House keys have symbolic meaning for Gaza families who have been repeatedly displaced by the war

MUWASI, Gaza Strip (AP) — Hassan Nofal carries the keys to two houses on his keychain. One of them is the key to his grandparents’ house in what is now southern Israel. His family was expelled from the house by Israeli forces in 1948 and was never able to return.

The other leads to Nofal’s house in the north of the Gaza Strip, from which he had to flee last year after Israel launched its bombing and offensive campaign in the area.

In the nearly nine months since then, Nofal and his family have been displaced four times, driven across Gaza to escape the onslaught. Nofal said he is determined to ensure his key does not become a keepsake like his grandparents’.

“If my house key becomes just a memory and I move on, then I don’t want to live anymore,” he said. “I have to return to my house… I want to stay in Gaza and settle with my children in our house in Gaza.”

Israel has said Palestinians will eventually be allowed to return to their homes in the Gaza Strip, but it is unclear when. Many homes have been destroyed or badly damaged.

The Israeli assault on Gaza, triggered by Hamas’ October 7 attack on southern Israel, displaced some 1.9 million of the pre-war population of 2.3 million Palestinians from their homes. Most of them have been repeatedly displaced since then, fleeing repeatedly across the Gaza Strip to escape a series of ground offensives.

Each time required a painful move to a new location and a series of overcrowded temporary shelters – whether in extended family homes, UN schools or tent camps. Along the way, families struggled to stay together and hold on to a few possessions. In each new location, they had to find new sources of food, water and medical care.

The latest exodus has seen people fleeing the eastern districts of the southern city of Khan Younis after Israel ordered an evacuation there. Almost the entire population of Gaza is now crammed into an Israeli-declared “humanitarian security zone” that stretches for about 60 square kilometers along the Mediterranean coast, with a barren rural area called Muwasi in the middle.

Despite its name, Israel has carried out deadly airstrikes in the “safe zone.” Conditions are squalid in the sprawling camps of ramshackle tents that the displaced people have erected – mostly made of plastic sheeting and blankets suspended from sticks. With no sanitation facilities, families live next to open sewage ponds and have little access to drinking water or humanitarian aid.

Nofal, a 53-year-old Palestinian Authority worker, said he, his wife and six children fled their home in the northern Jabaliya refugee camp in October. They first went to the central town of Deir al-Balah, then to Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah. They were forced to flee again when Israel launched an offensive there in May and advanced on Khan Younis. Last week they fled Khan Younis to a tent in Muwasi.

“When you move to a new place, it’s hard to deal with vermin and living on sandy soil,” he said. “We get sick because it gets hot during the day and a little cold at night.”

But the first step of leaving his home in Jabaliya was the hardest, he says. He held his key ring with the keys to his house and that of his grandparents, which are located in the former Palestinian village of Hulayqat, just outside the present-day Gaza Strip. There is nothing left of Huylaqat – the forerunner of the Israeli military captured the village and the surrounding villages in early 1948 and expelled the inhabitants.

Such old keys are valuable possessions for the descendants of Palestinians who were displaced or fled during the conflict over the establishment of the State of Israel. Many in Gaza fear that, like in the last war, they will not be allowed to return to their homes after this one.

Ola Nassar also keeps the keys to her house in Beit Lahiya in the north of the Gaza Strip. For her, they symbolize “security, stability, freedom. They are like my identity.”

Her family had just moved into the house with the newly renovated kitchen when the Gaza war began. Now it is badly burned, along with clothes and decorations that she had to leave behind when she fled in October. She is missing a valuable set of plates that was a gift from her brother and was smashed in an airstrike.

She, her husband and their three children were displaced seven times during the war, fleeing from town to town. From Rafah they came to their current accommodation – a tent in Muwasi.

“Every displacement was hard because it takes time to come to terms with it. And until we come to terms with it, we have to move again,” she says. Because of the skyrocketing prices, it was often difficult to find food. “There were days when we only had one meal,” she says.

As they stormed out of their homes, many left almost everything behind, taking only the bare necessities. Nour Mahdi said she only took her house keys, the title deed of her apartment as proof of ownership, and a photo album of her seven children. The album was later ruined in the rain, so she used it as kindling for a fire for cooking.

“It was very hard because it was very important to me as it contained memories of my children,” she said.

Omar Fayad has kept a photo of his daughter and one of himself when he was 10 years old. But after moving several times – “each place was worse than the other” – he wishes he had never left home. “It would have been better for me if I had stayed in my house there and died,” said the 57-year-old, who longs for his home in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza.

Hamas militants who attacked southern Israel on October 7 killed around 1,200 people and took 250 hostage. Israel’s response has cost more than 38,000 Palestinian lives, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and fighters in its count.

Muhammed al-Ashqar, also from Beit Lahiya, said he had been displaced six times along with his four daughters, four sons and his grandchildren.

The family was separated on the way. Al-Ashqar’s brother stayed in the north because his wife was pregnant and not healthy enough to move. Shortly afterwards, a shrapnel piece from an airstrike hit her in the head and killed her, but the baby was saved.

One of al-Ashqar’s sons went to Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza to live in his wife’s house. The son was cooking in the kitchen one day when an airstrike hit the house, killing his wife and four of his children in the living room. The son’s leg had to be amputated and two of his surviving children now live with al-Ashqar. Another son was killed in a separate attack in Nuseirat.

It is not the possessions that the 63-year-old is missing.

“There is no reason to cry after leaving everything behind and seeing all these dead and all this suffering.”

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Khaled reported from Cairo. Associated Press correspondent Wafaa Shurafa in Muwasi, Gaza Strip, contributed to this report.

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