Donya Ahmad Abu Sitta
The Electronic Intifada / July 23, 2026
Since the genocide began, I have kept a diary of my countless displacements, but, after the first 10 moves, the entries all seemed pointless and repetitive.
11 October 2023: Moved to a UN school after Israeli explosions shook our home.
5 December 2023: Moved to Rafah; sniper was meters away from the UN school.
13 June 2025: Moved to al-Mawasi after Israeli forces launched another ground invasion of Khan Younis. Weather was hot; transportation unavailable due to lack of fuel.
In those previous displacements, we’ve been forced to leave rented homes and apartments after following evacuation orders, sometimes leaving everything behind. But with this latest displacement, there was no evacuation order, no immediate threat: The owners of the apartment we were renting wanted to sell it.
My family and I had lived in this apartment in western Khan Younis, at the Al-Namsawi Towers, for nearly a year. From the fifth-floor balcony of the apartment, we had a view of the back side of the Nasser Medical Complex, where we could see the funerals of martyrs and hear the sirens of ambulances following every explosion from Israeli bombs.
As a medical student, the location was convenient, as I didn’t have to walk far to the trainings and workshops held at Nasser, always packed with students, some of us sitting two to a chair.
At one workshop, we learned how to stitch up wounds. We didn’t have enough stitching kits so we shared, and I later practiced at home.
Our move-out date approached, and we still hadn’t found a new place to live.
For weeks, every member of my family joined in the search.
We asked residents and questioned shop owners about potential homes. We also called friends for help and looked on Facebook pages.
But to no avail.
Finally, we decided to look further afield. A friend of my brother Hassan told us about a place near the Abu Hmeid roundabout in Khan Younis; the owners of the place had been his neighbours before the genocide.
Yet, there was one problem. The home was located in the so-called orange zone, an area that is adjacent to the occupation’s yellow line.
The orange line has been drawn up this year amid Israeli moves to increase the proportion of Gaza which it fully controls. On 29 May, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, announced that he had instructed the military to expand its direct occupation so that it covers 70 percent of Gaza’s territory.
Everything behind the yellow line – homes, agricultural land and everything in between – is off-limits to us.
Still, we had no choice, we had to be out of the house.
We immediately got to work preparing for the move.
Leaning Tower of Pisa
We moved out of our Khan Younis apartment on 18 June.
One driver with a donkey cart refused us transport, claiming his donkey was tired and he wanted to rest it.
When my brother Karim told me this, I wondered to myself: “Has the comfort of a donkey become more important than the comfort of a human being?”
The house is located about 1.5 kilometers from the yellow line. From our doorstep, I cannot see the yellow concrete blocks that the occupation has set up.
However, if I walk north for about 15 minutes, I would see them. Then, if I was to head south for about the same amount of time, I would see more.
Yet walking in either of these directions is dangerous.
Opposite our new home, a three-story apartment building, is a small supermarket, and a little farther ahead is a prayer tent. On all other sides are ruined houses and piles of rubble.
Our new house did not seem entirely like a house. To be more precise, it was a collection of concrete columns enclosed mostly by tarps instead of walls.
My brother Hassan had repaired some of the walls, though they were still damaged.
Inside was a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom and a balcony that slanted more than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Anyone standing on it would be likely to fall from the second floor to the ground.
My sisters and I spread out like bees in a hive, each person tidying up an area of the house. Jannah and Noha tidied up the living room, with its roof half-eaten by the force of bombs to neighbouring homes, and I cleaned the kitchen.
I wiped the limited surfaces, a wooden shelf along the wall and a metal sink, and then above it a window that looks out over demolished houses as far as the eye can see.
I heard my brother calling out, “Muhammad, Muhammad!”
Muhammad, a university student, is another resident of the building, in the apartment above us.
Muhammad came by, and Salman asked him: “Where can I find drinking water nearby?”
A few minutes later, Muhammad returned carrying a 20-liter water jug. We had to subsist on this amount for two days, since the water truck did not come to the area on Friday.
We stopped cleaning at midnight. We hadn’t eaten all day, but we were so tired we didn’t even feel hungry.
I went to bed but, since I was restless about our new home and its dangerous location, I did not sleep that night.
A sleepless first night
That first night, my mind traced over my worst memories of the genocide.
Such as when an occupation sniper was near our home in the al-Amal neighbourhood in Khan Younis, and we were forced to avoid windows, to crawl on the floor.
Then I thought about the time a special forces unit entered the al-Shaboura camp in Rafah at the beginning of 2024 and the quadcopters hovered low and targeted anyone who moved.
My mind considered all these scenarios, as if helping me plan for them. How would I respond if anything like that happened tonight?
I messaged my close friend Baraa: “I feel like there are people under the rubble surrounding me from all sides.”
She replied that I wasn’t just feeling that and that certainly people were under the rubble.
I fell asleep wondering about the people under the rubble.
Did they live for a long time under the rubble?
Did they suffer?
Had their calls to rescuers gone unheard?
I hoped that one day they could be buried.
The first shelling
I woke up the next day and felt relieved that the first night had passed peacefully. I drank tea by the fire with my family and then went to the kitchen to arrange and unpack our dishes.
It was around noon, on 19 June.
The house shook and some dishes fell from the shelf. I could hear the sounds of things being torn apart, yet I didn’t hear people screaming.
It was as if people had grown accustomed to the shelling.
I went to the balcony with my brothers and sisters. About 200 meters away was a cloud of white smoke rising above the destroyed homes.
We watched as it rose and then dissipated. It appeared to us to be an Israeli strike on a building.
We returned back inside and cleaned up what had fallen down. We spent the rest of the day cleaning.
By nightfall we were so tired we went to bed early.
Yet only a few hours later, we woke up to the sound of gunfire. We searched online for any information about what was happening, but we could find no news.
We were in a zone that seemed to be beyond news coverage.
My mother told us to stay away from the windows.
A few hours later, we heard the sounds of tanks, a metallic clatter and grinding.
What could we do? We had no choice but to go back to sleep.
Some of us managed to fall asleep, and some of us couldn’t.
Our first month
We have now been in the house for over a month.
The water truck comes twice a week.
People line up and wait for its arrival. From there, hoses extend from the tanks on the truck, and we fill our containers.
Obtaining drinking water is a separate ordeal. We pump water from our thousand-liter rooftop tank, which lasts us for about three or four days.
For bread, we have to go to the city center to buy it because there is no bakery in the area.
Adjusting to the new home hasn’t been easy.
There is no stable internet connection in the area, and we are still making repairs to the house, as it has no proper water or sewage system. Our most recent improvement involved partitioning off a space with a nylon curtain for my brothers from the main living area.
Quadcopters approach the neighbourhood daily, morning and evening, to film and survey the area.
Yet I have grown to feel more comfortable in the house now since, safety-wise, there is no truly safe place in Gaza.
Donya Ahmad Abu Sitta is a writer in Gaza
