Hassan Herzallah
The Electronic Intifada / July 21, 2026
The buzz of drones overhead was louder than usual that night.
It was midnight on 7 June, and my family and I were trying to fall asleep in our tent located in Khan Younis’s Al-Mawasi area, in the southern Gaza Strip.
As I was trying to drift off, I heard the sound of tank treads getting closer. For a moment, I thought I was imagining it, but the sound was ominously clear, enough to wake everyone in our tent, including my brother Muhammad (12) who was sleeping beside me.
Muhammad looked at me, fear in his eyes, and asked, “Hassan, can you hear the tanks?”
I thought of saying “no” so he could continue sleeping unworried, but the sound was very loud.
“Yes, I can hear the sound,” I replied to Muhammad before reassuring him and asking him to go back to sleep.
I was overwhelmed with fear, and my memories rewound to the January 2025 ceasefire, when we returned to our neighbourhood in Rafah.
We thought that the genocide was over until the night of 17 March, when we heard the same sounds of tank treads and then shelling. The next morning was when Israel unilaterally ended the ceasefire agreement.
For several hours, we were unable to flee as we couldn’t find a vehicle, so we left without any of our belongings, trekking from Rafah to Al-Mawasi in Khan Younis unscathed.
An invisible line
My brother Muhammad didn’t go back to sleep, and all my attempts to convince him to do so were in vain because the sound of tanks kept roaring from a distance.
We both stayed awake, listening apprehensively before dozing off into a fitful sleep.
When I woke up at sunrise, news had spread across the camp about the new yellow-painted concrete blocks now present in Al-Shakoush area, near our camp, marking a new expansion of the Israeli military zone.
Just the day before, other displaced people from a nearby camp had to flee as those yellow markers were placed close to their residence.
When a military zone moves overnight to just a few kilometers closer from where you are living, the distance between yourself and the danger becomes real. This danger, whether from shelling or random gunfire, or just proximity to the Israeli army, is when you start to wonder if you will be forced to flee yet again.
Within a few hours, all the conversations in our camp were about the Israeli “Yellow Line.”
I hadn’t seen this Yellow Line in person, but I saw its effects on people’s conversations.
Nine months after the pseudo-ceasefire, Israel has continued to expand its military control inside the Gaza Strip. On 28 May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directed the army to seize 70 percent of the Gaza Strip, which the army seems to have achieved.
This means that Palestinians cannot access about two-thirds of Gaza and are being pushed into a very small area because of these yellow concrete blocks.
The conversations were contagious – I started thinking whether our tent would be far enough from that danger and whether we needed to relocate or not.
‘Where else could we go ?’
My family and I lived those initial days in constant fear from the frequent random tank gunfire, but we remained where we were and did not move our tent since there was no place to go.
Two days later, after midnight, my phone screen lit up – my friend Ahmad was calling.
Ahmad Asfour is 30 years old, and before the genocide, he worked as a beekeeper and farmer on his small farm in eastern Khan Younis.
I met Ahmad in September 2025 while I was in Al-Mawasi at a seaside cafe that provided an internet connection.
He would come there every now and then from his nearby displacement camp, located near the Yellow Line, to check on his friend, the owner of the cafe.
Whenever Ahmad and I chatted, he would ask me the same question, “When will you return to Rafah, Hassan, and when will I return to my home in Khan Younis?”
He spoke about returning home whenever we met, as if it was only a matter of time before it happened.
But in the post-midnight call, Ahmad’s voice was different.
“I don’t know where to go,” he told me. “We were forced to flee from our tent due to the mass bombing and the approaching Israeli military.”
“I don’t know where to go. Can I come and stay with you until dawn?” Ahmad asked.
I spoke about this to my father, who instantly welcomed Ahmad and his family to our tent.
After around an hour, Ahmad came with his wife, brother and his ill mother.
His family spent the night at my siblings’ tent while Ahmad stayed at my tent.
After he pulled himself together, he told me how he and his family were sleeping in their tent when, around 12:30 am, “a big explosion” shook the area and “everything turned red.”
“Children were running, mothers were screaming and no one understood what was happening,” he told me.
Ahmad and his family fled the tent with whatever they could grab.
“We had been forced to leave our homes long ago,” he told me with frustration, “and today we were forced to leave even the displacement camp.”
At dawn, Ahmad wanted to return to his tent. I told him to stay until noon at least, but he was adamant on leaving early.
“If I leave that place, where else could we go? There are no places to set up a tent,” he said.
He went alone, and after a few hours, he safely returned and told me that their “tent was severely damaged because of the explosions, gunfire and the movement of Israeli tanks nearby.”
“I saw people trying to gather their stuff and leave the camp,” he said.
Despite their camp now being a dangerous place, Ahmad took his family and returned because they have no alternatives.
I check up on Ahmad regularly, and he is afraid of another round of displacement, just like the night when he called me.
I share Ahmad’s worries, as do my family and our neighbours in the camp. Every day, the same conversations – of getting displaced again because of the Israeli Yellow Line – are circulating in the camp.
As long as Israel keeps expanding its invisible Yellow Line, there is no guarantee that the place I am living in now – the tent – may remain tomorrow.
The Yellow Line is not just an arbitrary marking on the map – it is a new way to measure the distance between our tent and new rounds of displacement.
Hassan Herzallah is a Gaza-based Palestinian writer
