I have always felt a longing for looking, for gazing straight into the moments encased by the walls of my ancestors’ homes the moment they were built. To look at them from afar, to listen to their sounds, to live through the sweet and sour moments, those suffused with fear and pain. To see my grandfather returning from work, welcomed by my grandmother, father, aunts, and uncles. I see them gathered around a simple dining table, splitting a loaf of bread baked from shafts of earthly wheat, kneaded by my grandmother over the clay oven — the tandoor. They assemble to eat dinner off of one, plentiful plate.

I like the idea that the home embraces not only those inhabiting it. It holds the laughter and tears of my ancestors. The walls carry their voices. The closets distinguish their smells. The doors await their clenched hands. The tables are elated at their gathering. The beds prepare to receive their bodies with a mixture of familiarity, love, warmth, and delight contained within the word home.

It is quite common for people around the world to express their love for their home and their land. When a Palestinian speaks of such an attachment, they speak of a submerged presence, seeped in power, steadfastness, and love that can neither be stripped nor deterred by death. Those who have tried — and there have been many — to erase the identity of the Palestinians, especially their love for their homes and land, haven’t been able to break the bond of attachment cultivated over years. In keeping with long-held customs of inheritance, many families across historic Palestine, and specifically in Gaza, inhabit the homes of their ancestors till this day. Despite their simplicity, these structures stand strong against the weathering of times, sheltering grandchildren atop the spaces of their forebearers. Many old homes feature open spaces, front yards, or small gardens. The oldest may also have a humble basement used to store provisions.

Knowledge of the architecture of homes before the Nakba is bequeathed to me secondhand. My mother would sit me down and narrate these stories whenever she yearned for her mother — my grandmother — whom I’ve only encountered through photos and memories. I learned that my grandmother endured the dual oppression of being a woman and a mother through the Nakba and its wake. Still, she contained enough kindness and generosity to fill the entire universe. My mother told me about the houses that were both big and simple; the unpaved floor covered with a thin layer of cement. The kitchen and bathrooms were separated from the living quarters and the main courtyard. There were rarely any concrete roofs, just sheets of corrugated iron (“Zinko”) as cover. The walls were made of large blocks of mud and ash — construction material that is both thick and heavy — with small seashells thrown into the mix. The various rooms give way to a large basement, accessible through a metal ladder. These spaces mostly stored the provisions. Since the Nakba, the underground shelters provided refuge to everyday people and fugitives seeking safety from the bombs and barrels of the Israelis. These covert spaces allowed for unseen flight towards adjacent agricultural lands, where people would forage food from the trees and subsist for long periods of time in hiding.

My grandfather built his home in 1968 to accommodate a growing family of three sons and three daughters. My father was the youngest of them. The building’s hybrid style featured more urban architectural styles, most notably, a concrete roof. The space was brought together with an open yard where basil, mint, tomatoes, parsley and leafy greens were cultivated. My favorite was the grapevine that provided shelter on the rooftop and copious grapes for the children and neighbors to pick on hot summer days.

Let me tell you a secret: Our greatest fortune is that my father was the youngest of his siblings, so we grew up in our grandparent’s home, forming a bond of continuity with its walls. My father took to renovating the place after his marriage. The home was divided: The garden was turned to a kitchen and bathroom, and two homes were then made to share one entrance. Time passed, my uncle and his family moved away, and the home was left to my father alone. The growing needs of our nuclear family demanded further modifications. Eventually, my eldest brother decided to marry, and his small family moved in, too. That little home embraced both its grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Certainly, our ancestor’s homes can stand for a million years, holding generation after generation, swelling with overwhelming love that welcomes each coming member.

As long as the Palestinians are alive, their history is thriving. The Palestinian is proud of the past, its historical glory, and the land which is an extension of the self. What is a human without identity, without a past, without history! Many in Gaza reject immigration and permanent settlement abroad. Even those who leave to study return to invest in building, developing and advancing their communities.

The Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip have endured a series of assaults by Zionist aggressors since 2008. The onslaughts have led to the destruction of homes, year after year, and following each assault, the Palestinians recreate their homes and their present as an act of refusal — the refusal of destruction and erasure. Over the course of 16 years, there have been homes that have been rebuilt several times, and this sends a message: Home means remaining firmly rooted in the land, refusing to die.

The current war and genocide is the deadliest, most gruesome attack on our lives, homes, livelihoods. When the [Israeli] Occupation Forces announced their intention to clear out the North of the Gaza Strip of its inhabitants, many families sought refuge in shelters in the South. Neither cowardice nor escape, the evacuations testify to the desire to preserve life. No one anticipated how protracted the situation would become. Still, thousands of families remained steadfast in their homes in northern Gaza and Gaza City. My family was among those that remained. Despite the intensified bombing, my father refused to leave the house. Tanks lined up against our home in Shujayya, and we were besieged for five full days in December 2023. My father’s refusal persisted until a harrowing silence overtook the empty neighborhood where we remained alongside only two families. The sound of sniper bullets occupied the soundscape, the visual field became populated with the bodies of martyrs strewn on the street. Those who perished didn’t know that the area had become so dangerous, deadly even, and we heard their last screams which continue to echo in our nightmares till this day.

The warplanes and missiles bombarding homes and mosques in our neighborhood are loud. You cannot imagine the scenes of the siege, between the sounds of bombing that wrench the heart, and the smoke that fills the homes, windows, and doors that explode from the intensity of collision. The scene is closer to fantasy than reality. What can I even say about the nights we endured under siege? They were the most intense. We sealed off the windows with black nylon, as people did during the Nakba, to block off light from the house. We heard the sounds of robots treading outside our home, surveilling the area. My older brother has two young babies. We were scared their cries and sobs would be detected, and we would be bombed. Trying to calm the kids down was a challenge; the sounds of nearby shelling throbbed like piercing rain around us. The grueling days subsided with the withdrawal of the Occupation Forces. We left our home carrying with us whatever we could gather. In that last moment before leaving, my heart ached at the thought that I would never see my home again. I turned on my phone, and roamed around one last time, documenting the details of the space: “This is my room. That’s the kitchen. That’s the corridor …” With my heart aching, I left the home behind to embark on a long journey of displacement that lasted for days. During the ceasefire in January 2025, we returned to the home to find it still standing, albeit partially destroyed. It is still the home that we love, that we will rebuild and reinhabit once more. I cannot describe to you the joy we felt spending Ramadan in our home.

The loss of home may seem trivial in the face of losing one’s family. When I lost my eldest brother in the war, I understood this fundamental truth. Still, the loss of home is an experience that begets its own hardship. Throughout the war, the bombing and systematic destruction of Palestinian homes continues unabated with the psychopathic objective of erasing our people and rendering them mere corpses amidst the rubble. In January 2025, the ceasefire inaugurated a new Land Day and a new chapter of steadfastness. The flood of displaced families returning to the North shocked the world. It even shocked the Occupation Forces.

I walked out of our relatives’ home that day to bear witness to scores of returnees marching onwards, reciting silently in my chest, “Welcome back, oh, you have been missed, oh, how you left us alone in the North!” Their faces bore marks of exhaustion refracted from the earth; in their eyes one could make out the alienation of the universe. Still, the returnees were not strangers. The land remembered them. Its memory stretches back thousands of years. It withstands the occupation’s attempts to displace its offspring, to sever the connection between limb and earth, and to drive away the last child and the last breath. The land has been obliterated to the point that it is difficult to locate one’s home, but still, the memory of the inhabitants persists. There is no scene more beautiful than the returnees marching. Upon arrival back to the North, they set up tents upon the ruins of their homes. It felt as if they sang forcefully: “As long as the land persists, we will, too.”

The soul dies slowly when it departs from its homeland. The idea of the past — its preservation across history — withers away if it were not for the sons and daughters brought up on the love of their land and the rootedness of their identity. Return to the homeland is akin to coming home to a mother’s embrace after an arduous day. It recalls the warmth of the hands that caress a child. What force on earth can convince a young one that his mother’s lap could be easily replaced? The bosom that offers nurture in times of happiness and sadness, in sickness and in health. To the Palestinian, the earth provides a motherly embrace. To die clasping its soil is more honorable than living and thriving in faraway lands.

Ola Al Asi is a Palestinian freelance journalist, writer, storyteller, and lecturer of English language, based in Gaza. This dispatch appears in the eighteenth issue of The New York War Crimes, out July 4, 2025.