Family, homes, burials: In Gaza, a race to utilize lull in fighting

Like thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, Ghada Abu Irmana and her family were on the move this weekend.

Yet unlike during the past few weeks of the conflict, which saw 1.2 million Gaza residents evacuate homes and brave missiles for makeshift shelters in the southern Gaza Strip, they were not fleeing airstrikes.

Aided by clear skies and a temporary halt to the fighting, they were racing toward family.

Ms. Abu Irmana, her husband, and her three children packed into a pickup truck for hire along with 25 other passengers. All were heading as far north as possible to reconnect with parents, siblings, grandparents, and children, and see if homes are still standing.

“We haven’t seen them in 40 days,” Ms. Abu Irmana says of her in-laws in her home in the Bureij refugee camp.

Others were making the journey to central Gaza to see whom they can bury.

In the four-day cease-fire that had been set to end Monday evening, the first respite from Israel’s air campaign and ground invasion of Gaza that followed Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, Gaza residents took the chance they had dreamt of for weeks – to pick up pieces of lives they say will never be whole again.

Late Monday, Qatar announced it had brokered an agreement between Hamas and Israel to extend the truce to facilitate more hostage releases for two more days. Before Monday night’s expected reciprocal releases from the first deal, Hamas had released 40 Israeli hostages and Israel 117 Palestinian prisoners into the West Bank.

But before the contentious talks on an extension had borne fruit, roads in Rafah and heading north were packed with cars, tuk-tuks, and donkey carts.

Families moved between towns to gather groceries, bury relatives, or even just visit the beach to walk on the sand or dip their toes in the water, knowing it may be their last chance for weeks – and perhaps for some, ever.

Transportation in high demand

Early Friday, families packed onto pickup trucks normally hired to cart sheep or furniture but now ferrying 30 standing passengers for a one-hour journey to central Gaza along cracked and cratered roads.

“Since the day we left home one week into the war, we do not know what happened to our house,” Ms. Abu Irmana says as the driver takes off.

“My husband told me it was partially devastated; I hope to find that it’s fine. I hope this cease-fire will continue,” she says. “We have been waiting with bated breath” for what happens next.

With demand for transportation high and time short, people even crammed into the trunks of taxis, their legs dangling over bumpers.

The four days without missile strikes created a chance for some to harvest olives or search for medicine.

Friday, the first full day of the cease-fire, the beach in Khan Yunis, packed with families, was the first stop for Amany al-Khalout, a social media influencer and food blogger. It was her first walk in weeks.

“Unlike Gaza City, there aren’t many cafes and parks here, but it is still nice to take a short walk,” says Ms. Khalout, who had left her home in Gaza’s Al Karama neighborhood for Khan Yunis in the south.

Six-year-old Rita Idwan, whose bicycle tire was punctured early in the war, had to wait for a lull in the fighting to get it repaired at a garage near their home in Rafah.

“She kept pleading with me to let her ride her bike. It was unsafe for anyone to venture outside,” says her mother, Rasha Idwan.

On Friday, Rita’s cousin accompanied her to the garage. Hours later, she is scooting around on newly inflated tires.

“Happy now?” Ms. Idwan asks. Rita, sitting atop her bike, nods shyly.

Grief and disappointment

The realization that the cease-fire would not allow displaced Palestinians to return to their homes in the northern part of the strip, particularly Gaza City, dampened the spirits of many.

People anxious to check on homes, possessions, and relatives with whom they had lost contact were prevented from crossing the central Wadi Gaza dividing line by the Israeli army, which occupies large swaths of Gaza City.

“It is like having Eid holiday but being prevented from celebrating it,” says Ms. Khalout. “I miss my home, my kitchen, my previous life. I wish this cease-fire would last longer and become permanent.”

Many utilized the hours free of bombings to bury loved ones.

At Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, bodies, many of which had yet to be identified, were lined up in a large tent Friday in a makeshift morgue, waiting to be transported for prayers and a mass burial in a nearby empty lot. A grieving mother stood over her adult son’s lifeless form, weeping and wailing. Evacuees huddled in tents nearby.

Yet some did not even have the consolation of burying their dead.

Fatima Najjar, an evacuee living in a shared tent in the hospital’s courtyard, received the gut-wrenching news that her sister Aisha was killed by an Israeli airstrike on her temporary shelter in Khan Yunis hours before the cease-fire was announced late Thursday.

“I don’t know if my sister has been laid to rest. I don’t know if her daughter is still alive,” says Ms. Najjar, seated after having just fetched water. A third sister reads the Quran aloud and prays. “I don’t know if the rest of her family has been rescued from the rubble.”

“Can you believe it?” she says of her sister, taken “on the night of the cease-fire.”

Somayaa Abu Nada lost her family home in the Zaytoun quarter of Gaza City at the beginning of the war, forcing her and part of her family to evacuate to Rafah, and her sister and other relatives to stay with an aunt in Khan Yunis.

At the time, she says, “the most important thing was that we stay alive.”

A sister who loved books

But now Ms. Abu Nada can only think of fate and the death of her 32-year-old sister, Hiba Abu Nada, a poet and avid bookworm, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike on their aunt’s home Oct. 20.

The family hastily buried Hiba but was unable to reach the bodies of several other family members trapped beneath the debris.

On Friday Ms. Abu Nada returned to her aunt’s house to retrieve the bodies of her aunt’s brothers-in-law and others to give them a proper burial more than a month after their deaths.

She searched amongst the debris for Hiba’s belongings, keepsakes to remember her by – particularly her writings and books.

“She read everything: books, articles, novels, anything that had writing on it,” Ms. Abu Nada says. “I knew she would be reading and writing even during wartime, even during the worst days of our lives.”

Among the rubble, she finally found a book, “The Story of a Magian Love,” with Hiba’s handwriting on the cover: “October 16, 2023,” the day she finished reading the novel.

“I felt a sense of happiness,” Ms. Abu Nada says, “This novel was being read by my sister during the Gaza war in the fall of 2023.”

Uncertain as to whether Israel and Hamas would extend the truce, and amid Israel’s insistence it would continue the war, Ms. Abu Nada began reading her sister’s book.

The novel, by Abdul Rahman Munif, is about a young student grappling with unrequited love.

“I don’t know if I will finish the book or if I will die first,” she says.

Taylor Luck contributed from Amman, Jordan.