In Gaza, Home Is Just a Memory

In October, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, after two years of war. In the weeks since, sporadic Israeli strikes have killed at least a hundred people in Gaza, according to Palestinian health officials, but the ceasefire, however fragile, is holding, and so is a semblance of hope. Palestinians are now returning to destroyed city blocks, where services are scarce, and access to water, food, and electricity is limited. The few remaining schools are still doubling as shelters, and local charity groups are trying to circulate aid and other basic resources.

The United Nations estimates that at least 1.9 million people were displaced during the war. One of them is Shahd Shamali, who is twenty years old, and is currently living at a camp in Deir al-Balah, in the center of the Gaza Strip. For several weeks, we communicated via WhatsApp video calls. From my screen, I could see her sitting at a shared desk in a room, where others held their phones at chest height to catch the router’s range. When our calls dropped, as they often did, Shamali and I would switch over to text messages and voice notes.

Shamali was raised in Rimal, a neighborhood in western Gaza City, near the Mediterranean Sea. It was once a business and commercial hub, with ministries, banks, schools, and galleries within a few blocks of one another. Palm-lined boulevards cut between modern glass apartment buildings, and upscale restaurants overlooked the water. The neighborhood has since been reduced to a sprawl of tents and wreckage, storefronts hanging from cages of bent metal. Shamali and her family lived in Al-Jundi al-Majhoul Tower—a fourteen-story building that sat across from an ice-cream shop and a sports store and was home to hundreds of residents. On September 14, 2025, they learned of an impending strike, forcing them to evacuate the area.

In written responses to The New Yorker, the Israel Defense Forces said they act in accordance with international law, taking “all feasible precautions to minimize harm to civilians.” When asked about the strike on Al-Jundi Tower, the I.D.F. referred to a previously issued statement about a strike on a “high-rise tower in Gaza” on September 14th, which said that the building was being used by Hamas for “intelligence gathering” purposes.

I spoke with people in Gaza who recalled receiving an advance warning of ninety minutes before their building was struck by the I.D.F., whereas others told me they were given less than five minutes. Shamali and her neighbors in Al-Jundi Tower had twenty minutes. I asked her to describe her home, and the life she made there, before it was erased, and the consequential choices she and her family made in the brief evacuation window: what they took, how they got out, and where they went. “Those twenty minutes,” Shamali told me, “felt like two seconds.” Her account captures the kind of tragedy that Palestinians have endured, and how it shapes their thinking about what lies ahead, even after the ceasefire—their feelings about home and about the future, when both remain precarious.

The following footage was provided by Shamali and her family and others who were present in the area at the time of the strike. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Home is everything. Everything—safety, comfort. No matter what happened during my day, I always knew I’d come back home.

There are eleven of us, in my family, and most of us lived in the apartment together. My siblings—Rawan, Dina, Rahaf, Hala, Jana, Reem, Ahmed—Mom, Dad. And then the most important member of our family, my cat, Lulu.

A typical day started with everyone gathering for breakfast. Regardless of whether one of us was sleepy or tired, we all had to eat breakfast together. After that, everyone would go off and start their days. Later, when we were back home, my little siblings and I would play music. Dad would be watching the TV. Mom and others would be using their cellphones. Still, we were all together. Being together, as a family, is very important to us.

My favorite place in our home was my room. Whenever my siblings and I felt upset, or when we wanted to escape our problems, we’d go in there and draw. We would hang the drawings on the wall. It was our safe place.

My mom and I were down on the street charging our phones because there was no electricity inside our apartment. Dad called, and he told us that the building across from ours had just been ordered to evacuate, because of a coming strike. A few minutes later, he called again and said that our tower, too, was ordered to evacuate. We were given only twenty minutes before the strike would hit.

We started running back to our building, where my dad and my siblings were.

I didn’t know what to take with me. I’ve been displaced several times before. I know what it’s like to leave your things behind and start over. But I still didn’t know what the most important things to take were. Because everything is important.

We all wanted to survive. Safety first, and then everything else could be rebuilt. I took a cellphone, a charger, a pillow, and a blanket. My siblings took the internet router. Mom took a little food for the journey ahead—things to sustain us, like some biscuits. My dad gathered up all my siblings. We left the apartment and he closed the door behind us.

Once we were outside the building, I asked, “Where is my cat? Where’s Lulu?” My siblings had forgotten about her. In these situations, she hides. My family refused to let me go back inside and get her. But I insisted.

I had a feeling inside of me—fear—that the building might come down at any moment. There was a lot of screaming, a lot of children trying to get out. People were everywhere, carrying mattresses and blankets. As I was going up the stairs, people were swarming around me, saying, “Come on, we don’t have time, come down.”

When I made it back to the apartment, I found Lulu hiding under my bed. I took her and put her in a box so that I could carry her with me. As I was leaving, now for the final time, I took one last look at the apartment, knowing deep down that I would never see this place again. I would see it only in ruins. I left everything behind in that moment—my dreams, my ambitions, my anger, my room, my bed.

I fled the apartment. As I was going down the stairs of the building, Lulu got out of the box and ran away, upset by the commotion. I grabbed her, and then I ducked into a neighbor’s apartment, where I kept hugging Lulu until the crowd passed. When I finally got outside, my family was standing in front of the building waiting for me. We got as far away from it as we could before the strike.

As soon as the twenty minutes were up, the first strike landed on the tower. The sound was intense. The buildings surrounding the towers collapsed from all directions. It was an earthquake. Literally an earthquake. Later, we learned that multiple strikes had hit our building and the tower across from it.

We sat in the street for around two hours, trying to figure out where to go. We ended up going to my sister Dina’s apartment in Gaza City. It was the closest place we could reach that night.

When we came back the next morning, I saw rubble. I saw floors compressed on top of one another. My mom, my siblings, and I couldn’t control our tears. We just sat in front of the wreckage, not knowing what to do. We asked ourselves if we would ever be able to rebuild, or if there would ever be a place as warm and as lovely as our home. We didn’t try to get anything out from under the rubble, because it would have been impossible.

When your house is gone, the memories you shared with the people who filled it go, too. Eight of my childhood friends have died in the war. It feels as if my life has ended with theirs, but still we have to carry on. I wish my life could somehow go back to the way it was. But I know I’ll never feel safe again.

I really hope the ceasefire holds. Because now we can move around again. There is water, there is food—those are the most important things. We’re kind of settled in Deir al-Balah, a city in the central Gaza Strip. Sometimes my dad says, “This isn’t our home. This isn’t the place we were born in. Even if our house is rubble, I want to pitch a tent next to the rubble.” Other times he says, “No, it’s O.K., we’ll endure it.”

I miss the streets, too, but then I feel, Where do I go back to? I can’t tell north from south anymore.