Displacement is an Extra Limb That I Carry

Author’s Note: I wrote this testimony on March 17, 2025, around 20 hours before I was forcibly displaced again.

During the horrifying, long stretch of the genocidal war on Gaza, we did not have the privilege or the time to sit with our feelings. Surviving was a priority over processing our emotions. During the few weeks of the ceasefire in January, I slowly began to navigate my feelings, attempting to crawl out of the shell cupping my heart. It is too much, however, for one to feel and comprehend all at once what we are enduring in Gaza

Now that I’ve permitted myself to confront, to finally process all that I’ve been through… I am nothing but grief.

This grief is a shape-shifter — it never manifests in the same form, always unpredictable, always unannounced. Sometimes it is a child I lull to sleep; other times it is an untamable beast that devours my being. Sometimes it deceives me, I mistake it for healing, as it briefly exits my body. But in the end, it always finds a way back, palpable, beating to a rhythm of its own, lurking in my bones. 

Hear me out when I say that my grief is lonely; it occupies the body and turns it into its vessel.

Every moment throughout the last eighteen months of this genocidal war has been hell. But receiving ‘evacuation orders’ and being forcibly displaced from our home, along with all of Eastern Khan Younis, was a deeper layer of hell no human should have to endure. The displacement — God Almighty, the displacement — continues to haunt me. It is the worst lived experience I have had, my worst nightmare, a trial I do not wish on anyone. Crossing that threshold into exile left me in a constant ghorba, a state of estrangement that clings to me whether my eyes are open or shut. Since leaving Khan Younis, I have not felt whole. The knowledge that I will never be free of it — that complete healing will never come, that full recovery sounds impossible — has become something I carry with me always, like a part of my body, like an extra limb, that I never asked for, nor do I have the strength to continue to carry.

Every time I think about how I have endured the last eighteen months without breaking down, I am astonished by my strength — by the fact that I remained standing, that I looked calm from the outside, and my body did not expose my pain. There were numerous moments when I wanted to crawl into myself, but that was never an option. I had to act and escape from ground invasions, into ‘safe zones’ — I had to make tough decisions on what to take and where to go. 

On July 22, 2024, just seconds after dropping evacuation leaflets from the sky, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) unleashed a savage and arbitrary assault on Bani Suhaila — airstrikes and tank shelling without pause or mercy. I remember telling my sisters, “Just grab your kids and a backpack and walk fast. We’ll meet at the Bani Suhaila roundabout.” This came after a gruesome twenty-five-minute walk from my house to theirs, with tanks rumbling, helicopters vomiting evacuation leaflets from above, and the air ripped apart by the roar of F-35 bombs. The world was in chaos. Fear was everywhere. It was the second forced displacement that month for the residents of East Khan Younis.

One of my older sisters could barely stand. Her husband was kilometers away in Deir al-Balah, and she was left alone with two children to carry. I assured her that I'd take her one-year-old daughter, along with my bags and my parents’ medicine bag. When we got to al-Jundi al-Majhool Square — the small one in Bani Suhaila, not the bigger one in Gaza City, both now reduced to rubble — I had to steady her. “No crying. No talking. Don't waste your energy doing anything but walking as fast as you can.” Then, just a few steps later, another explosion rang out. A piece of shrapnel struck my uncle in the same place we had just been standing. 

At first, I didn’t know who it hit. The sound was deafening. My body moved on instinct — I pulled my precious niece tightly against me, pressing her small frame into mine, desperately shielding her from any flying shrapnel. My mind spiraled into terror. I imagined the worst — what If I died and she somehow survived? Her mother, thankfully, only steps behind. Still, the thoughts flooded in: would she be orphaned, traumatized, left screaming in a world that just tried to erase her? I clutched her very close and fervently made dua’, quietly whispering the protective words I had been praying since the very first day of this relentless genocide:

أعوذ بكلمات الله التامات من شر ما خلق 

بسم الله الذي لا يضر مع اسمه شيء في الأرض ولا في السماء وهو السميع العليم

I seek refuge in the Perfect Words of Allah from the evil of what He has created.

In the Name of Allah, Who with His Name nothing can cause harm in the earth nor in the heavens, and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Knowing.

I went through it all again on Aug. 8, 2024. We were displaced twice that month and again in October 2024. My first displacement took place on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. However, it was the third displacement, on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023 — when we were forcibly moved to a UNRWA school — and the fifth, on Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2023 — when my family and thousands of other residents of Khan Younis were forcibly displaced to Rafah, where people from all over the Gaza Strip had already been driven — that stood out most vividly. These moments were etched in memory as we were forced to evacuate under massive attacks and intense bombardment. It’s been eleven displacements so far. The severity of the situation becomes clear when I reflect on how I’ve come to measure each displacement by its level of terror. Each one left marks: my body shrank, my skin burned, my speech became faltered. For every displacement, I gained a white hair — one for each time I held back tears, for every moment I kept it together instead of falling apart.

Years ago, my sister Alaa used some leftover dye paste on the ends of my hair. To my delight, the dye did not show. Even after twenty minutes, my hair refused to change color. I joked that maybe I was like my grandmother, who even in her seventies had barely a strand of gray hair. But apparently, it takes a genocide to rewrite your DNA.

Drowning in the anguish of genocide and exile, I could no longer find comfort in literature that once gave me refuge. What once offered escape now felt hollow. I could no longer find myself in its pages. The grief I carried, the disorientation, the weight of this war — none of it felt mirrored in the Palestinian literature I once loved. Kanafani’s exilic texts, the resistance literature, even their brilliance couldn’t reach into the grotesque intimacy of what we were enduring. To me, nothing written before could mirror the profound pain that Gaza was enduring. I craved literature that could articulate what I could not even begin to process. 

That longing followed me until December 2024, when I read Mahmoud Darwish’s يوميات الحزن العادي (Journal of an Ordinary Grief). The autobiographical literary text resonated with me on a level I had not expected. Darwish’s words spoke to me from within my own silence. He wrote of how every sudden displacement put his life, how rage quietly consumed him, and how estranged he felt in his own skin once crossing the ghorba threshold. For every question he asked, he answered with something that tore the soul open.

“—Where is your body?
—Inside my clothes.
—What are its borders?
—Dates. South: May 15, 1948; East: November 1956; West: June 5, 1967; North: September 1970. These are the borders of my body.”

And like Darwish’s, my body’s new borders were mapped by displacements. Dates: East: Oct. 13, 2023; West: Dec. 5, 2023; North: July 2024; South: August 2024.

Today, as I walk through Khan Younis — my grief-stricken city, like all of Gaza, disfigured by war, emptied of its people, its face now unrecognizable, I carry grief as a companion. It walks beside me, uninvited but ever present. I am on the verge of a silent sob, a muffled scream, a cry that no longer has a voice.