How Does It Feel When Your City Is Destroyed?

What can a person do when they have become without a city, without shelter?

By Ahmed Abu Artema

A video clip shows an elderly woman kissing the door of her home in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood of Gaza City as she bids farewell before fleeing to the south. The woman, weeping, comments on the moment of leaving her home:

“This house is very, very dear to me. I lived in it for twenty years and built it stone by stone. I left my home against my will, and my heart is bleeding for it.”

She leaves without knowing if the house will stand if she ever returns.

Wiping Gaza off the map is an old Israeli dream expressed by the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1992, when he said: “I wish I could wake up one day and find that Gaza has sunk into the sea.”

Turning these dreams into reality was nothing more than a matter of opportunity and ability. The destructive desire did not suddenly emerge in Israel’s behaviour after October 7th. All that happened was that the opportunity came.

It started within Rafah, a city that housed 1.5 million residents and displaced people. The entire population was forcibly evacuated by Israel in May 2024, and then its entire neighbourhoods and homes were destroyed, turning the city into a huge pile of rubble.

The media covered the story closely in the first days, then it became routine news, and then it was no longer news at all. The destruction of houses and the blowing up of entire residential blocks with explosive robots became a routine, ordinary activity of the Israeli army.

The supporting governments did not take serious steps to hold Israel accountable, which only whetted its appetite for more. So, it went on to destroy most of the city of Khan Younis in the south, as well as the Jabalia refugee camp, Beit Lahia, and Beit Hanoun in the north.

Then it moved on to Gaza City, the centre of the Gaza Strip and the symbol of Palestinian resilience. Despite the fragile ceasefire, Israel wants to destroy this icon because for them, it stands for defiance.

What does it mean for a city to be erased from existence?

I was one of the people who had to flee Rafah.

When I returned to the city on the first day of the January 2025 ceasefire, I could not recognise the city, where I had lived for more than twenty years.

I tried to find streets and intersections to recognise familiar landmarks, but they weren’t there. They had been completely wiped out. I entered my neighbourhood, but it no longer existed. Israeli bulldozers had demolished all the neighbours’ homes and piled the rubble into a single mound.

I got a headache and felt dizzy, so I quickly left, my clothes and hair covered with the dust of the rubble.

Erasing a city from existence is a horrific crime against the soul, being and memory. A city is not merely buildings and streets that can be rebuilt. A city is a person’s sense of rootedness, stability, and standing on solid ground.

The city where we were born and raised, where we met relatives, neighbours, and friends.

Every corner of the city is filled with memories. This was the street I used to walk every morning thirty years ago on my daily way to school. And here was the restaurant where we used to buy our almost daily meal of falafel and hummus.

This corner of the street was also a meeting place for neighbours every evening to talk and share thoughts about politics and society.

Over there was the market, bustling with people and the calls of vendors.

This square was full of life. In the days leading up to the holidays, you could barely find a place to step because of the crowds.

I used to walk here with my family, going from shop to shop to buy what we needed. And if the trip went on too long, we’d have a meal at a restaurant known for its delicious dishes (kabab or shawarma), or a glass of juice (sugarcane or mango) to quench our thirst.

Here was the mosque where I used to pray, and above it was the library where, when in middle school, I began discovering geography, history, and literature through reading.

And that high hill, now occupied by tanks and bulldozers, with trenches and earthen barriers dug into it—I used to go there seeking moments of calm, watching the sun sink into the sea at sunset when I was in my early twenties.

The city knows us just as we know it. My city tried to resist the global tide of individualism by keeping social ties strong. Most families were of refugee origin, displaced by Israel during the Nakba of 1948. The grandparents came and settled here, then their children grew up, got married, and had children. The third generation then grew up, married, and had children in the same place. Thus, relationships have extended across generations. It was rare to walk down a city street without someone who knew you stopping, greeting you, and asking about you and your father.

Is it really true that I am now using the past tense “was” to describe those details that remained “present” for nearly forty years of my life?

Destroying a city means uprooting people from the land they grew up in.

It means losing the sense of safety, warmth, and stability in one’s life, and suddenly finding themselves standing on ground that trembles and shifts beneath their feet.

People were torn from their city as the soul is torn from the body. They were forced to leave under the threat of the machinery of death. They fled with the bare minimum of belongings—only what they could carry. Some didn’t even have time to take anything from their homes because the shelling intensified from every direction. All they could do was try to save themselves and their children.

Hundreds of thousands suddenly found themselves homeless in the streets—no shelter to protect them, no wall to lean on.

They left behind years of toil, their life savings, memories of beautiful days, and dreams of a brighter tomorrow.

Israel deceived the people of the city and the world by claiming it would be a limited operation to counter terrorism. Yet the operation stretched on for more than half a year, resulting in the destruction of the entire city.

A look at the map of total destruction makes it clear that this destruction was not driven by operational necessities. Rather, it was the intended strategy.

Recently, it sought to complete the mission in the largest city, Gaza.

The Israeli military began applying pressure through intense bombing and massacres to force nearly one million people in Gaza City to leave. Israel was trying to appear generous by allowing people to leave the city and by merely destroying it without killing all its residents. This is what Prime Minister Netanyahu boasted about in his speech to Congress on July 24, 2024, when he said: “We did not kill a single civilian in Rafah because Israel got civilians out of harm’s way!!”

Of course, the claim that Israel did not kill civilians in Rafah is a blatant lie, refuted by reports from every credible human rights organisation. But the most dangerous aspect of this statement is that Netanyahu used the euphemistic phrase “getting civilians out of harm’s way”—a rhetorical attempt to normalise the crime of forcible displacement, followed by the total destruction of an entire city.

His statement was met with loud applause from members of Congress.

On October 1, 2025, Defence Minister Yisrael Katz threatened that anyone who remained in Gaza City would be considered terrorists and terror supporters. In other words, the Israeli defence minister publicly declared in the media that all civilians would become legitimate targets for killing.

The people of Gaza feared a repeat of the Rafah experience, so many refused to leave despite the high risks to their lives and the lives of their families.

The defenceless people faced their fate alone. They had to choose between leaving their city forever or facing death. But the destruction of the city is also a form of death. People don’t know what to do.

My friend, the poet Amal Abu ‘Asi—who is the same age as me—wrote after her doctor recently told her she had been diagnosed with cancer:

“I truly understood the meaning of displacement when the news of my cancer diagnosis felt lighter on my heart than the news that I must evacuate to the south, leaving my dream alone in Gaza City. This kind of sorrow can only be understood by those who have lived through the harshest levels of oppression, heartbreak, and injustice.”

This was the reality for all Gazans—Israel had granted them the “freedom” to choose the form of death they preferred.

But even this miserable freedom was not available to everyone. Some could not even afford the cost of the journey to the south, with their necessities, so they remained in Gaza, facing horrors and death.

Mohammed Saeed, an inhabitant of Gaza City, wrote on Facebook in September 2025: “I swear to God, I’m still in my home. I’m afraid for myself, my family, and my children. But I don’t have a tent, nor money, and there’s no space left to set up a tent even if I had one. We are not steadfast, we are devastated in every possible way.”

Just a few days after writing this comment, Mohammed and his entire family were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza City. They were killed—simply because they had no tent and couldn’t afford the price of escape.

So, why do oppressors destroy cities?

The destruction of the cities in the Gaza Strip is not unprecedented in history, nor is it a precedent for Israeli behaviour.

Oppressors throughout history have destroyed many cities, like Baghdad, which was destroyed by Mongolian conqueror Hulagu Khan, and Warsaw, which was destroyed by Adolf Hitler towards the end of World War II. And Israel itself has destroyed more than 400 Palestinian towns and villages during the Nakba of 1948.

Oppressors do not love cities because cities are full of spirit. Everything in a city, its buildings, trees, homes, and neighbourhoods, is full of life. Oppressors are necessarily enemies of life.

Oppressors are always driven by their greed and material calculations, so they don’t care about memories, dreams, hopes, and human suffering. What do they care about ancient trees, historic buildings, and places steeped in the scent of history?

For the Gazan woman who kissed her door and tearfully bade her home farewell, that house holds the memories of a lifetime; every stone of it contains those memories. But for the soldier who will blow it up, it takes nothing more than the push of a button to turn it into rubble, and the mission would be complete.

What do oppressors care about the dream of a young man about to begin life, who sees the trees and stones around him shining with smiles and optimism?

And what do oppressors care about an ancient olive tree that people care for and prune across generations and that gives them shade and fruit, where they feel love and harmony with nature?

Destroying a city, in the war criminals’ calculations, is nothing more than erasing a blemish from a drawing in a notebook; It is simply a brutal decision, without regard for any human cost or spiritual meaning.

Those who embrace a genocidal ideology want to uproot a people from their roots. This genocidal policy includes the direct killing of people, as well as the erasure of everything that reminds people of their existence on the land and severing all their roots and emotional ties.

What can a person do when they have become without a city, without shelter?

This is a murder that isn’t recorded in statistics, nor covered by the media. After the destruction of our city, we have become strangers. I see the world swaying around me, no solid ground beneath our feet to stand on.

What comes to mind most often these days are the verses of the Iraqi poet Muzaffar al-Nawab:

“I was satisfied that my share of life to be like that of a bird.

But glory to you, even birds have homes that they come back to.

And I’m still flying. “