Ramallah, occupied West Bank — For more than 16 months, loss and grief have stalked the granite-floored corridors of the Retno Hotel.
On the evening of October 6, 2023, the family-run hotel was close to full occupancy. A few of the 70 or so guests were Palestinian Americans but most were from Gaza. Expecting to return home soon, they had brought just enough clothes for a week’s stay.
Among them were Ahmed Ayyash, a 72-year-old civil engineer from Gaza City, and his 62-year-old wife, Maha. Forty-four-year-old Shadia Abu Mrahil from Deir el-Balah was there with her 25-year-old son, Karam.
Like most of the guests from Gaza, they were regular visitors to the modest limestone building with its 45 double- or triple-bedded rooms. It wasn’t the quiet north Ramallah street that drew them there, nor the small courtyard out front with its plastic tables and chairs, although on sunnier days, the guests would sometimes sip their coffee there near a canopy of bright pink bougainvillaeas.
They were there to receive medical treatment – for cancer, heart problems and developmental disorders – that was unavailable in Gaza. Both Ahmed and Shadia have leukaemia.
They would travel via the Beit Hanoon crossing, managed by the Israeli army and known to Israelis as Erez, in northern Gaza to Ramallah. For a few days at a time, they would stay at the hotel while they received their treatment and then return home to Gaza. Relatives would often accompany them. Some had been doing this for years. For Ahmed and Maha, these medical trips also offered an opportunity to visit Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem and to eat kunafa with friends in Nablus, 50km (31 miles) away.
October 6, 2023, was a quiet day, a Friday. Most businesses in Ramallah were closed and many guests at the Retno Hotel took a break from their treatments. Ahmed went out to pray at a nearby mosque with Maha, his wife of 44 years. They had arrived in Ramallah the previous day and bought bread, cheese, chocolate, fruits and vegetables for their stay. When they returned to the hotel that evening, they ate dinner in the dining hall, and spoke to fellow guests before going to bed.
When they woke up the following morning, everything had changed. In the days that followed the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, Israel launched a massive bombardment of the Gaza Strip and cut off food, water and electricity. The Palestinian American guests at the hotel fled. Those who stayed, hospital patients and their family members, waited anxiously for news from Gaza. The phone service was down and many were unable to reach their loved ones back home. Some crowded into the hotel owner’s office to watch the developments on television, wondering what the fast-escalating war would mean for their families and for their treatments.
Ahmed stayed in his room watching the news and scrolling through Telegram updates from journalists in Gaza. Guests who managed to contact loved ones during the sporadic moments when the phone service returned, shared whatever they learned with others. Others never got through.
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