Abdullah Hany Daher writes:

In Gaza, the landscape changes faster than memory can keep up. Every neighborhood carries its own scars, some fresh, some already fading into dust. Places once familiar become unrecognizable overnight; streets you walked yesterday may not be there tomorrow. On this shifting ground, home is not just a structure. It is a fragile anchor to a previous version of life, one that can vanish without warning. Losing this place means losing the map inside you.

I remember the first time I saw our house after it was hit. It was May 2024. I stopped in the street, staring at the roof. A missile had torn through it, leaving a wound wide open to the sky. I stepped inside slowly. The door wouldn’t open all the way, the paint peeled off the walls in rough patches. The air was thick with dust and the smell of burnt concrete. I tried to see it as someone else’s home, but I couldn’t. This was ours, the place that had shaped me since childhood.

I cried—not in the quiet way I had learned during the war. My head tilted back, eyes locked on the hole above me, and I let it happen. I cried because the sky was now inside without permission. Because sunlight fell on broken tiles instead of on the living room floor. Because one strike could erase years of living.

In June 2025, I returned. This time there was no house. Not damaged, not wounded—gone. Scraped from the earth as if it had never stood there. I stood where the living room had been, staring at dirt and scattered stone. I thought my chest would collapse. It didn’t. In place of tears, a strange stillness. That’s when I learned what it means for grief to run dry, to be left with only emptiness. Losing a home in one sudden blow knocks you down. Watching it disappear piece by piece teaches you how to live in the ruins. [Continue reading…]