In Gaza, the Nakba is being relived in 2025

Ruwaida Amer’s grandparents lived through the Nakba in 1948. Now, in 2025, she is experiencing another catastrophe.

The Nakba. It’s a concept that accompanied me from birth until I lived through it myself these past two years.

I was born a refugee in the Khan Younis camp, known by the city’s residents as the largest gathering of refugees expelled from their lands during the Nakba, when Israel was founded in 1948.

Whenever someone asked me my name, it was always followed by: “Are you a refugee or a citizen?”

As a child, I would ask: “What is a refugee?”

I attended a school run by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, and my documents always had to include proof that I was a refugee.

I received treatment at UNRWA clinics, always needing to bring that refugee card.

When I began working as a journalist in 2015, Nakba Day was one of the events I looked forward to covering. That year, I went along with colleagues to the Shati camp, west of Gaza City.

It would be my first time writing about the Nakba, and my first visit to a refugee camp in 13 years, since we had moved from camp life to village life in al-Fukhari, south of Khan Younis.

When I entered the camp, memories of my childhood in Khan Younis came flooding back: the small, crowded houses, some newly built, others still original structures.

It was nice that the commemoration falls in May, with good weather.

Elderly men and women sat by their doors, just as my grandmother did when I was a child. I used to love sitting with her; she seemed used to open spaces, like her pre-1948 home in Beit Daras.

‘What is a refugee?’

We sat with elderly women, all over 70. They talked about their homeland, the stability they had in their lands, their simple lives, the food they grew and ate, and the heartbreak of not being able to return.

We met many – from Majdal, Hamama, and al-Jura, all depopulated villages and towns taken over by Israel in 1948. Whenever I met someone from Beit Daras, we’d share memories, and laugh a lot, talking about the maftoul (Palestinian couscous) the town was famous for.

He estimated he was about 15 years old at the time. He was already married to my grandmother, and they had a child.

He would describe the scenes as I sat in awe, asking myself: How could the world have stood by silently?

My grandfather told me they had a good life, working their farm, eating from their crops. Each town had a specialty, and they exchanged produce.

Theirs was a simple cuisine, with lots of lentils and bread made from wheat they ground in stone mills. Until that dreadful displacement.

He said the Zionist militias forced them to leave, ordering them to go to nearby Gaza.

My grandfather said he shut the door to his home, took my grandmother and their son – just a few months old – and started walking. Israeli planes hovered overhead, firing at people as if to drive them to move faster.

The baby – my uncle – didn’t survive the journey. My grandfather never wanted to go into the details, he would only say that their son died from the conditions as they fled.

After hours of walking, they reached Khan Younis and, with nowhere else to go, he pitched a tent. Eventually, UNRWA was set up and gave him a home, the one I remember from my childhood. It was so old; I spent years visiting them in that asbestos-roofed house with its aged walls.

That memory of being forced into exile became their wound. Yet, the idea of return, the right to go home, was passed down through generations.

The Nakba was a memory passed down from the elderly to the young.

But in the war that Israel began waging on Gaza on October 7, 2023, we lived the Nakba.