The exhaustion of Ahmed al-Ghufairi cannot be disguised in any way. He speaks calmly, but between answers he can’t help but rub his eyes – perhaps to stop tears or because he doesn’t manage to fall asleep until six in the morning –, sigh or lose his gaze. For six months this Palestinian from Gaza has been suffering in the distance from the Israeli invasion of his home. And four years ago, specifically, on December 8, he learned that a bombardment in the Zeitun neighborhood killed 103 relatives, including his wife, three young daughters, his mother and four brothers.
When the horror happened, he and his father were about 130 km from the strip, in Umm al-Fahm, an Arab town in Israel where he went on weekends to supplement his job as a construction worker in Tel-Aviv . After the October 7 attacks, they had been blocked there, after the Netanyahu government revoked their permits and those of 18,000 other Gazans in retaliation.
As he did every day, Ahmed spoke on the phone with his partner until he heard an explosion near the house, the warning shot before an air attack: “Then – he remembers – my wife went to me say ‘forgive me, Ahmed’. It was the last moment I heard her.” A few days later, still immersed in disbelief and shock, father and son decided to leave the room that gave them shelter for two months and cross the occupied West Bank to find a way to return to Gaza. But that path took them to a reception center in Jericho, where they have been since then together with about 200 ex-workers from Gaza.
They are part of the 5,000 who, it is estimated, half a year later, are still stranded at different points on the Palestinian map, since more than 10,000 have already been returned by Israel to the strip, after being arrested and questioned, in which they report ill-treatment physical and psychological.
In the shelter in Jericho, organized in an academy of the security forces of the Palestinian Authority, the men spend their days feeling powerless because they cannot help their families, who tell them about hunger and exorbitant prices of basic products. While waiting for a safe way back to Gaza, they cannot work (some risk leaving to find informal work) or go to the city center for fear of arrest. The only exit is to a nearby mosque, where they go along a dirt road between crops, which is connected to the center by a broken thread.
The rest of the time, they wander around the rooms – large spaces where they sleep on bunks or with mattresses on the floor – or in the courtyards; they wash the clothes, which hang on the bars of the windows or on the fence of the property; they dialogue interspersing news from Gaza with memories of their life there.
Three old men, in the shade of a tree, are a sample of the group. Jamal from Jabalia says he lost family members in December. Mustafa, from Khan Iunis, explains that they have run out of money. And Salih, from Rafah, laments because “there is no food in Gaza”.
At best, if the lockdowns allow, some talk to family members. Muhammad al-Oush is the only one who smiles when he sees that, for the first time in three months, his brother manages to connect him via video call with his daughters, displaced together with their mother in the tent camps in southern Gaza.
“I’m very happy to see them,” he says as he shows them the dogs in the complex. A joy that mixes with sadness when one of the daughters asks him “When will we return home, to the north?”. A house that is no longer there because it was destroyed by a bombing. “Those of us here get to know each other, we live in the same circumstances, our destinies are intertwined. Many have lost their loved ones and we support each other”, confesses Muhammad.
This sense of community prevails in the face of abandonment. La Vanguardia coincides with the visit of Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which has decided to establish a weekly clinic like those in Jenin and Tulkarem, where there are 500 other Gazans. Samuel Johann, project coordinator, explains that they will organize “group sessions and consultations to deal with stress and resilience”. “We support them in the mental consequences and the difficulty of the treatments – he continues -. We hope to relieve them. It’s difficult, because they come from Gaza.”
A relief that for Ahmed will only come when he can go to the strip to say goodbye to his family and bury his mother and brother, whose bodies are still under the rubble. He also wants to place offerings on the graves of his daughters Tala and Lana, who were born on the same day, March 3, and would have been 10 and 5 years old. To the older one, he wants to return a drawing with hearts; and, in the second, leave him a coin like the one he always asked for. “It is the only reason why I will return to Gaza,” he says. But I will not be able to live there again, it would be very difficult for me, there are many memories that are like a scar”.
