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I Thought I Knew Gaza. Then I Went Back.

After nearly three years, I finally returned to my homeland. I wasn’t prepared for what I found.

For nearly three years, I imagined my return to Gaza.

When the war began on October 7, 2023, I was in Cairo. I was supposed to be there on a brief visit. But then Israel closed the Rafah crossing, and I was suddenly trapped in another country.

For nearly three years, I tracked every headline, every air strike, every photograph of neighborhoods I knew by heart. I spoke daily with my family. I interviewed people inside Gaza. I wrote about the war and read everything I could find about it. Over time, I began to believe that I understood what had happened to my city.

When I finally returned this spring, I expected to be shocked by the destruction—and I was. Everyone had seen the images by then. Entire neighborhoods had been reduced to rubble. Landmarks had disappeared. Streets I once walked had become unrecognizable.

What I did not expect was how difficult it would be to recognize ordinary life.

The journey back to Gaza was not easy. When the Rafah crossing reopened earlier this year (it would soon be closed again, and is now intermittently open on a limited basis), there were about 120,000 refugees registered with the Palestinian Embassy in Cairo. Only about 50 people at most were being allowed to enter Gaza each day. Somehow, my name made the list.

I was not alone. Around 150 other Palestinians were making the same journey. Many of them were not returning to intact homes. Some knew that their houses had been destroyed. Others would be returning to tents erected on the ruins of neighborhoods that no longer existed. Yet they came anyway.

As we waited through long hours of travel and inspections, I found myself thinking about our choice to return to Gaza under such circumstances. Many people had asked me why I would ever go back to such a hellish situation. But it was never a question for me. I missed my family and my home. After years of separation, I wanted to be with the people I loved rather than continue watching Gaza from afar.

The people going back with me felt the same. They missed their families. They missed their city. They missed the places where their lives had unfolded before the war.

For nearly three years, many of us had lived with a constant longing for home. Gaza was no longer merely a place on a map; it had become an absence that shaped everyday life. And so people returned not because conditions had improved or because rebuilding had begun, but because the pull of home remained stronger than the uncertainty waiting for them there.

During the journey, I spoke with a man who, like me, had spent the war years in Egypt. Unlike many Palestinians, he had legal residency and Egyptian citizenship. He had stability, work opportunities, and a life that was far more secure than anything waiting for him in Gaza.

Yet he chose to return. He told me that no amount of stability could compensate for the feeling of being separated from his family and homeland. Physically, he was in Egypt. Mentally, he said, he remained in Gaza. Every day began and ended with phone calls, news updates, and worries about relatives living through the war.

“I was comfortable there,” he told me. “But my heart was never there.”

He knew he was returning to destruction. He knew there would be shortages, uncertainty, and hardship. Yet the desire to be home outweighed the advantages he was leaving behind.

Maha, another woman I met on the journey, described years of instability in Egypt. Without residency papers, finding work had been difficult. Housing was........

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