We thought returning home would end the nightmare.

After months of fleeing bombardment, sleeping in tents, schools, or under makeshift nylon sheets, many families finally walked back to their homes in northern Gaza during the fragile ceasefire in January 2025. The roads were lined with rubble. Our houses were broken shells, neighbourhoods unrecognisable. Yet we carried a fragile hope: that by stepping back onto our land, even among ruins, we were reclaiming our lives.

But as soon as we returned, the headlines followed us. Terms like “mass relocations”, “humanitarian cities,” and “population transfers” began to appear, suggesting that even after everything we had endured, our next destination might not be what remains of our homes, but military-controlled camps in the far south of Gaza, where the army had swept through and wiped out entire residential neighbourhoods, turning them into barren, flattened deserts.

For many outside Gaza, such reports read as distant political debates. For us, they land like threats. Each new statement feels like a draft of our next exile. The idea that the Israeli military might herd hundreds of thousands of us is terrifying precisely because we know what those “cities” would really be: overcrowded compounds, controlled checkpoints, food and water distribution under armed watch — if we are lucky enough to receive them — no freedom of movement, no guarantee of ever leaving.

Families who have just swept dust from their broken floors now whisper about whether they should keep bags half-packed, ready to flee once again. Children, who have barely adjusted to sleeping in their own beds after months away, overhear the word........

© Al Jazeera