In early September this year, around 10 am, I took my mother to Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat refugee camp for a health checkup.

She had been feeling weak and experiencing severe dizziness, nausea and headaches.

I stood in line at the reception desk to get a ticket for my mother to see a doctor.

After waiting for around 20 minutes, I finally reached the woman at the reception desk. She asked which doctor I wanted to see.

“A general practitioner,” I replied.

She gave me number 37.

I took my mother and went to the waiting room, where at least 32 people were ahead of us.

We waited for three hours before our turn came.

After examining my mother, the doctor diagnosed her with anemia, explaining that it is common, given the lack of proper food. He prescribed her iron supplements and painkillers.

We went to the hospital pharmacy, bought the medications and left the hospital at around 3 pm.

Southward

On our way home, we passed through a new encampment in Nuseirat called al-Souq al-Jadeed.

The camp was gradually formed during the genocide on the site of a market that the Nuseirat municipality had built a few years earlier to organize street vendors.

Though the market itself has disappeared, the name al-Souq al-Jadeed – meaning the New Market – has remained.

The camp was crammed with displaced people until its dwellers temporarily returned to their homes all around the Gaza Strip following the short-lived January ceasefire.

But in August, after Israel approved a major offensive in Gaza City and Benjamin Netanyahu warned that the military would destroy more high-rise buildings, many families were displaced to al-Souq al-Jadeed once more.

They pitched their tents, cramming into every available corner in the camp.

Some people set up their tents in front of their relatives’ houses, where those relatives had already reserved space for them in anticipation of displacement.

Residents had started this practice of reserving so that, given the shortage of space, their displaced relatives could stay close to them.

Others apparently had nowhere to go — they stayed in the streets with their belongings instead of moving them into a house or pitching tents.

As my mother and I walked through the encampment, we passed by a woman with her three young children: a girl with messy hair and two boys.

They were standing on the roadside next to the camp. They had a small table, some quilts, boxes to carry food and other belongings spread out on the ground.

The mother looked me over before asking, “Are you from Nuseirat?”

“Yes,” I replied.

The mother started explaining to me that her husband went around the displacement camps looking for a place, but couldn’t find anything for them.

Then she asked if I knew of any plot of land where they could shelter themselves at any cost.

“No, ya khalti,” I replied, using the Arabic word for “auntie” out of respect.

“If I knew of a place, I would definitely help.”

The glimmer of hope in her children’s eyes vanished.

As my mother and I continued back home, I silently rebuked myself a hundred times and cursed the circumstances we have to endure a million times.

No place

When my mother and I got home, my father was talking to our cousins in Gaza City with the speakerphone on.

He looked pale.

Sixteen of our relatives in the north – most of whom had previously refused to leave – decided to flee south due to the ferocity of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing.

But our four-room home was already jammed with our family of six, plus my aunt, her husband and their two sons – one with his wife – and three daughters.

They pleaded with my father to find them an apartment – or a roof, or any piece of land where they could pitch their tents.

“The situation here is so dangerous,” my cousin Maysara said. “We don’t want to die.”

My father asked them to wait until the end of the day while he tried to find a solution.

As he hung up, I sprang to my feet. “How? There is absolutely no place,” I asked in disbelief.

“What could we do? Abandon them and watch them die?” my father replied in anger, exasperated from the trying circumstances that were visited upon us.

In November 2023, my cousins’ home was bombed while they were inside.

Sixteen of my cousins were killed, and many others were injured.

This time, we could lose them all if we did nothing. We needed to find them a place.

My brother Hussein and I searched the streets of Nuseirat for any place, a task that felt like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Hussein also made calls and checked social media, but prices were unimaginable.

A tiny apartment cost anywhere between $1,000 and $3,000 a month, while larger homes were demanding as much as $7,000.

The extreme cost of living is one factor behind the crisis.

Many landlords have lost their businesses – their buildings bombed or partially destroyed by Israel – leaving them with only one or two apartments to rent out.

With the cost of essentials like food have skyrocketed, just to keep their children from going hungry, some landlords raised rents to survive.

Another factor is exploitation.

Some people have turned the genocide into a business opportunity – some hoard goods and sell them at exorbitant rates while others impose impossible rents.

In Gaza, we despise such profiteers as much as we hate the occupation itself. Yet, because of urgent need, we often had no choice but to accept such extortion.

Dead end

My brother and I returned home that evening after almost four hours of searching Nuseirat and then nearby al-Zawayda, finding nothing but prices soaring beyond reason.

I wished to die rather than to deliver the bitter truth: we couldn’t find any place.

I told my father that he could offer our cousins my room instead of simply saying there was nowhere for them to go.

He called our cousins with the speakerphone on and explained that we couldn’t find a place. Then he offered, “You can have a room, a bathroom and use our kitchen to cook.”

Some of them laughed – not out of amusement but despair. They thanked my father and declined the offer.

Then they pondered among themselves before telling my father that they decided to stay in northern Gaza – not as an act of resilience, but because there is no place in the south.

“We prefer to die in an airstrike than from famine,” Maysara said.

But even if we had found a place, and somehow my cousins managed the rent, they couldn’t have afforded the expenses of living – like food and water, the cost of charging their phones and replacing essential belongings they couldn’t take with them.

Before the call ended, my father assured our cousins that we would find a solution.

Maysara recited from the Quran: “Nothing shall ever befall us except what God has destined for us.”

Wariness

When a ceasefire was announced on 9 October, we contacted our cousins immediately.

“Alhamdulillah, all of this has ended,” Maysara said. His previously tense and strained voice now carried relief but cautious optimism. “For an entire month, we didn’t leave the boundaries of our street out of fear.”

My father, our family and I felt an overwhelming sense of relief as a weight had been lifted off our shoulders.

My cousins are safe – for now, at least – but remain deeply anxious, unsure of whether Israel will once again break the ceasefire.

Hassan Abo Qamar is a writer based in Gaza.

Tags

• Nuseirat
• displacement
• eiGazaDispatches

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