Palestinians Are Refusing to Flee Israeli Bombing in Gaza. ‘If I Die, I Die.’
Many families won’t leave their homes in the north, fearing a repeat of the mass displacement 75 years ago
In 1948, the Abu Sada family was forced out of what is now southern Israel. Many family members made a new life in the town of Jabalia, just north of Gaza City, settling on a plot of land to grow fruits and vegetables.
Now, 75 years later, Israel is telling their descendants to move out again. Israeli airstrikes are raining down all around, including one that killed 10 family members. But the family refuses to budge.
“I don’t care anymore,” said Basil Abu Sada, a 35-year-old software engineer whose great-grandfather first brought the family to Jabalia. He worries that if they leave, they won’t find food or shelter—or ever be able to return. “If I die, I die.”
Hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians are refusing to leave the northern Gaza Strip, which the Israeli military is bombing in advance of an expected ground offensive. Many of the holdouts said that they fear displacement just as much as they do the dwindling supplies of food and water, the daily bombings and the looming invasion.
The trauma of displacement is central to the identity of Palestinians in Gaza. Of the Gaza Strip’s 2.1 million people, more than 1.7 million are descended from refugees who were expelled or fled during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war from land that became the state of Israel. More than 720,000 Palestinians were displaced in that conflict, events that Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or catastrophe in Arabic.
In the current conflict, which was ignited by Hamas militants infiltrating Israel, killing some 1,400 people and taking hostages, the Israeli military has told more than a million Palestinians to move to southern Gaza. The holdouts worry that those who fled south will be forced out of Gaza altogether and into Egypt or some other country, though Cairo and other Arab capitals say they oppose another Palestinian displacement.
Iyad Shobaki, 45, said his family of 10 is staying put in Gaza City. “The emigration of 1948 started like this,” he said. “People said, ‘OK, we’ll leave our houses and come back in one or two weeks,’ but they never did.”
“How can I help my country?” Shobaki said. “I will stay in my house. That’s what I can do.”
Israeli leaders have said they want Gaza residents to evacuate to the south for their own safety, although its military has been bombing the south, too. Israel has said it would create “safe zones” for civilians in the south, and that it doesn’t want to occupy Gaza after the war, the goal of which, it said, is to end the rule of Hamas.
Gaza’s south began receiving humanitarian aid on Saturday, and on Sunday Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari urged the north’s holdouts to move south.
But many Palestinians said they don’t trust the word of the Israeli military and they are staying put. Some are holed up at home. Tens of thousands are sheltering at hospitals and churches, although such locations have been hit, too.
Shobaki, an engineer, said he stays awake every night until 5 a.m. while the rest of his family sleeps, in case something happens. During the day, he monitors Al Jazeera on the solar-powered television in his living room, watching for airstrikes near him.
According to Hamas-led health authorities, Israel’s airstrikes have killed more than 4,600 people in Gaza since the start of the war, although U.S. officials and some experts have disputed that total. At least 42% of housing units across the strip have been destroyed or damaged, according to a U.N. report citing data from Gaza’s housing ministry, also run by Hamas.
Hussein Hamad, a human-rights researcher, said he and his family of 20 are staying at their home in the Tel Zatar district of Jabalia. He said his parents and grandparents fled from Barbara village between the northern border of Gaza and the Israeli city of Ashkelon in 1948, losing their homes and 10 acres of farmland.
“We will not repeat this displacement,” he said. “We will stay until the crisis ends.”
He said living conditions in Jabalia now are stark: no electricity or water, scarce internet connection and a crumbling health system. His family members wait in long lines for bread, fill jerrycans with water from nearby wells and parcel out their remaining food.
“In the face of all this, I have decided to stay and stand firm,” he said. “Either life is decent or we have no need for that life.”
Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East at Columbia University, said the displacement of 1948 looms large for Palestinians in Gaza. “A second displacement is something that understandably they’re going to resist, whether out of Gaza certainly but even from one part of Gaza to another,” he said.
Poet and essayist Mosab Abu Toha, who said his grandparents were expelled from Jaffa in 1948, is staying in the Jabalia refugee camp where his mother was born.
On Thursday night, an uncle’s home in the nearby Al-Shati camp, where Abu Toha was born, was bombed. Besides his grandfather’s home, where he is staying, four other houses also were bombed. “There are still corpses under the rubble,” he said. “I can smell flesh.”
“To be made refugees again, to lose what we already built on this troubled land, is utterly devastating and inhumane,” said Abu Toha, who founded Gaza’s only English-language library and was a Harvard Scholar-at-Risk Fellow in 2019 and 2020.
As the death toll rises, Western leaders have called on Egypt to let people cross safely from Gaza into its territory. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi has resisted, worried that Israel won’t let Palestinians return. Egyptian authorities also are concerned that refugees in the Sinai Peninsula will be vulnerable to extremism after Egypt worked hard to tamp down militancy there.
“Egypt does not want to get involved in any of this,” says Mohannad Sabry, a scholar at King’s College London’s Defense Studies Department and author of a book on Sinai.
Most young people in Gaza have trouble finding work due to a 16-year Israeli and Egyptian blockade on the strip that has choked the local economy. Many wind up stuck in their parents’ homes, unable to marry, buy apartments or have a comfortable life.
Negotiations between Israel and Palestinian leadership to create an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been moribund for years. The West Bank has been occupied by Israel since 1967, while Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, two years after Israeli forces unilaterally withdrew from the territory.
Many of the Palestinian refugees who were displaced in 1948 and fled to Arab countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, said Israeli historian Benny Morris, “weren’t properly absorbed. They were regarded with a degree of contempt as outsiders and potential subversives.” To this day, many of them and their descendants live in suburban slums and crowded buildings.
Roughly 800,000 Jews in Arab countries in 1948 were displaced in the decade and a half that followed—representing most of the Jewish population—with the majority settling in Israel, Morris said. Unlike the Palestinian refugees, he said, they and their descendants never have wanted to go back to their native countries.
There are about six million Palestinian refugees who were either displaced by previous conflicts with Israel or are their descendants, according to a United Nations agency dedicated to them.
They often lack full rights in the countries they are in. In Lebanon, roughly 210,000 of them remain largely on the fringes of society, restricted from working in some sectors and purchasing property.
“There needs to be a more humane way to do this,” said Nadia Hardman, a refugee and migrant rights researcher at advocacy group Human Rights Watch. “There needs to be a pathway to proper legal status and protections while preserving the right of Palestinians to return to where they came from.”
Abdallah Hasaneen, a 23-year-old civic-education trainer and writer who is a descendant of refugees, said that if enough Gazans are forced to migrate to Sinai, it would be the end of the Palestinian issue.
“I would rather die than be a refugee in Sinai or anywhere else,” he said. “This is our land.”
As living conditions deteriorated at shelters for displaced Gaza residents in southern Gaza, some families have decided to return home. A 23-year-old medical volunteer, who asked to be referred to by her first name of Marah, said she and her family struggled for four days in Khan Younis, a city in the south. When they arrived, an airstrike hit a shop nearby. When space ran out at a friend’s home, they slept in an olive grove.
“It wasn’t safe,” she said. “We ran out of water. We ran out of food. No medicine. It’s like dying slowly.”
They returned to Gaza City.
After another airstrike hit a building in front of their home on Friday, she and her family took shelter at a nearby church, then fled south a second time without knowing where they would end up. On Sunday, she said, she found shelter at a friend’s home in the central town of az-Zawayda, crowding in there with 60 other people.
In 1948, she said, her grandfather was displaced from Bir as-Sab’i, a city in the Negev Desert east of Gaza that Israelis now call Beersheba.
She estimated that each building in her neighborhood in Gaza City still has at least one or two families left.
On Saturday, the Israeli military again airdropped leaflets in northern Gaza, this time saying that people who don’t leave may be at risk of being associated with a terrorist organization. An Israeli military spokesman later said Israel won’t treat those who haven’t evacuated as a member of a terrorist group, and that it doesn’t target civilians.
Basil Abu Sada, the software engineer in Jabalia, estimated that about 10% of the people in his neighborhood of Bir Al Na’jathere have stayed.
His family, he said, walks more than 2 miles to the nearest supermarket because driving might attract an airstrike. They live off well water but have no clue how long it will last. When his uncle’s house was destroyed, the family was able to pull from the debris only four of the 10 who died.
“We all wish the war to stop,” he said. “For the future of Gaza, we wish it to be good and safe.”
Anas Babas contributed to this article.
Write to Chao Deng at chao.deng@wsj.com, Stephen Kalin at stephen.kalin@wsj.com and Omar Abdel-Baqui at omar.abdel-baqui@wsj.com
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Appeared in the October 24, 2023, print edition as 'Staying Put in Gaza: ‘If I Die, I Die’'.