The New Yorker:

In October, 2023, I could not imagine anything worse than the destruction in Jabalia refugee camp. But what is happening now outstrips anything I saw there.

By Mosab Abu Toha

Whenever I hear the Arabic word mukhayyam, or camp, my mind leaps to Jabalia refugee camp, in northern Gaza. I was born in Al-Shati refugee camp, a few miles away, but Jabalia was where my maternal grandparents were born, grew up, and had my mother. It is the largest of Gaza’s camps, a place that more than a hundred thousand people call home, and over time its informal settlements grew into a dense collection of concrete structures, which expanded as families added rooms and floors. I studied in Jabalia between fifth and ninth grade. On Fridays, I went shopping there with my mother, and later with my wife.
When I was a boy, I saw how a narrow street in the camp could turn into a sort of makeshift café. On a summer afternoon, someone would bring out a chair to escape the indoor heat and humidity. Another neighbor would join. Soon, a dozen people would be chatting in the street about work, soccer, food, border crossings, family. Each person would talk like a political analyst, a sports commentator, or a food critic. Children would sit on squares of cardboard cut from boxes, listening.

My mother’s parents lived on Hawaja Street, just a twenty-five-minute walk from our house in Beit Lahia. On our way to visit them, we always passed a trash bin so big that people called it “the ship.” Their home had two bedrooms, a living room, and a storage room, which contained a sack of wheat flour and a mattress for guests like me. The kitchen was smaller than a bedroom and had no table, so we ate meals on the living-room floor, our chewing drowned out by the sound of people talking as they shuffled by.

In Jabalia, almost every wall was spray-painted. I remember seeing jokes, messages, phone numbers for cooking-gas providers, and the names of people killed in Israeli strikes. Once, I saw a dark joke: “Neighborhood for Sale.” When there was a big soccer match, the streets and shops emptied. Every café with a TV filled up with Palestinians of all ages. If you weren’t watching, you still knew when there was a goal by the rumble of voices that shook windows and doors. The special thing about life in the camp was that we created our own reasons to celebrate, even if they didn’t last.

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