There is nowhere left to go – we are trapped

Israeli bombardment destroys Bab al-Bahr Tower in Gaza City’s Rimal area on 10 September 2025.
Omar Ashtawy APA images

Before the announcement of a ceasefire in January 2025, I was among the 400,000 people who stayed in northern Gaza.

The experience was overwhelming and unbearably hard. Israel did everything possible to force us southward. We endured severe bombardment, chessboard-like displacement and famine for more than a year.

But my family and I refused to leave.

We knew the occupation could not force us to abandon the places where we were born, raised and lived most of our lives. And we knew that if we left northern Gaza, the occupation would take over our land.

The brief ceasefire from January to March 2025, when people were finally allowed to return to their homes, felt like the most glorious and important moment in Palestinian history.

Palestinians returned to the very homes in the north that they had been forced to leave.

That return, however, now feels like a cruel trick.

On 8 August 2025, the Israeli security cabinet signed off on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to take over Gaza City and force nearly 900,000 people – including many already displaced – to leave.

The news brought back the darkest memories of October 2023, when more than a million Palestinians were ordered to evacuate northern Gaza within 24 hours.

The same cruel scenarios repeat themselves, and people in Gaza ask in disbelief: Why did they allow us to return only to force us to leave again?

Movement is impossible

The present moment feels more dangerous than ever.

For the first time, even those of us who stayed – including my family and myself – realize we may not be able to remain.

Israel now controls 70 percent of the Gaza Strip.

The north – including Jabaliya refugee camp and Shujaiya – is already in ruins, and the Israeli army is advancing toward neighborhoods.

In the past, whenever a ground military operation hit our area, my family would temporarily move to relatives’ homes in Jabaliya camp, and when it became dangerous at the camp, our relatives would come to us, like pieces on a chessboard.

Our options were fragile even then, but now, those options have vanished.

There is nowhere left to go – we are trapped.

People are crowded into the western part of Gaza City near the sea, pressed against the shoreline with no escape.

To the west lies the sea; to the east and north, Israeli forces are closing in.

Every direction is blocked, and even moving within the city itself has become impossible.

The morning of 9 September, after a night of relentless shelling that shook both the walls and our nerves, I woke to the news that the Israeli army had ordered 900,000 people in Gaza City to move southward to what they call a “humanitarian zone.”

The warning came shortly after Netanyahu declared: “In the past two days, 50 of these towers have fallen. The air force brought them down. Now all of this is just an introduction, just a prelude, to the main intense operation – a ground maneuver of our forces, who are now organizing and gathering in Gaza City.”

On the maps, the entire area was marked in red – a color that now signifies danger and death.

Netanyahu calls these attacks “a prelude,” while for us life has been a continuous hell.

The Israeli F-16s and helicopters are intensifying their bombing of the city while quadcopter drones hover above. Sometimes they drop leaflets with evacuation orders; other times, they release small bombs directly over our heads and homes. They have broadcast insults that I have personally heard, calling us cows and dogs, or shout: “Stay tuned. We will invade Gaza City soon.”

In recent days, Israel has destroyed several prominent buildings in Gaza, including Al-Soussi and Al-Roya towers – landmarks that once anchored neighborhoods and gave the city a sense of structure, identity and even a hint of modernity. The families who had lived in them were suddenly homeless.

These buildings had also been surrounded by dozens of tents, families living in their shadow after losing their homes.

When the towers fell, the rubble crushed the spaces where the tents had been, and the displaced were displaced again, their shelters rendered uninhabitable.

This is not a battle. Each armored vehicle carries enough explosives to obliterate everything within a hundred meters, including homes, streets and all that lies between. The tanks roam the streets like mechanized predators, forcing entire neighborhoods to flee in panic.

My family and I have searched desperately for an apartment farther south in the Strip. Khan Younis and Rafah have already been pulverized, reduced to ruins. We cannot survive winter in a tent. We have called every number, begged friends, searched endlessly.

There is nowhere left in Gaza to absorb us.

Stay or leave?

Even the most tattered tents are prohibitively expensive. A single tent can cost over a thousand dollars – an impossible sum for people who have already lost their homes and livelihoods.

Some families tried to move south, only to return when they found nothing waiting in the so-called safe zones.

Even the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross has said it is “impossible” to evacuate Gaza City “in a way that is safe and dignified under the current conditions”; there is simply not enough space. The Gaza Strip no longer resembles what it was in October 2023, when people could still move and find shelter in cities like Rafah or Khan Younis.

Many people will not leave, not because they want to risk their lives, but because of the numb indifference that follows witnessing genocide. Death has become, for many, the easier and more “affordable” option.

For us, there is no longer even the illusion of choice. The walls are closing in, and we ask not only where we can go, but whether there will be any place left at all.

Malak Hijazi is a Gaza-based writer.