Abdallah Aljazzar
+972 Magazine / October 21, 2025
I didn’t turn back to see my family again after saying goodbye. I felt too ashamed. I was leaving for peace, and all they had was famine and war.
“I need a haircut,” I told my barber, Mohammed. “Okay. The usual?” he asked. “No, I am proposing to my love tomorrow.” The lie came easily: I’m single, and have been for a long time. But I needed the barber’s hand to move with extra purpose and care, because this was no normal haircut.
A little while earlier, the Irish government had called me. It was a Tuesday in August. “Prepare to leave Gaza for Ireland. Maynooth University is ready.” For more than a year, I had rehearsed my departure from my home in Gaza, like my little brother Ali practices flying kites. Now, the rehearsal was over.
I had big plans, but how do you leave your life? How do you give up your home? I wanted to depart with my spine straight, my dignity intact. I didn’t want to feel like I was running away. But to leave home with “dignity”? The word has lost all meaning.
For a start, I finally decided, it means how I look. In the barber’s mirror, I saw a mirage of my brother, Nour — a police officer who has been missing since he vanished during Israel’s bombing of Khan Younis. “How do I look?” I asked him silently. “Do I look human enough for Ireland?”
For my entire life, I had been the one left behind, watching others disappear into the possibility of elsewhere: cousins, friends, acquaintances. But this time, I was the ghost preparing to vanish. My joy was shrouded in fear, like a second skin. What if one Israeli soldier at the Kerem Shalom crossing into Israel decided not to let me leave — or worse? This is the reality of life in Gaza: I knew then that excitement only means getting ready to be disappointed.
That evening, I carried two gallons of water to my makeshift bathroom, and poured it over my body. My skin slowly remembered the feel of being clean. No one would see me cry there, bathed in water and sand, salt and soap, and my own grief.
I dressed in my only clean clothes and moved through the hugs, saving my mum for last. My mother is pure love, incapable of hatred even though hatred has claimed so many of her own. I breathed in the scent of home one final time. Then, stepping outside my tent, my family followed me into the street like a funeral procession.
I found a taxi instead of a donkey cart to carry me from Al-Mawasi to Deir Al-Balah in the center of the Strip, where the evacuation bus would pick me up. At the last moment, it struck me that this might be the final goodbye. What should I say? Before climbing into the taxi, I looked at my little brother Ali and said, “Deer balak ʻala ammak.” I wasn’t sure if he got me. “Ali, you take care, and take care of mum, okay?”
These were my last words to Gaza.
I didn’t turn back to see my family again. I felt too ashamed. I was leaving for peace, and all they had was famine and war. I tried to tell myself that I was leaving so that one day I could bring them out, too. Except I didn’t believe that either.
That night, as I waited for the bus to arrive, I lay on asphalt, using my backpack as a pillow. But I stayed awake, following the Irish instructions with the devotion of a monk. At 3 a.m., I stepped onto the bus and into the unknown, with a group of more than 40 other scholars.
As the bus lurched forward, all I could see was a landscape of ruin, Gaza in fragments, Ali’s eyes with heavy responsibilities, and Nour’s absence. By 7 a.m., we had reached Rafah, the place where I was born. The war had turned it into a graveyard, occupied by forces that made it a no-go zone.
Still, I scanned across broken concrete. Maybe Nour was trapped somewhere, waiting. Nour’s name means light in Arabic, and without him, my life is shrouded in darkness.
At the Karem Abu Salem/Kerem Shalom crossing, one of the officials on the Palestinian side offered me a cigarette. Inside the Strip, a single cigarette cost a day’s wage. I had quit smoking, but took one anyway, for the ritual of this fellowship. Soon I found myself in a circle of fellow exiles, puffing smoke into the morning air, and watching it drift over the border.
Finally, we crossed to the Israeli side. The Irish embassy staff were waiting like angels. They gave us edible food and water that was not rationed. I also witnessed the magic of my visa emerging from a printer. When I looked at it, my eyes lost focus. This one little piece of paper was all it took?
The rest of that journey — to Jordan, then to Turkey, before arriving in Dublin — is still a blur. Yet, in and out of sleep, Nour’s voice kept coming to me: “Carry me with you, not as your weight, but as your wings.”
During the 2014 war, we lost the marble factory that was our family business. A few years later, we rebuilt it, but in 2021 it was partially destroyed. Now, it’s completely gone, along with my house and farm and maybe Nour too.
The announcement of a ceasefire last week felt surreal. All I can think about is getting my family out, to ease their burden, help them find comfort, process the trauma, and start over. But I don’t know how.
At night, I dream Nour is looking for me. “I’m in Ireland, habibi,” I call out to him. “Everything is green and lovely. I have moved into my accommodation in Maynooth. Just one room, but big enough for two. I saved a place for you by the window. Just tell me where you are, habibi. I will come get you.”
I wonder whether he is alive somewhere in the Israeli prisons, unable to reach us. Will he be released as part of the agreement? Will he call me from our family tent in Gaza, saying, “I miss you too, big brother”?
And then, last Tuesday, I woke up to my family calling me. They had met three Palestinians who had just been released from Israeli detention, and they said they had seen Nour. He is alive. He is okay.
I found myself on the ground crying. Just tell me where you are, habibi. I will come get you.
Abdallah Aljazzar is a Palestinian from Gaza
