Jabalia, a vanishing image: Of faces and homes

We met Omar at the Counter Academy for Arab Journalism. On October 7, we were together in Lebanon. We came to know him better over the next 45 days as he worked with us on documenting the eradication of his people and the destruction of his land. Omar is from Jabalia, situated in the north that is being wiped out by Israel, the north whose people, places, and landmarks are being obliterated. On November 17, we were in a morning news meeting when Omar suggested that we write about the Jabalia refugee camp. The camp is vanishing right before our eyes, he said. With each ensuing day of news coverage, more of Jabalia disappears, as hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants have been forced to flee. We agreed to the suggestion, and Omar wrote the piece straightaway. We edited it to be published in Arabic on November 21, but minutes before it was due to run, we received the news that Omar’s home and his family had been made to vanish. His father, mother, sister, and three of her children were killed in an Israeli airstrike.

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It has been days since I was last able to contact my family and friends in Jabalia refugee camp. Situated in the north of the strip, the camp is one of the largest, most populous and liveliest Palestinian refugee camps. It was assembled in the aftermath of 1948, as Palestinians forcibly removed from their homes in historic Palestine flocked to the region to seek refuge.

As Israel’s aggression has intensified over the past month and a half, the images and sounds coming from the north of the Gaza Strip have all but disappeared. The few images that have made it out onto the large news networks that have managed to hold onto a source in the north bear no traces of familiar places. In looking through those images, I am searching for the picture of my family, my neighbors, and my neighborhood between Aajarima and Hoja streets. But the images that big media entitle “exclusive from Gaza” reflect back at me a single unchanging scene: destroyed homes, martyrs under the rubble and the harrowing wailings of the bereaved.

I spent 26 years, my whole life, roving those streets, and I know them like my own name. In just 45 days, the Occupation has changed the strip’s topography beyond recognition. It strikes me as deliberate, intended to precipitate a sense of alienation. I feel it as part of the aggression by the Occupation on us. 

Children seep into the photos and videos as survivors of recent massacres. I listen intently to their words. Children do not just learn how to speak. They equally practice the craft of forming memories of people and places.

Their quivering voices transport my memory to a day in 2008. I was running toward the house of our neighbors with my family. The house had just been destroyed by an Israeli airstrike. When we got there and as I was taking my first step into their shattered home, my body was overtaken by a fierce shiver. I froze in place. I had accidently stepped on the dismembered limbs of a man that I used to see around with a smile on his face. The missiles of the Occupation had transformed him and his family, in just an instant, into carnage.

Even after time has elapsed, every time I pass by their house, I freeze. My mind is assaulted with sounds as if that moment is happening then and there again.

That was the first time I realized that Israel occupies my memory. I remember this now, as I look through the posts and videos, trying to follow the news on social media, reading the comments, updates and pictures. They are all announcements of mourning and loss.

I scrutinize the pictures: the masses of rubble were all once houses and places that I used, at some point or another, as landmarks to meet my friends. They have been transformed into wreckage and into questions that plague my memory. What memory do I have in that place? I second-guess myself. Perhaps I have never been in that place before.

I stare into the faces of people I used to see daily in north Gaza and Jabalia refugee camp. After being killed in the massacres of the Occupation, they now reside as inscriptions in obituaries. It never occurred to me that the faces I used to see passingly on the street, at intersections and by homes and buildings would suddenly become wounds that cut deeply into my body, becoming a source of pain that I could not imagine feeling until I felt it. I used to pass them, notice them, and we would exchange smiles without even knowing each other’s names. Their presence is associated with the place itself. Seeing them was part of being in those locations. They are as much a part of that location as that location is a part of them.

Now, in this war, I continue to ask myself the questions I ask each time the Occupation renews its aggression on Gaza. What are we left with but, at base, the question as a form of protest? How does the Occupation colonize our memory? How does it restructure our emotional connections to people and places, weaponizing those connections as new sources of violence against us and pain inflicted upon us? I find myself rearticulating these questions: how does the Occupation turn our emotional connections into tools for tormenting us? How can I grapple with the shock born of forgetting places that the Occupation wipes out with the aim of alienating us and distorting our cartographic memories of those places? I return to our relationship with lived space in Gaza, to our buildings and ruined homes as I contemplate what drives someone whose house had just been destroyed by the Occupation to return that same night to sleep underneath the collapsing ceiling of his home.

The relationship to the architecture of the city exceeds the connection with its concrete materiality. It seems, in some context, that there is a deeply intimate emotional bond tying people, and Gazans in particular, with buildings and homes. I wonder if the reason is the strip’s small size, which helped foster our relationship to its streets, homes and buildings in a manner that exceeds ordinary meanings. The city’s buildings are part of one’s family. Maybe this is the reason I feel myself on the brink of suffocation every time I see the destruction that wiped out the neighborhoods and homes where I lived, the faces that I grew up with.

My friend from Gaza asks, “If we survive this war, what would be our meeting point?” Most Gazans typically choose Hayy al-Rimal, in the center of Gaza City, as the place to meet whenever they decide to go out. I still remember our state of feeling undone, feeling unmoored after the Israeli aggression of 2021, when the Occupation destroyed parts of Hayy al-Rimal, and it seemed to us like the heart of the strip had sunk into darkness. People who were accustomed to going there to meet friends and spend time did not know where to go. Now that the Occupation has destroyed all of these neighborhoods, I try to evade the question that insistently assaults me: what darkness, what unmooring awaits the people of Gaza?

I try to examine all the photos and videos that have succeeded in getting out of the strip, firstly, to find some assurances and to hear people’s voices and, secondly, to discern the extent of the Occupation’s assault on my memory. For every strike on Gaza is also a strike on a space in my memory.