The Nassar family managed to assemble a semblance of their home’s old living room. A sofa and some chairs survived, along with a small table they can gather around to eat. The room’s wall had been almost entirely blown away, so they hung sheets over the gaping hole, hiding the mound of wreckage outside.
Buried somewhere under that rubble, Khalid Nassar knows, is the body of his son Mahmoud. It has lain there unretrievable for the past four months since he was killed in an Israeli airstrike.
This has been the struggle for displaced Palestinians returning to their homes in Gaza under the nearly month-old ceasefire: To re-create some bit of normal lives amid the death and destruction left by 16 months of Israeli bombardment and ground offensives against Hamas fighters.
Finding ways to settle in
Coming home after months — or more than a year — of living in tents or other shelters, families have no means to do any serious rebuilding. So they find little ways to settle in.
Apartment buildings that were reduced to hollowed-out skeletons have been draped with colorful bed linens serving as walls — as if the houses have been turned inside-out. Families dig chunks of concrete and mangled metal out of the interior to make them semi-habitable. Rooms look like fragmented movie sets, with furniture arranged in any intact corner, while the remaining walls are shattered.
The Nassars fled their home in Jabaliya refugee camp early last year, moving around northern Gaza. Khalid Nassar's son Mahmoud was killed in October when he tried to go back home to retrieve some clothes in the neighboring building, which they also owned, and a strike hit it, Nassar said. His daughter was also killed in a separate airstrike on her home in Jabaliya, where her body too remains buried under rubble.
The family returned in January, as soon as Israeli troops withdrew from Jabaliya, which had been the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the war in the previous four months.
They found the top floor of their three-story building was wiped away. One of Nassar’s sons settled with his wife and kids on the second floor. The 61-year-old Nassar, his wife Khadra Abu Libda, 59, and the five children of another son, who was imprisoned by Israel, moved into what remains of the ground floor.
Miraculously, their living room furniture remained. Other rooms were trashed, littered with debris. In one room, someone had spray painted “Hamas” on the wall – Nassar said he didn’t know who did it or whether the house was used by fighters during the battles.
For water, they have to walk 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) to wait in line for hours at a well – when the pump there is working. For food, they have collected some humanitarian aid supplies, some bread, and a green called “khobeiza” in Arabic that grows in empty lots.
But the wreckage next door where his son is buried haunts Nassar. “Every minute I think about how to get my son out from under the rubble,” he said. “I can’t describe the torment so long as my son is not properly buried.”
He said he digs every day, but the only tool he has is a shovel, so he can’t lift the large slabs of concrete. “This morning, I was digging and searching, but I found nothing but some papers and clothes,” he said.
After the ceasefire in January, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flooded back to homes across Gaza that they had fled. Not everyone has been able to return. Hanan Okal said her family’s building in Jabaliya was flattened. So they are staying in the nearby school-turned-shelter where they have been taking refuge.
Nearby in Jabaliya, the Odeh family returned to find their building's ground floor gutted. They had to set up a ladder to climb in and out of the second floor, where Yousef and his brother Mohammed Oudeh settled in with their families.
Their parents, Ahmed and Mariam, stay in a tent of wood and plastic sheets outside. The shell of their building does no better than the tent to protect from the cold, they said.
With the surrounding neighborhood flattened, there’s nothing to shield them from the cold February wind. At one point, the wind blew away and tore the sheets they had set up in the holes in the walls. So they scrounged for new sheets and blankets among the rubble of other houses.
Ready for the family's return
Youssef Issa returned to his family home in Jabaliya to prepare it ahead of his parents and siblings, who remain in their shelter in central Gaza.
He found it in relatively good shape. It was partially damaged by nearby collapsed buildings, but apparently, it was used by Israeli troops as a position at some point in the fighting, so it wasn’t bombarded. Issa said he, his cousin and his friends swept out the debris and spent ammunition casings.
Like many houses, his had been scavenged and looted for anything of value. Clothes, blankets and any food left behind was taken. But his flat-screen TV was not touched: Without electricity, it was useless to steal it.
But Issa was able to reassemble an almost cozy-looking sitting room. The family’s plush purple sofa was still intact. He draped thick red fabric over the hole in the wall behind it. And he arranged the cushions on the sofa just right – ready for his family’s return.
