bear witness to the destruction of her neighbourhood, which has suffered intense Israeli bombardment. The surrounding areas, including Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun, saw tens of thousands displaced, with buildings flattened.

When asked why she stayed, she replies sharply: "Because expulsion is another death. I chose one death."

Now, after the statements of Netanyahu and his ministers, she finds herself surrounded by the same questions. Should she leave, and if so, where?

"All of Gaza is destroyed," she says. "More than seventy percent of the buildings are gone. The streets are obliterated and ruined. What's left to destroy? There is nothing left but the Palestinian human being, and they want to uproot us every moment."

Al-Hawajri sees no logic in the expulsion. Her children sleep amid shattered glass and memories of explosions, but she insists they will stay.

"I will not leave. I will not repeat the scene of women carrying the remains of their furniture on their backs. I will not offer my children another image of defeat."

But when asked if she is afraid, her voice softens: "I am not afraid for myself. I am afraid that my children will grow up without a city, without a home, without a homeland”, she admits, capturing the emotional weight of survival amid obliteration.

Al-Hawajri’s experience is echoed across northern Gaza, where families face extreme malnutrition, starvation, and restricted access to humanitarian aid, particularly after Israel blocked the entry of aid supplies in March.

"I am a mother of five, sleeping with them amidst ruined walls, feeding them fear instead of food. Hunger has hollowed out our bones, our bodies have become fragile.”

While Al-Hawajri witnesses the erasure of her city from within, others have been displaced into camps that bear historic echoes of past tragedies, linking present fears to the collective memory of 1948.

A bereaved father in a tent

Khalil Abdelhadi, 45, lives in a tent in Al-Shati camp, pitched over the ruins of his former home.

Al-Shati was established in 1948 to house Palestinians displaced during the Nakba, and has since remained one of Gaza’s most densely populated areas.

For decades, it has endured siege, overcrowding, and repeated bombardments—making it a stark symbol of the unresolved trauma of displacement. Today, little of the camp remains, its neighbourhoods pummeled into rubble by Israeli air strikes.

During the first mass evacuation in late 2024, Abdelhadi fled Al-Shati with his family after being ordered south on foot, along with thousands of others moving under bombardment.

On Al-Rashid Street, west of Gaza City, his son was killed in an Israeli air strike. “I left him there. I could not carry him. I could not bury him. The bombing rained down like hellfire. We ran. My son stopped running with us.” When he tells the story, his voice no longer resembles that of a living person.

Since that moment, Abdelhadi says he has lived “with only a third of a heart.” Now, as new threats of forced displacement spread, the trauma resurfaces with greater force.

Will he be displaced again? Abdelhadi shakes his head: "I was displaced once, and I lost my son. What more can I lose? Displacement is death. Staying is death. But at least if I stay, I die on my land.”

Al-Shati itself stands as a reminder of the Nakba; families who fled there in 1948 sought refuge only to face repeated cycles of destruction and displacement across generations.

Today, the same patterns of bombardment, forced relocation, and humanitarian crisis resurface, showing how history is painfully repeating itself.

Adding to this is engineered starvation, with over 320,000 children, the entire population under five in Gaza, at risk of acute malnutrition. Humanitarian aid entering Gaza is barely a trickle of what a population of over two million people needs. Just to cover basic humanitarian food and nutrition assistance needs in Gaza, more than 62,000 tons of life-saving aid is required every month.

Weighed down by hunger himself, Abdelhadi doubts his own family would be physically able to make the twenty-kilometre journey if expelled.

He explains: "Hunger has exhausted us all”.

As Abdelhadi and others grapple with immediate survival, the broader question looms: the threat of large-scale displacement is a potential violation of international law and a humanitarian catastrophe.

Forced displacement

The destruction across Gaza is not random; it is part of a calculated strategy that mirrors historical patterns. The repeated cycles of displacement are tightly linked to both immediate Israeli military offensives and long-term demographic engineering.

Awad says, "If all of Gaza turns to ash, it means that we have lost our memory. There will be no street left to remember, no place to revive in our stories. The escalation of the war will be a bell for departure. I fear that forced displacement will begin immediately.”

Legal experts warn that large-scale forced displacement could violate international humanitarian law. “The increasing issuance of Israeli evacuation orders in Gaza is leading to the forcible transfer of Palestinians, which may amount to a violation of international humanitarian law“, notes one UN report.

Laws aside, Palestinians have discovered that displacement is not just a movement from north to south. It is a passage from one fragile life to another. A journey from death to death.

History repeats itself here, but with greater audacity: an occupation called "full security control", displacement called "humanitarian measures", death called "an unfortunate mistake".

People know that this is just a rewriting of the Nakba, but with twenty-first-century tools: airplanes instead of guns, government data instead of paper leaflets. The essence remains the same: uprooting Palestinians from their land, erasing memory, and turning life into a cycle of fear and survival.

Disclaimer: None of the people interviewed for this piece agreed to be photographed, not wanting to be represented by images of their hardship.