Where can we escape, when every corner is pervaded by death?
My family and I look into each other’s eyes. We don’t say a word, but our anguished faces are all asking the same question: Do we flee to the south, where bombardment and killing never cease — where death only comes slower? Or do we remain in Gaza City Governorate, just before the Netzarim checkpoint, which has also become home to everyone from Gaza’s north — more than 1 million people — only to be erased quickly, because the occupation has already decided to wipe it out completely?
The choice seems to be between how quickly we may die.
The occupation has devastated Gaza’s northern area — Jabalia, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia — and its eastern frontiers in Zeitoun and Shuja’iyya, by land and air, leaving behind a trail of blood, destruction and unimaginable suffering. Today, these areas lie 90% destroyed, flattened to the ground, utterly uninhabitable — no buildings standing, no shelter, no life. Entire neighbourhoods were erased as if they had never existed. This total destruction is precisely what Israel today threatens in Gaza City Governorate — to turn it into a mirror image of the north and east, despite the destruction already present, leaving it as lifeless as those areas have become.
Between 2023 and 2024, Israel launched three brutal ground invasions into Gaza City Governorate, with tanks rolling through the streets, crushing everything in their path. Tel al-Hawa, Al-Rimal and Al-Sabra bore the heaviest blows, with nearly 70% of homes destroyed and countless lives torn apart. Entire streets were reduced to rubble, and the air was thick with smoke, dust and the stench of death.
The most merciless of these attacks came in March 2024, during the sacred month of Ramadan. Al-Rimal was placed under a suffocating siege for nearly 20 days. During that period, we could not even drink safe water. We could not contemplate moving or even looking out from our windows. My family and I endured a real famine, facing death by starvation during those 20 grueling days. Al-Shifa Hospital was completely destroyed, leaving behind total ruin, while surrounding neighbourhoods were shattered and residents trapped under relentless bombardment from tanks and airstrikes. Everything that moved in the streets — whether human or animal — was targeted.
I lived through those cursed days. I witnessed the full reality of an Israeli ground invasion: tanks patrolling day and night without pause, their engines roaring like beasts, the streets trembling under their weight. Yet the cruelty did not end with their withdrawal from any area. Once Israeli forces moved a safe distance away from a neighbourhood, they obliterated it entirely from the air, erasing every home, every life — which is what happened to Palestine Square in Al-Rimal. Nothing was left behind.
This month — on August 10, 2025 — the occupation began demanding that the residents of Gaza City Governorate prepare for displacement — including from Al-Rimal neighbourhood, where I reside. This governorate is one of the largest in Gaza, home to more than 1 million people.
Is the plan, after seizing this vast governorate, to take control of the south, gather all of us in Rafah, and forcibly displace us from Gaza entirely?
Days after the occupation’s announcement, my father began reaching out to people in the south, searching desperately for any place where we could seek refuge. The southern Gaza Strip holds nearly a million people, yet everyone told us there is no place capable of sheltering us. Many southern areas are already in ruins, like Khan Younis, the largest governorate in the south. There was nowhere for us to go.
But even if we could leave, I could never forget what we endured at the start of the war. In the first week, the occupation ordered us to move south, claiming it was safe. Our actual displacement occurred on October 13, 2023. Just three hours after arriving in Khan Younis, in the south of the Gaza Strip — an area the where the occupation ordered us to go, claiming it was safe — a neighbouring house was targeted in an airstrike, severely injuring my brother Mohammed in the head. By God’s grace, he survived, but the experience traumatised my family.
Ten days later, on October 23, 2023, we returned to northern Gaza, where the nightmare intensified. There was no place for safety or rest. The destruction was immense, the bombing relentless, and famine had already begun to take hold with a brutal grip.
Now, as the occupation presses us once again to flee south, we face a terrifying dilemma: How can we trust that the south is safe, after nearly losing my brother Mohammed there? We know that any misstep could revive the same nightmare, and that our lives, and the lives of our loved ones, could hang by a thread.
How could my family, which endured more than a year and a half of unimaginable suffering in northern Gaza, surviving the deadliest horrors — ground invasions, manufactured famine, relentless airstrikes, all from Israel — ever leave our city now? Starvation began ravaging northern Gaza in the third month of the war, yet no one knew the extent of our suffering because communications and the internet were cut off, leaving us invisible for three long months.
Now I can understand the pain of the people of northern Gaza who returned home during the 60-day truce. For them, going back north was like a dream realised after unbearable hardship. How could they even consider leaving it all again for the south?
“What do you think about going south? Everyone is advising us to,” my father asked his colleague, Abu Moayad Al-Ramlawi. Just days earlier, the Al-Tuffah neighborhood had received a warning to flee — and then was completely wiped out. My brother-in-law’s wife lost her brothers simply because they refused to flee.
Abu Moayad replied, “All I have is a tent. Nothing else. I will carry this tent anywhere in the south. Death will find me there too, but I’d rather die among people than alone here.”
My father then asked my uncle about leaving. He replied firmly: “I will stay in my home. If death wants me, it will find me — north or south.”
Desperate, my father reached out to his cousin’s daughter in the south, seeking a place to stay. She apologised: “There is nothing here but a tent, if you want it.”
And so, my family is torn, trapped in uncertainty. The coming winter looms — should we shiver in a tent, exposed to bitter cold? This war drags on endlessly, and no one else besides Palestinians seems to care how long it will last. Stay in the north and suffer, or flee south and suffer all the same. Either way, north or south, our torment is inevitable.
Tensions have escalated sharply over the past few days. The occupation has begun besieging the residents of Sabra, located near the borders of Gaza City Governorate. Anxiety and fear hang heavy over the population. On August 16, tanks drew dangerously close to the Al-Rimal neighborhood, signaling an imminent threat.
Two days later, the situation appeared to shift slightly. Reports indicate that Israel and Hamas have resumed negotiations. Analysts warn that a full occupation of Gaza City Governorate, due to its vast size, could take the entirety of 2026 to complete.
We fear that these negotiations may prove futile, leaving us displaced and forced out of Gaza — reliving the tragedy Palestinians endured during the Nakba of 1948. Many never returned to their homes, even to this day.
And yet, we ask ourselves: if we die while staying in these homes, who then will be left behind?
[Reprinted from Truthout. Dalia Abu Ramadan is a Palestinian storyteller and aspiring graduate of the Islamic University of Gaza, sharing powerful narratives that reflect the strength, resilience, and challenges of life in Gaza.]