Homeless and hungry, Palestinians fear a repeat of 1948 history

The night was warm and lovely as the Abu Samra family gathered outside their home in the northern Gaza Strip in September 2023, the smell of mint from the garden filling the air.

As always, the family patriarch recounted how, as a 10-year-old in 1948, he was forced from his village in what is now Israel, one of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced in what they call the Nakba -- "the catastrophe."

The patriarch, Abdallah Abu Samra, had told the story often, each time focusing on different details to ensure his family would remember them. One day, he hoped, they would all return.

Within weeks, that prospect seemed more distant than ever.

Hamas waged its surprise attack on Israel, storming across the border on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people -- most of them civilians, according to the Israeli government -- and seizing about 250 others as hostages. Israel then launched its war in Gaza, killing tens of thousands and leaving generations of Palestinians to experience displacement and hunger, and the fear that they would never see their homes again.

The Abu Samra family and many other Palestinians say they have always lived in the shadow of the Nakba. And from the first moments of the war, as Israeli warplanes started dropping bombs and flyers ordering mass evacuations, their worries of another Nakba rose.

Since then, nearly 2 million people -- about 90% of the population -- have been driven from their homes and displaced within Gaza, many of them repeatedly, according to the United Nations.

In recent weeks, Israel's Defense Ministry has promoted a plan to force much of Gaza's population into an area near the Gaza-Egypt border, which legal experts warn would violate international law by displacing hundreds of thousands of people indefinitely. Palestinians in northern Gaza now face that prospect again as the Israeli military plans a full assault on Gaza City.

"We are in a bigger Nakba now," said Abu Samra, a retired teacher.

Israelis have long objected to the characterization of the 1948 conflict as a catastrophe. For them, it was a war of survival. A little more than two years ago, when the United Nations held a commemoration for the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel's formation, Israel's U.N. ambassador denounced the event as "shameful" for "adopting the Palestinian narrative calling the establishment of the state of Israel a disaster."

The mass displacement nearly 80 years ago -- and the rival narratives about it -- are among the most intractable issues in the long conflict between the two sides, with Palestinians and their descendants demanding, and Israel rejecting, the right to return to the land they fled in 1948.

In the current war in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government says that because Hamas has burrowed deep into -- and under -- Gaza's neighborhoods and infrastructure, residents must leave civilian areas. It has said that its displacement orders are temporary, to get civilians out of harm's way and mitigate casualties.

The Palestinians haven't been driven out of Gaza itself. But Israel's displacement of civilians and destruction of neighborhoods "appears to be a push for a permanent demographic shift in Gaza that is in defiance of international law and is tantamount to ethnic cleansing," said the U.N.'s human rights chief, Volker Türk.

Israel is also encouraging what it calls "voluntary" emigration for people to leave Gaza entirely but has not found countries willing to take them in large numbers. Human rights experts say that any mass, so-called voluntary emigration would also constitute a kind of ethnic cleansing because conditions in Gaza have become so unlivable that many Palestinians will have no real choice but to leave.

The language used by some members of Netanyahu's government has added to Palestinians' fears. Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said that Israeli forces were "destroying everything that's left of the Gaza Strip" and were "conquering, cleansing, and remaining in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed."

The Abu Samra family, about 20 in all, said they began fleeing on the first day of the war, when Israeli bombs struck so close to their home that the walls shook. It was the start of a cycle of displacements, until they eventually split up to find shelter. Some relatives died in Israeli strikes, the family said. Others fled to neighboring Egypt and now wonder if they will ever return home, or if there will be anything left to return to.

Abu Samra, now 87 and frail, has been stuck in southern Gaza, in a tent of tarps, a curtain and blankets. Once again, he is scared, hungry and separated from most of his family, just as he was as a boy.

"I always think, talk and dream" of going home, he said.

For a brief window this year, a ceasefire allowed some Palestinians to go back to their neighborhoods. Many found only rubble. Nearly 80% of buildings have been damaged or destroyed, with more being cleared as Israel now expands its military campaign. The World Bank estimated that it could take 80 years to rebuild the homes that have been destroyed.

"With the news and what is happening, we are losing hope that we'll ever be able to return," said Ghada Abu Samra, 25, Abdallah Abu Samra's granddaughter, who managed to flee to Egypt.

For many Palestinians, the Nakba is not only a traumatic memory but also a matter of identity. About 1.7 million of the 2.2 million people in Gaza are either refugees from the war surrounding the establishment of Israel in 1948 or their descendants, according to the U.N. And while most have never lived outside Gaza, many consider themselves refugees from the lands their families fled -- including villages nearly wiped off the map.

Survivors of the 1948 war say that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were told at the time that they would be allowed to return to their villages in what is now Israel after a few days or weeks. Many just took a few belongings and the keys to their front doors.

They were not allowed back.

The key to a house, often called the key of return, is such a powerful symbol for Palestinians that many families hold onto theirs, even for homes inside Israel that no longer exist.

In the current war in Gaza, incendiary comments by Israeli leaders raised Palestinians' fears that history was about to repeat itself.

"We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba," the Israeli agriculture minister, Avi Dichter, said a few weeks into the war. "Gaza Nakba 2023."

Israel says it opened humanitarian corridors to allow people to find safety, and that it communicated its evacuation orders in flyers, text messages and phone calls.

Human rights groups counter that the war has rendered so much of Gaza uninhabitable that it is leading to permanent displacement, a potential war crime.

Some, like Human Rights Watch, call the displacement an intentional part of Israeli policy that amounts to a crime against humanity. Two prominent Israeli groups have joined some other international organizations in accusing the government of committing genocide for killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, razing huge areas, displacing nearly all of Gaza's population and restricting food.

Israel has rejected the accusations as deliberate misrepresentations.

"It is misguided and deeply misleading to portray the IDF's extensive efforts to minimize civilian harm as tools for forcible displacement," it said, referring to the Israel Defense Forces.

In January, when Israel and Hamas struck a brief ceasefire deal, members of the Abu Samra family cried tears of joy, thinking it might offer a chance to go back home.

They had grown up on Abdallah Abu Samra's stories of displacement in 1948, and before the current war, some had even felt a twinge of resentment at the older generation for leaving what is now Israel and winding up in Gaza.

Abu Samra had spent his early childhood living off about 100 acres his father owned in the farming village of Iraq Suwaydan -- about 15 miles north of the present-day Gaza border -- harvesting grains and picking figs.

In 1948, Abu Samra said that he and an older brother had gone to the edge of the village to grind wheat when hundreds of residents, including his family, suddenly had to flee. He and his brother walked east, while their family walked south.

People left with very few belongings -- some clothes, blankets and a bit of food -- believing they would return within days, he said.

"The most important thing is the key to the house," he recalled. "Everyone locked their door and took the key in the hopes that they would be gone only a short period."

Days turned into weeks, then into long, hungry months. Finally, in 1949, Abu Samra and his brother reunited with their family in a refugee camp in Gaza.

That was the story he recounted on that September night in 2023, as he had so many nights before.

"I wanted to plant in the minds of my descendants who didn't live the Nakba," he explained.

His daughter, Abeer Abu Samra, said she never fully understood the stories until Israeli bombs began falling near the family home in Gaza after the attack Oct. 7, 2023, shaking the walls, followed by the Israeli orders to leave.

"We always used to say, 'Why did they leave? Why did they leave their homes?' But then," said Abeer Abu Samra, 52, trailing off for a moment, "then we went through the same trial."

Like those who fled in 1948, family members thought they would leave their homes for just a few days. Many took only a few changes of clothes. And their keys.

It was the start of nearly two years of repeated displacements. The family -- grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, children -- took to the road.

Ghada Abu Samra and about a dozen other relatives found shelter in a one-room house in central Gaza, sharing eight thin mattresses, they said. The women and girls slept inside, while the men and boys slept on the terrace.

Most days, they shared a single meal, they said -- often stale bread and lentils. It reminded Abu Samra of the meal that her grandfather survived on in 1948 -- stale bread and tea.

Soon, they fled again, south to the city of Rafah.

"As we kept getting displaced further south, I kept losing faith that I would ever go back," Ghada Abu Samra said.

"Some people say, 'I wish I had been crushed along with my house,'" she added. "Sometimes I feel that way, too."

Everywhere she goes, she still carries with her the key to her home in northern Gaza, which has long since been reduced to rubble, she said.

"It's my only reminder of home," she said of the key.

Her aunt, Abeer Abu Samra, carries the key to her home as well.

"It often occurs to me, will these keys become like the 1948 keys of return?" she said.

"I don't expect to return," she started, then stopped herself. "No, we'll return, we'll return," trying to convince herself.

As life in Gaza became unbearable, some members of the Abu Samra family left the enclave entirely, paying more than $5,000 each to get to Egypt, having organized several GoFundMe campaigns to raise money.

But Abdallah Abu Samra refused to leave Gaza. "I've had enough of being uprooted," he would say.

Only when most of his family members were trying to leave did he finally relent, but then was denied Israeli permission to leave Gaza. The family said they were told that he had a "security block," with no further explanation. Israeli officials declined to comment about Abu Samra's case for this article.

Much of Abu Samra's family has left, settling in Egypt for now. Abu Samra remained in Gaza, moving frequently to escape the Israeli military invasion and bombardment, going from shelters to friends' homes to tents.

Around him in the crowded encampment where he and his wife are now, people have grown thin and frail as hunger has grown more severe. In some parts of Gaza, conditions are so dire that international monitors have officially declared a famine. Abu Samra survives on money his family sends him from abroad.

He thinks less about ever returning to his childhood village in present-day Israel. Even getting back to northern Gaza seems unlikely. But he dreams of it anyway -- to erect a tent next to the rubble that was his home.

"I'm not leaving Gaza for anything," he said from his flimsy shelter of tin sheets and tarps. "I have had enough of being displaced since I was a child."