Lujayn
New Lines Magazine / May 14, 2025
Sharing a taxi across Gaza’s desolate landscape, a young Palestinian writer bears witness to a people’s history of dispossession
In our search for shelter in southern Gaza, we headed to a field hospital after hearing that a medical delegation had arrived from abroad. My mother was in desperate need of treatment for abdominopelvic injuries sustained during the 2014 war, but there was no medicine to ease her pain. We left the small room where we were staying, located in Rafah’s al-Mawasi area, and walked for half an hour through the sand dunes. My mother finally spotted a car coming our way and we flagged it down, grateful for a ride.
Next to us in the taxi sat an elderly woman, likely in her late 70s, cradling a little girl no older than 4. The child’s gaze was fixed on my mother with an intensity that at first surprised me. A man holding a small boy shared the front seat with a younger man. The car was packed with more people than usual, but this is Gaza’s reality, where fuel is scarce and means of transportation few. We were lucky to have found a taxi at all.
The driver was locked in a heated debate with the man in the front seat about the escalating events and who was to blame. The young man, who was holding a falafel sandwich wrapped in a piece of paper, joined the conversation. He unwrapped the sandwich and noticed that the paper was a map of the world. He pointed to the tiny distance between Palestine and the rest of the world and wondered aloud why the entire globe seemed incapable of sending the aid needed to save the people of Gaza.
The little boy sitting next to him said, “Those are short distances,” causing the young man to give a quick geography lesson on borders and distances.
The elderly woman remarked, “You know more than most your age.”
“My father taught me the geography and history of the world,” the young man replied, his voice heavy with pain: “Arab, Islamic, European, American, African, and Asian.”
“Where is your father now?” the driver asked.
“I don’t know,” the young man answered. “We were displaced from Jabalia: me, my mother, and my siblings. We don’t know if he was captured or killed.”
“May God return him to you safely,” the woman responded. “You’re better off than I am. At least you still have hope that he’s alive. Both of my sons and their families were killed when their tents in Khan Younis were bombed.” She pointed at the little girl: “All I have left is this little one.”
I took out a biscuit and tried to give it to the little girl, but she shook her head. My mother took the biscuit and gently placed it in the girl’s hand, saying, “Take it, my dear.”
The girl accepted it from my mother with a big smile. The elderly woman smiled too and said, “You look a lot like her mother.”
I now understood why the little girl had been staring at my mother. She saw in her the face of her own martyred mother.
A massive explosion suddenly shook the ground and the entire car fell silent. Everything on the road — if you could call it a road — came to a halt. The path was covered with tattered tents and makeshift stalls selling goods, with a long queue of people waiting to fill up their containers with water. After a few minutes, we moved forward and found that an Israeli missile had struck a group of young men who had been sitting by a tent, charging their phones and searching for an internet connection. Their bodies were scattered across the ground.
The atmosphere in the car got heavy with sadness, grief and bitterness. The elderly woman tried to distract us. “Where are you all from?” she asked.
“From central Gaza,” the driver answered.
The old man beside him said, “I’m a ’48 refugee from Fallujah” — he was displaced during the Nakba.
The young man said, “I’m from Jabalia,” the refugee camp in northern Gaza. He, too, was a child of parents displaced during the Nakba.
“I’m a ’67 refugee,” said the elderly woman, recalling her life in the Jordan-controlled West Bank before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
Then my mother spoke.
“I’m a mix of all of you,” she said, “My family were ’48 refugees who fled their small village to Gaza, and ’67 refugees who went abroad. I returned to Gaza in 2008. Now, I live here.”
The elderly woman asked, “Why did you come back?”
“There’s no place like my homeland,” my mother replied. “If I could turn back time, I would make the same decision to return.”
We finally arrived at the hospital. We stepped out of the taxi, bidding farewell to the woman and her granddaughter.
The hospital was nothing more than a cluster of tents. Our entry number was 300. My mind was still heavy from the burdens of memory that the small taxi had carried. Each passenger was weighed down by their own story of pain. And now it had all flowed into a shared experience of loss. The war that began in 2023 had displaced us anew and marked a new phase in our dispossession.
As we went our separate ways, the image of that little girl, her searching eyes and lost expression, was seared into my mind. She was searching for the mother she had lost in the faces of others. In the rubble of Gaza, amid all the devastation, we too pine for the country that was once ours.
Lujayn (15), is a writer residing in central Gaza after the destruction of her home in Gaza City and several forced displacements
This story was translated into English by The Lighthouse Collective, an international group of translators with roots in Gaza, founded by Rebecca Ruth Gould
