Since October 17, 2023, Heba Al-Agha has been sharing her diary through her Telegram channel “Talk of Life and War.” The entries include poetry, freeform narration, descriptions, and photos, as she is forced to move with her family from their home in Gaza City to Khan Younis, then to Rafah, and as of May 2024, to Cairo. This is a selection in translation.


Translated by Julia Choucair Vizos0

Displacement to Al-Mawasi, January 26, 2024

The story goes back to the Naksa of June 1967.¹ Our grandmothers tell of how the residents of Khan Younis were forced to flee to the area of Al-Mawasi, which at the time was all farmland, planted with guava and cucumbers. They had nothing to eat except for some flour they had carried with them, so they kneaded and baked it. As the story goes, everyone got diarrhea from eating too many cucumbers. One week later, they returned to Khan Younis to find it—as with the rest of the Gaza Strip—completely under Israeli occupation.

Today, once again, the occupying army has ordered the people of Khan Younis to move to Al-Mawasi, designated as a “safe zone.”² The area is different now; there are neighborhoods, buildings, townhouses, mosques, and organizations, so living conditions are better. Most of my relatives have fled there, to plots of land that some of them own or to different facilities where everyone is crowded and exhausted. And this wait to return home is much longer than that of ‘67.

Before September 2005, Al-Mawasi was fully under Israeli control, and densely populated with settlements. The settlers set up agricultural projects, or kubaniya as we call them, and the people of the city went to work in them as farmers. Then the occupation retreated, with its settlers and bad memories, and Al-Mawasi became a booming agricultural producer, filling the city’s markets with what the land and the people of the land can provide.

Now once again, Al-Mawasi hosts the displaced and cares for them, as if honoring the root of its name: guardianship. It hides those who are afraid among its trees, inside its tiny houses, and in the tents they have erected. The ground underneath expands as it embraces all those whose gaze is on the fate of their homes in the east. Even the sea can find some calm, knowing that this land opens its arms to the displaced—at least until the army turns its feet toward Al-Mawasi, forcing a new scattering, a new panic, a new diaspora.

Al-Mawasi continues to dodge geography and the enemy, existing as a suspended space between north and south, a place of refuge from Khan Yunis to Rafah, like a woman fleeing with her children from fear to fear, while she makes her last attempts to protect them.

Oh, Al-Mawasi, don’t fail us now. Keep my mother and siblings, my family and loved ones, safe. Bring them back to us safely, for it is enough that they will return to a bulldozed city in ashes—a city that they kidnapped from its people on the morning of December 1, 2023, and returned as a lifeless corpse.

On the Hamadeen Quarter, January 27, 2024

The news coming out of Khan Younis, in this cold weather, is bewildering. The clashes around the points of incursion, the shelling and siege of schools that are sheltering the displaced, the rain drowning tents and soaking bodies and blankets… I curl up into myself, sick with worry over my relatives who have been scattered to Al-Mawasi, while I am here with my husband and children, in a room in frosty Rafah city.

What is happening defies my wildest imagination. I wonder how January is spending its last days in our old neighborhood. What does the place look like without its warm gatherings around fire pits, with toasted bread and a bowl of mreese made from dried kishik, or sweet potatoes and hot tea… How are our neighbors spending this strange January, far from the neighborhood’s warmth, in a sad winter of shocking fates…

The quarter of Al-Hamadeen extends longitudinally.³ If you enter from the north, you begin at the house of Uncle Abu Samer, at the brick factory and home of the late Uncle Abu Hamdan and his children. Then you pass the house of the late Uncle Abu Ali. On your right, you’ll find the houses of the families of the late Uncle Abu Sami and Uncle Abu Muhammad Ya'qub, the mill, the house of Uncle Mustafa Taher and the late Yusuf Taher, the house of the late Hajj Abu Atef, the house of the late Uncle Abu Fathi and his sons, and the late Uncle Abu Saleh and his sons. You then roll down to the house of Uncle Awni, and behind it the houses of the late Sheikh Saeed and Uncle Rushdi, and the houses of the late Uncle Suleiman and Abu Hisham and their sons. Continuing west, you are met by the new diwan and the house of the uncle Muhammad Najib, who went abroad. You keep going until you reach the house of the late Hajj Abdul Hamid, that of the late Hajj Abdullah and his sons, and the house of my grandfather Hajj Nayef, with his children’s houses to the west and the houses of the sons of the late Hajj Yahya Sa'id to the right. Finally, you come up on the houses of the sons of the late Hajj Saqr Yusuf.

This is an old neighborhood, it was built before the Nakba. During the Nakba it received refugees from the village of Berbera. The Ahmed family lived in an area between the eastern and western sections. A pious woman named Umm Ibrahim lived among them, and later became the neighborhood’s midwife. She attended the births of all my siblings and those of almost all the children of the neighborhood, and lived there until her death. In recent years, most of the Ahmed family moved to newer neighborhoods, and the area turned into agricultural plots lining the sides of the road.

When it rains, our sandy street becomes a muddy torrent that piles up at the end. Dotting the street are old trees of every kind: palm, olive, orange, lemon, mulberry, pomegranate, jasmine, Arabian jasmine, henna, and shade trees. There is also a lone tomato greenhouse, some wheat fields, and abundant pots of mint, arugula, parsley, and zaʻatar. There are also chickens, geese, turtles, cats, birds, and goats. The area is known for its old wooden doors, the most famous of which are the Bab al-Barani and the door on Abu Fathi’s baika (an old, simple structure made of stone or mud brick). To the west lie a number of ahwash (internal courtyards).

Our neighborhood houses the memories of our families, from the large extended family that dates to our great-grandfather Hamdan, to the smaller family of Abu Ahed with his seven daughters and three sons. It has grandchildren who value their ancestors, it has uncles and aunts, celebrations and holiday seasons, parties, and treats like umm Ali, kanafeh, sumaghiyye, or fatteh.

Our neighborhood also has martyrs, the men and women who left us recently without a goodbye. There’s a new road that services the army with its tanks, bulldozers, and the soldiers who have come from the corners of the earth to obliterate history, life, geography, and civilization. They have come to take revenge on memories, on scents and weddings, on the land, greenery, and trees. They have come to scatter the people of the land in unfamiliar places, leaving them only with the hope that they will return. We cling to this hope every moment of every day, as we do to the unanswered question: is the neighborhood okay?

Elegy for the Family Home, February 4, 2024

Our home overlooks every direction. Around it, the sun dances all day, and when it sets, it disappears directly in the front. Our home boasts a permanent, stubborn spring that crowds out the other seasons, but it also hosts gusts of cold and the calm of prairies. As far as the eye can see, the groves that our ancestors planted stretch out. And at the center of my heart, the house grows, like a small pomegranate tree. Inside each of our hearts, a different tree from the orchard grows, its branches and roots now pulverized and kneaded back into the earth.

How does one collect their memories of home? Where do we preserve the joy perched on its windows and balconies?

Each of us carries on their head a basket full of scents and sounds. We exercise our memory: this is our bedroom, that room is my mother’s, this other one is my younger brother’s (and as of late, the “groom’s room”), this is where we receive guests, and in it is the library, our pride and joy. In the library are the novels signed by their authors, the many books for young and old, the letters of Ghassan Kanafani to Ghada Al-Samman, the prose of Ahlam and poems of Darwish, the pocketbooks we bought with our allowances, the dictionaries, the books on the Quran and Hadith, and—in the center— my mother’s copies of the Quran. All now burned to ashes.⁴

We weep for our memories, big and small: the photo album, the clothes that fit us, the scent of my father who departed a while back, the farm that was raised by my brothers like a little girl grown into a bride. We weep for the nights and days in my mother’s kitchen, when we laughed ourselves tired, when from her bedroom she yelled “Go to bed!” her voice carrying a lifetime dose of safety.

My seventy-year-old mother has always been a homebody, attached to her bedroom and belongings. Known to everyone by her nickname, Fattoum, this pampered youngest child remembers everything, and has a captivating presence. She built this small house and married all her children off. The last of the weddings was set for mid-October. Everything was ready, even the cards. My little brother and his wife were to live with my mother in the family house, but Israel sent us a wedding gift that wiped out every trace of celebration, even the groom’s suit.

On the night of the evacuation, fear was in control. The army launched fire belts nearby, and no one slept a wink. At dawn, our phone began receiving a barrage of messages. I winced as everyone in the house began packing, their hands trembling, their hearts at a loss. I was transported back to my first displacement from Gaza, to that same shiver in the heart, to the absolute bewilderment. Yet this time… to the unknown.

I stayed in the house as everyone went outside. I couldn’t bear a new exodus, let alone one from this most familiar house. I tidied up as if expecting guests. I had no desire to lug everything I had brought from the first displacement, so I left most of it behind. I went to the library and grabbed two books and threw them into the bag with my Quran. I went to the kitchen and ate one of my mother’s incredible dates. I sliced a big chunk of white cheese—a miraculous find amid war—covered it in hot peppers and tucked it into the darkness of the oven, to be enjoyed as cured cheese when we returned. Then I squeezed myself a glass of lemonade and sat down to sip it in peace. I spoke to the house. “We won’t be long, don’t be scared.” The family home and I had renewed our relationship, and were close again after my journey into marriage. I whispered to the house, embraced and assured it, then was pulled away by my family’s calls from outside. The night was approaching, so I went outside, swallowing my tears and muttering prayers as I went. I hoped that life would stop right then and there, that this moment not be lived.

The house was destroyed and set ablaze by military order, like many of the neighboring homes: my uncles’, my grandfather’s, those of our beloved relatives in the old neighborhood. Neither the front nor back doors were left standing. But our home does not die if they bring its walls down. The land does not die if they pound it into debris. The roots of the house run deep, and a new bud will grow. The home is the home, and there is no explaining that word beyond feeling it. Whether palace or hut, the home is not just property and material, but flesh, bone, dignity.