On The Ground newsletter: Get a weekly dispatch from our international correspondentsGet a weekly dispatch from our international correspondentsGet a weekly international news dispatch“We’re going south to camp in a tent. You can play in the sand. It’s just a trip and then we can go home.”This is what I was forced to tell my three-year-old daughter last week, as I prepared to evacuate her, my wife, and our newborn baby girl out of Gaza City, while Israeli forces advanced. I had to pretend we were going on a camping trip to the south of the besieged Strip. I wanted to spare her the danger, suffering, and terror of the truth that we were being forcibly displaced for the eighth time.She laughed and got excited for the “holiday”, packing her favourite knapsack, which has a purple stuffed sheep on the front.“To the south!” she said, doing a little dance.This is the reality of being a father and a journalist in Gaza, where Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing ahead with a widened offensive to take all of Gaza City and enforce a boots-on-ground occupation of the Strip. open image in galleryNedal with his three-year-old daughter, preparing to flee for the eighth time as Israel advances (Nedal Hamdouna)Nearly all the two million people who live in Gaza have been forced to flee their homes multiple times, and over 90 per cent of homes have been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN. I am one of those people. We’re originally from the far north of Gaza – Beit Lahia. I last saw our home, famous for its strawberry fields and orange groves, before the last ceasefire collapsed in March.Two months earlier, I had walked from where I had been displaced in the south back to Beit Lahia on foot to reach my town. It took me about 11 hours. With every step, I carried hope and a longing to hug my land and my home.My home had been partially destroyed. Since then, Israel has intensified its strikes on the north – and I don’t know if it’s still standing. I have no idea whether I’ll ever be able to fulfil the promise I made to my daughter to go back.For the past few months, we’ve been camping in a partially destroyed building in Gaza City. My wife gave birth to our newborn last month, in the dark, in the middle of bombing. I managed to get her to a hospital, but there were hardly any medical supplies, it’s a nightmare. And baby milk now costs $30 (£22).We didn’t want to move again, but Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to take full military control of Gaza City. And last week Israel dropped leaflets from planes telling us that if we didn’t evacuate, we could be killed. This is the eighth time since October 2023 we’ve obeyed military evacuation orders, not counting the many times we’ve been chased from place to place within the same city. We’ve criss-crossed the length and breadth of Gaza, trying to escape tanks, fighter jets, drones, and bombs.Each time I’m displaced, I feel as if I’m dying inside. It’s a nightmare that haunts me endlessly, a vortex of exhaustion and fear, moving constantly, waiting for the unknown.It can cost over £1,000 each time to evacuate to cover the costs of transport, fuel, bits of wood to build a tent, tarpaulin to drape over it, and a patch of land to call your own.The tent alone now costs as much as £750 – if you can even find one. Those tents need waterproofing for winter. Today, almost every Palestinian in Gaza needs a new tent. The ones that survive have been almost completely destroyed over two years of war. Even wood and tent materials now cost five times what they used to.Each time we are displaced it begins with the desperate search for a place – a patch of barren land, rubble, beach, or farm – to stay.open image in galleryNedal returned to his destroyed family home in north Gaza in January (Nedal Hamdouna / The Independent)This time, I had to risk bombing and gunfire to travel south ahead of my family, in order to try to secure a patch of land without a tent already on it. Prices of rent were already rising with the news of evacuation orders.First, I went to the so-called “humanitarian zone” in Al-Mawasi near Khan Younis, but there was no room to pitch a tent or even walk freely.So I went on to the central area – Deir al-Balah – and found some empty plots of sand and farmland. The owners are now asking for double what they charged in previous months or years. Just the land alone costs $100 per month, with no water supply. I had to hand-dig a latrine in the sand and line it with cement to keep my family from getting sick. Renting a flat in Deir al-Balah is impossible: the price has reached $2,000 a month, that’s if you can even find one.Even getting south is dangerous and expensive. You first have to find a driver with a working car. That alone costs hundreds of dollars, even just for a few hours’ drive down Rashid Street, a coastal road and the only way to the south now. Fuel is prohibitively expensive, a litre of fuel now costs 100 shekels (around £22), which I’m told is 16 times the price in the UK. Some people use synthetic homemade fuel by burning plastic, which costs 50 shekels per litre, but it is dangerous and toxic. open image in galleryFleeing Israel’s bombing: ‘I have to pretend to my toddler we’re just going on a camping trip’ (Nedal Hamdouna)Together with my daughter and her purple backpack, we packed the car with everything we had salvaged: you have to carry all you own, as markets are empty – there are no kitchen utensils, no blankets, no mattresses – and prices are through the roof. Many families move on donkey carts because it’s slightly cheaper. On the road, everyone we saw was panicking, terrified there wouldn’t be time to escape the bombing. We also saw dozens of broken-down cars lacking spare parts, overloaded with people and belongings.And this is my fear: where will everyone go? There are a million people in Gaza City. Where will they find space in the south? Who can afford the skyrocketing costs that have doubled since the latest evacuation orders?And how will everyone survive? Everyone in Gaza is suffering from a water crisis and a shortage of cooking gas. People cook with firewood, which now costs 8 shekels per kilo. Many are breaking furniture – doors, windows, bed frames – so they can feed their fires. People queue for hours for water trucks. Women, children, and the elderly often walk hundreds of metres just to fill a single gallon. Every day is a deadly fight to survive: just to get water, food from a shop, or emergency aid.As I write this, some of Gaza City’s tallest towers and historic landmarks have been destroyed – buildings that stood for decades, wiped away in moments. It is unbearably painful to watch the last of what remains being reduced to rubble.open image in gallerySmoke rises as an evacuated residential building, which was housing displaced Palestinians, collapses after it was hit by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City (Reuters)There is only one chink of hope: that the planned invasion of Gaza City will be cancelled and that the forced displacement of its residents will end, before it’s too late.After two years of abandoning us and silence from the outside world, “humanity” has become a hollow word.And so I ask the planet: Save Gaza. Do not let it all end up like Rafah, Beit Lahia, and Jabalia, razed to the ground in ash and rubble.I write this still dreaming of returning to Beit Lahia – to the orange and apple groves, to the trees whose leaves have now withered from thirst, to the birds that died in their cages from hunger and fear.I write with the desperate hope that I might return one day to embrace the broken walls of my home – and piece together what remains of my memories.
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My evacuation from Gaza City: ‘I told my terrified toddler we’re going camping’
