Inside one battle-scarred Gaza building, displaced families tell the story of war

Located on a quiet road on Omar al-Mukhtar Street in Western Gaza City, the Skeik building was a familiar sight for Gaza lovers.

The tree-lined street that runs alongside it was once a favorite place for dating couples who wanted to avoid Gaza’s socially conservative gaze.

But the road nicknamed “Lovers Street” and the six-storey building overlooking it are now surrounded by rubble. There are very few residents left who remember the old days. Those hiding here right now are running away from Israeli tanks, not because of Gaza’s disapproval.

The war in Gaza has left the once-fancy neighborhood in ruins. The stylish shops and restaurants on the beach were full of shrapnel and bullet holes, and the park with French-manicured trees was buried under gray rubble.

The Skeik building still stands, but its walls are now spattered with shrapnel and a large cannon-sized hole has been blown in one of the upper floors. Their pre-war faces are replaced by a kaleidoscopic confetti of displaced people.

Two years after the start of the Gaza war, this building offers a snapshot of how the conflict has eroded Gaza’s people’s ties to home and community, and what impact this is having.

The previous tenants of the Skeik building are long gone. Above boarded-up warehouses on the ground floor, eight of the building’s 10 apartments have become temporary homes for families displaced by the war.

Twenty-six-year-old Hadeel Daban lives on the fourth floor with her husband and three young children: nine-year-old Judi, six-year-old Murad and two-year-old Mohammed.

The family arrived two months ago and paid 1,000 shekels ($305; £227) a month to camp in spare rooms.

“The people who were here before us left because it was dangerous,” Hadeel said. “Shrapnel is hitting the walls here, but it’s still better than the tent.”

The family’s few possessions are neatly stored in piles of bags along the walls. The gaps where the windows used to be are covered with torn sheets. This is the 12th place the family has moved.

“As we load our belongings into the car, I put my kids on top of everything and tell them to play with items like kitchen utensils,” Hadeel told me. “I tell them we’re going to live a different life, a little bit away from what we had.”

The family’s home is located less than a mile away in the al-Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City. They fled when a relative’s apartment above them was hit in the first week of the war.

They returned a few months later. However, in an attack on the building next door on March 15, 2024, Hadeel’s mother-in-law was killed, her three children were injured, and Hadeel’s husband was buried alive.

“We spent hours looking for him and found him under the rubble,” he said.

Her husband Izzeddin was unconscious. They took him to al-Shifa hospital. Here, Hadeel said that she was told that her husband had a fractured skull and was in a coma.

It was stated that he was still under treatment three days later when Israel sealed the hospital and launched a two-week military operation to eliminate Hamas command posts there.

It was only when Israeli forces finally withdrew that Hadeel was reunited with her fragile but alive husband.

Hadeel told us he still needs regular medical checkups. “I would take him to a neurologist [in Gaza City]But six weeks ago all the doctors moved south,” he said.

The house is not just about shelter or furniture. And all three families we spoke to in the Skeik building had moved multiple times.

“None of my neighbors are my neighbors anymore because new people come every month,” Hadeel said. “I don’t even know where my actual neighbors are; some went south, some were killed or injured. There are no neighbors anymore.”

On the day our colleague met Hadeel, Gaza City was evacuating again as hundreds of thousands of people moved towards safer areas further south.

The Israeli army, advancing in the city, had given a “final warning” for them to leave the city. However, the families we spoke to were planning to stay there.

While Hadeel was talking to our cameraman, a series of explosions echoed through the apartment.

Huge gray clouds rose in the middle distance from between the windows.

None of his younger sons even flinched.

The Skeik building was built in 2008, following the construction boom that devastated Gaza City in the mid-1990s. Excellent location, right next to the American International School and one block from the Palestinian parliament; both are currently in ruins.

It was this central location on the main Omar al-Mukhtar street that put the Skeik building in the path of Israeli tanks in the first months of the war.

Al-Shifa hospital is located two blocks north. A few weeks after the occupation, the Israeli army moved to seize the complex, saying it was being used as a Hamas base.

The soldiers approached from many directions, including the roads around Omar al-Mukhtar Street.

A large rectangular hole was cut into the wall near the back of the Skeik building. Inside, graffiti in Hebrew reads “the last Samurai”; this is a reference to a Hollywood movie about a 19th-century Japanese warrior defeated by modern weapons.

We asked the Israeli army whether its forces were using the building or fighting there. We did not receive an answer.

However, the owner of the building, Suheil Skeik, who now lives in Türkiye, told us that the block was used as an observation point by Israeli troops during operations.

Israel, on the other hand, said that it hit many settlements used by Palestinian snipers in the region in March.

Ground forces remained in Gaza City for months in the early months of the war, launching a second attack on Al-Shifa hospital in March 2024 while Hadiel’s husband was receiving treatment inside.

Because of the rapid change of residents, no one in the building now remembers what happened in the first months of the war.

However, conflicts still continue around it.

In the upstairs apartment of Hadeel’s house, 59-year-old Muna Amin Shabet plays with her grandchildren under large bullet holes punched into the wall.

“Two days ago, bullets hit here, inside the building,” he explained. “I grabbed the children and ran with them to where it was safer. We sat there and prayed to God that everything would be okay. The children were very scared.”

Muna is also from Tuffah district. He has been living here with his wife, three children and grandchildren since August. They don’t pay rent. Muna says the family lost everything when their house was destroyed weeks after the war started.

“They destroyed the entire Tuffah area; all of it, not a single house was left,” he said. “We start life over again by collecting spoon after spoon and plate after plate. The famine came and we ground pigeon feed for food and fed on wild greens,” he said. “I say that after two years of war, I am not alive, I am one of the dead.”

Another resident from the northern town of Beit Lahia said his area had now become a “wasteland” after the Israeli army razed the area. “There are no houses left, not even signs, to indicate that there was once a neighborhood here,” he said.

The UN says 90 percent of housing in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed. Entire neighborhoods with their common history, family ties, and social support were destroyed.

But destroying the idea of ​​home is more difficult than destroying bricks and mortar.

When our cameraman visits Muna’s house, her two grandchildren are drawing pictures. It’s an idyllic storybook image of a tidy little house with a sloping red tile roof. The sun is perched on the horizon, the sky is pink and blue, there are trees and plants.

It’s nothing like where they live.

Widespread destruction of homes and communities often means families are torn apart to survive.

Of Muna’s five sons, two went south and the other went to stay with his mother-in-law. Others come and go, he says. While Muna stayed with relatives, she and her husband even lived separately for months before moving into the Skeik building.

The extended family that once surrounded him and strengthened his world is fraying.

“We are dispersed. Separation is the hardest thing,” he said. “My life was taken away from me. My health was gone. Our home was gone, the people dearest to our hearts were gone, we were left with nothing.”

This is a feeling that Shawkat al-Ansari knows very well.

Originally from Beit Lahia, now destroyed, he told us that his mother and sister were sleeping on the street in southern Gaza, while Shawkat lived on the first floor of the Skeik building with his wife and seven children.

Four months ago, his brother disappeared.

“She went to buy flour from one of our mothers-in-law’s house in Shejaiya [on the northern edge of Gaza City]. We still don’t know what happened to him. “We searched everywhere but couldn’t find it.”

The constant turnover of people moving in search of food, safety or shelter made it difficult to keep families together.

“We were living just fine before,” Shawkat said. “Now my brother is missing and we are all stranded in different places.”

One by one, the pillars that hold people together (home, community, family) have been loosened, with the continued displacement of Gaza’s population and the razing of its neighborhoods and streets.

Now sitting in the empty concrete rooms of the Skeik building, Shawkat, too, watches the future slip away. She says her children did well in school before the war, but now they have forgotten how to read and count.

Constant movement freezes their lives.

Days later, we received a call from Hadeel. He and several other families in the Skeik building were on the move again.

He said Israeli forces threw smoke bombs into the area to signal that they were about to enter the area.

“We didn’t see the tanks last night,” he said, “but if we don’t leave now, we’ll wake up with them tomorrow.”

Hadeel was packing up when we spoke, planning to join his brother nearby before trying to head south together.

“We will stay on the streets and live in tents,” he said. “No matter what we do, nothing will be able to rebuild what is inside us. My children are no longer my children. There is more pain than innocence in their eyes now.”

Surviving buildings across Gaza have become transit centers for families that the war brought together and then separated.

If the negotiations are successful, peace could end their journey and reconstruction could bring them a different future.

But their old lives are left behind.

This war erased the path to the past.

Additional reporting from Aamir Peerzada and his colleagues in Gaza. Designed by the BBC’s Visual Journalism team.