‘I saw my Gaza homeland rebuilt before but this time’s different’

“I rode a camel on a sandy road with my grandmother and started crying.” Ayish Younis describes the worst moment of his life; Even though 77 years have passed, he still sees it that way, and he has experienced many horrors since then.

The year was 1948, the first Arab-Israeli war was raging and Ayish was 12 years old. He and his extended family were fleeing their home in the village of Barbara in once-British-ruled Palestine, famous for its grapes, wheat, corn and barley.

“We were afraid for our lives,” says Ayish. “We had no way of fighting the Jews alone, so we all started to leave.”

The camel took Ayish and her grandmother seven miles south of Barbara, into the Egyptian-held area that became known as the Gaza Strip. It was only 25 miles long and a few miles wide, and had just been occupied by Egyptian forces.

As a result of the 1948-49 war, an estimated 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes and became refugees; Around 200,000 people are thought to have packed into this small coastal corridor.

“We had pieces of wood that we leaned against the walls of a building to make a shelter,” says Ayish.

They then moved to one of the giant tent camps set up by the United Nations.

Today, Ayish, who is 89 years old, lives in a tent in Al Mawasi, near Khan Younis.

In May last year, seven months into the two-year war between Israel and Hamas, Ayish was forced to leave his home in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, following an evacuation order from the Israeli army.

The four-storey house he shared with his children and their families, divided into several flats, was destroyed by what Israel believes may have been tank fire.

Now the house is just a small white canvas tent, only a few meters in diameter.

Other members of the family live in neighboring tents. They all had to cook over an open fire. Since they do not have access to running water, they wash using canned water, which is scarce and therefore expensive.

“We’re back to what we started, back in the tents, and we still don’t know how long we’re going to be here,” he says, sitting on a plastic chair on the bare sand outside his tent, his laundry drying on a nearby clothesline.

Since he moves with difficulty, a walking frame is supported next to him. But he still speaks in the crystal clear, melodic Arabic of someone who studies literature and recites the Quran every day as the imam of a local mosque.

“After leaving Barbara and living in a tent, we finally managed to build a house. But now the situation is more than a disaster. I don’t know what the future will bring and whether we will be able to rebuild our house.”

“And eventually I want to go back to Barbara with my entire extended family and taste the fruits I remember from there again.”

On October 9, Israel and Hamas agreed to the first phase of a ceasefire and hostage release agreement. The 20 surviving hostages held by Hamas were returned to Israel, and Israel released approximately 2,000 Palestinian detainees and prisoners.

Despite widespread jubilation over the ceasefire, Ayish is not optimistic about Gaza’s long-term prospects.

“I hope peace spreads and things calm down,” he says. “But I believe the Israelis will do whatever they want.”

According to the agreement on the first phase of the ceasefire, Israel will retain control of more than half of the Gaza Strip, including Rafah.

One of the questions that Ayish, his family and all Gazans are pondering is whether their homeland will be successfully rebuilt.

In 1948, the Egyptian army was one of five Arab armies that occupied the British-controlled Palestine Mandate the day after the establishment of Israel, a Jewish state. However, they were soon defeated and withdrew from Barbara, causing Ayiş to decide to escape.

Ayish became a teacher at the age of 19 and earned a degree in literature through a scholarship program in Cairo.

He says that the best moment of his life was when he married his wife Hatice. They had 18 children together. That’s a record, according to a newspaper article that once featured him; the largest number of children from the same mother and father in any Palestinian family.

Today he has 79 grandchildren, two of whom were born in the last few months.

The family would move from their first tent to a simple three-room concrete house with an asbestos roof in the refugee camp; They later expanded this to nine rooms, thanks in part to the wages they earned in Israel.

When the border between Israel and Gaza was opened, Ayish’s eldest son Ahmed was one of many Palestinians who took advantage of it by working in an Israeli restaurant during his holidays while studying medicine in Egypt.

“At that time, people in Israel were paid very well. This was the period when Palestinians earned the most money,” he says.

All but one of Ayish’s children received college degrees. They became engineers, nurses, teachers. Many moved abroad. Five of these are in the Gulf countries, and Ahmed, a spinal cord injury specialist, now lives in London. Many other Gazan families are similarly dispersed.

Like many Gazans, the Yunus family wanted nothing to do with politics. Ayish became an imam at the Rafah mosque and became a local headman (or headman) responsible for resolving disputes, just as his uncle had been in the village of Barbara many years before.

He was not appointed by the government, but he says he is respected by both Hamas and the Fatah political movement, the dominant party in the Palestinian administration.

But this did not save the family from tragedy in the street clashes of 2007 when Fatah and Hamas fought for control of the Strip. Ayish’s daughter Fadwa was killed in the crossfire while sitting in the car.

The rest of the family survived wars between Hamas and Israel in 2008, 2012 and 2014, as well as the devastating war triggered by Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Then came the evacuation order, which said the Israeli army was carrying out operations against Hamas in the area, forcing them to leave their homes in Rafah and spending more than a year in makeshift tents.

Ayish’s life has come full circle since 1948. But his greatest wish is to go even further back in time, to return to the village, now in Israel, that he last saw when he was 12, even though it no longer exists.

The only possessions he has with him in his tent, apart from clothes, pots and a few other essential items, are the valuable title deeds to his ancestral lands in Barbara.

Thoughts now turn to rebuilding Gaza.

But Ayish believes that the extent of the destruction of infrastructure, schools and healthcare is so great that it cannot be fully repaired even with the help of the international community.

“I don’t believe Gaza has a future,” he says.

He believes that his grandchildren can play a role in rebuilding Gaza if the ceasefire is fully implemented, but he does not believe that they will be able to find jobs in the region as good as those they have or could find abroad.

His son Haritha, who is a graduate of Arabic language and has four daughters and a son, also lives in the tent. “An entire generation was wiped out because of this war.

“We can’t understand this,” he says.

“We used to hear from our fathers and grandfathers about the 1948 war and how difficult it was to be displaced, but there is no comparison between 1948 and what happened in this war.

“We hope that our children will take part in the rebuilding, but do we have the capacity as Palestinians to rebuild schools? Will donor countries play a role in this?”

“My daughter went through a two-year battle without school, and for the two years before that schools were closed due to Covid,” she continues. “I used to work in a clothing store, but it was demolished.

“We don’t know how things will develop or what source of income we will have. There are so many questions we can’t find answers to. We don’t know what the future will bring.”

Nizar, one of Ayish’s sons and a trained nurse who lives in a nearby tent, agrees. He believes Gaza’s problems are so great that the youngest generation of the family cannot play much of a role, despite their high level of education.

“The situation is unbearable,” he says. “We hope that life will return to the way it was before the war. But the destruction is enormous – complete destruction of buildings and infrastructure, psychological devastation within society and the destruction of universities.”

Meanwhile, Ayish’s eldest son Ahmed in London describes how it took the family more than 30 years to finally transform their old house into what it is today – money was saved over the years of expansion, he explains.

“Do I have another 30 years to work and help and support my family? It’s really always like that; every 10 to 15 years, people lose everything and go back to their old ways.”

But he still dreams of living in Refah again when he retires. “My brothers in the Gulf also bought land in Rafah to return and settle. My son, my nephews and my nephews want to return.”

Pausing for a moment, he adds: “I’m very optimistic by nature, because I know how determined our people in Gaza are. Believe me, they will come back and start rebuilding their lives.”

“Hope is always in the rebuilding of the new generation.”

Top image credit: AFP via Getty Images

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