Our land is now in a death zone
Said Alsaloul The Electronic Intifada 4 September 2026
Yellow concrete blocks are seen in the Shujaiya neighborhood east of Gaza City, 27 July 2026. (Bilal Osama / APA Images)
I live on the western edge of al-Maghazi refugee camp, central Gaza, a few meters from the Salah al-Din highway, which runs the length of Gaza, bisecting its east and west.
Before 2023, our neighborhood was mostly calm. My memories are of breezes in the day and at night; birds singing in the morning; and neighbors’ green backyards.
The noise from traffic on the highway, the honking of horns, were comforting sounds to me. At night, as traffic quieted down, you could look out our windows and see couples walking hand in hand and groups of friends heading out for a picnic.
Yet now, much of the camp is in ruins.
On the afternoon of 6 November 2023, I was at home, giving my siblings an English lesson – I am the oldest of six – when, just as we were wrapping up, everything turned black.
The bombing of the building next door was so heavy to the degree you couldn’t hear or feel it. All I remember from those initial moments is darkness.
After a few seconds, when the dust had settled, I heard screams. People were injured and shouting for help.
Our building was damaged but still standing.
My sister Rola, 16, was injured in her head and bleeding from her arm. I wrapped my T-shirt around her arm.
As my family got out of the building, we tried to flag down passing ambulances. Two were entirely full.
Eventually one stopped and was able to take Rola to the hospital.
Later that night, I returned home to help the Civil Defense workers who were at the scene. They were digging through the rubble, trying to find whoever they could.
The Civil Defense spared no effort in their rescue attempts, but many of my neighbors had died under the rubble.
In the coming months that stretched into years, I saw al-Maghazi targeted by Israeli forces.
Many more neighboring homes were bombed, their residents still inside. To the west of our home, three towering residential buildings were leveled, and to our east, three houses.
What my eyes saw and my hands touched in those months is not easy to paint here in words.
Kids trapped under rubble passed away before we could reach them.
The war was bloody in my neighborhood.
Return to al-Maghazi
After staying with relatives for three weeks, we returned to our home in al-Maghazi and began to clean it out.
The ceiling had essentially collapsed, and three rooms were uninhabitable. Every window and door was blown out.
The market had no construction materials, no glass to replace the windows. We glued sheets of torn plastic and old blankets over the windows to keep out the winter rain and, eventually, the mosquitoes in summer.
My brothers and I spent our days clearing rubble, removing broken concrete blocks out of the hallway, with only our bare hands and a rusted shovel.
We managed to clear one room to sleep in, and we patched the water pipe leading to the kitchen.
Yet the rooms that were completely destroyed, we could do nothing about those at the time.
The house was far from perfect, but it was sufficient for my entire family to live in.
Our lifeline during starvation
Starvation hit us the hardest in December 2024, when Israel blocked the majority of humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.
My family rationed every loaf of bread like it was precious gold. My mother would take a single piece of flat bread and tear it into many pieces, one piece each for me and my siblings.
That was our meal for the day. Some days, we had nothing but water and salt.
Our land in eastern al-Maghazi was our lifeline. Less than a kilometer away from our home, our land had 55 olive trees, 10 palm trees and five fig trees.
We supplemented our diet with anything we could find on our land, including the grassy Egyptian mallow and olives.
Before the war, during the olive harvest in October, family and friends would gather to reap the crop together. On Fridays, my friends Muhammad and Ibrahim would show up at my house before sunrise and we would go to the land together.
I remember Muhammad climbing to the highest branch of the tree with a wooden stick, laughing as he sent olives raining down.
Ibrahim and I dragged the tarps beneath the tree, shouting at Muhammad when he sent olives down from the wrong branch, away from the tarp. We knelt to the ground and picked up the olives with our hands.
The harvest wasn’t just about food. It was about who we were together.
My friends and I grew up under those trees. We told each other secrets, planned our futures.
Fertile land into desert
Then, slowly, Israel cut us off from our lifeline, our land in eastern al-Maghazi, but not before destroying everything we had cultivated.
Just a few weeks before the so-called ceasefire was announced in October 2025, Israeli bulldozers came onto our land and uprooted the trees and razed neighboring agricultural land. They left it like a desert.
A friend of the family, a tree trimmer, told us that he was trimming trees when the tanks and bulldozers approached. He barely escaped with his life.
After the ceasefire, Israeli troops temporarily retreated to the east of our land and we were able to visit it.
Not a single tree was left. What was once green was brown.
We thought we might be able to rehabilitate the land and replant the trees. We began looking for saplings.
But the area was not safe. It was about 200 meters from the Israeli “yellow line,” the boundary imposed by Israel that now encompasses nearly 60 percent of Gaza.
At one point, we managed to go there and gather some firewood from what remained of the uprooted trees. Yet gunfire never stopped in that area.
After a few months, the yellow zone crept closer to our land, moving westward, until it was just a few meters away from it.
Then, in March 2026, we read in the news that the yellow blocks had been installed near the primary schools run by the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) in eastern al-Maghazi.
Soon, the yellow line swallowed our land; that same month, our land was almost an entire kilometer behind the yellow line.
What was once a source of life is now a death zone.
Like a horror movie
At our home in western al-Maghazi, we watched as the yellow line moved closer.
Every morning, the few remaining neighbors share these same concerns when they meet on their way to pick up aid parcels or stand in line for drinking water.
Despite the circumstances, in April 2026 I founded an English-speaking community in Gaza City. Two hundred members have joined classes to improve their English skills.
The group meets in Gaza City. Before the war, reaching Gaza City from al-Maghazi took 15 minutes by car; now, the trip is an hour.
Salah al-Din highway is bumpy and full of potholes, bereft of homes and greenness.
One day this past June, I was on my way to a class when the other drivers warned the vehicle I was in to not travel farther on Salah al-Din because a yellow concrete block – which Israel uses to demarcate the yellow line – had been put up along the road.
We took the risk and traveled the usual route; nothing happened.
The next week, more yellow blocks appeared, all the way up to the edge of the highway.
It was like a horror movie: yellow blocks every 60 meters.
We passed by an area where cars had been pulled over by the Israeli military and passengers were being taken into custody.
On yet another trip in June, I was riding along Salah al-Din highway in a big tarp-covered cart attached to a car. We were about 18 in the back.
The car broke down.
In the distance, we could see tanks, temporary military sites.
Some of us stayed inside the car. Others helped repair the flat tire.
An Israeli tank was not far from us the whole time.
My heart beat heavy in my chest.
Back at home, it feels like we could receive yet another evacuation order. A final one that would subsume Salah al-Din highway and then our home.
How many families will be displaced this month?
Will we wake up and find the yellow blocks west of Salah al-Din highway?
Said Alsaloul is a writer and English teacher in Gaza.