At midday in early September 2025, my family and I sat in the living room, all of us pulled away from the windows. My family lived on Al Sahaba street in northern Gaza, just coming out of a long, exhausting period of starvation which was our second in two years. Everyone was mentally drained. We had not been full in at least four months—no money meant no proper nutrition. We spent July waiting for a ceasefire that never came, and when it didn’t, something in all of us quietly broke. By August, we were no longer hopeful nor did we have the will to survive. We were just still here, debating what to make for lunch. My mom pushed for lentils. “We should save the stored food,” she said, “we never know what’s coming.”
We had learned the lesson the hard way. During the last starvation period, when flour disappeared entirely, we had to make animal food into something that could pass for bread. Every time we went out and bought animal food at prices that made no sense, we would sit around and ask the same thing: why didn’t we buy more flour when we had the chance? Store food while you can, before it becomes almost impossible to secure unless you are willing to risk your life chasing an aid truck for what might not even be there.
We were arguing over lentils. We didn’t know yet we’d soon be arguing over whether to leave our home for a tent.
My sister, who was on her phone, suddenly went pale. She blurted, “Israel issued the evacuation order to displace to the South!” For a month before she said this, that was all the news talked about: Mass evacuation order for the North of Gaza, to wipe the city and occupy it. The dreadful day I refused to believe would happen for the second time in two years was happening. My brain froze from the countless horrible possibilities that crossed my mind.
This time, it was more horrific. People raced to flee the North, believing there was no other option, that there was no future here. It was a hard decision for my father, but he couldn’t do anything but decide to stay. My family was drained financially, so there was no option for us to displace to the south. We couldn’t afford to move even though we were moving from a house to a tent. We faced impossible costs to flee to southern areas: $5,000 for a truck to take us along with our furniture, $1,000 for a tent, $5 per meter of land to pitch it on. For my family, the math was simple: we had no money. We stayed.
My father carried that decision the way only a man without options could. I would find him talking to himself, worn down by a weight he had no way to lift. He would spend the day at home, he could not and did not want to see any more of the neighbors leaving us behind, with their faces and goodbyes. One family left, then another, until there was almost no one left. And when the people left, everything else followed. The market shut down, the water trucks no longer came, the electricity supplier fled south with his generators. What remained was silence, bombs, and the skeleton of a neighborhood.
This came after the horrific strategy that the Israeli forces followed to displace the people: massacre entire families, reduce neighborhoods to the ground, all to be used as a warning tool. On September 11th, 2025, an air strike hit the Al-Husari family’s home in the al-Shati refugee camp. Fourteen people were killed. Only two survived: Mohammad and Amal Al-Husari, who lost their four children, Foad, Osama, Belal, and Eman, along with the rest of their family. Their eldest son, Foad, was my friend from school. When I asked him if he was going to flee south, he answered that he would not leave his house for the second time, that he would stay this time. Mohammad and Amal remained alive, but everything that gave them a reason to be alive was not.
In late September, a warning came from the Israeli army—they would bomb the school across from our home in thirty minutes. I waited an hour and a half in my aunt’s house two streets away. The waiting was exhausting. I thought of my house and all the memories we had in it: the weekly Friday breakfast we ate with my grandparents as kids; the kitchen where I watched my mom cook; telling her how my day went, venting about my problems; our living room where we sat with my father after he came back from work. I remembered my father two days before the warning, looking at a photo of our house being built as he said, “My father built this house in the 1980s, it is still standing despite everything and will always stand.” And I thought to myself that our heritage, our home, our memories, in a matter of minutes could be gone.
Suddenly, four missiles hit. The sound pierced through my ears, so sharp I thought they would burst. The ground shook under us. My heart dropped to my stomach. My knees trembled. In that single second, I was certain: the house was gone.
My cousins and I ran home with the voices of our parents yelling: “Not yet, we still don’t know if they are really done!” I did not care and continued running. At first, when I reached our street it was covered with smoke. I did not know if it was coming from my house or the school. As the smoke faded, I saw that my home had survived. Relief brought me to my knees, but the feeling did not last one second, because I understood then what this entire month was really about. All the death and destruction was a message: stay and live inside this, or leave and lose everything. Yet, my family had no other option but to stay home.
Somewhere in that month, between the bombs and the silence and the waiting, I stopped being able to picture my future. I forgot that I had dreamed of getting a PhD to teach, to write. Those things didn’t disappear. They just became impossible to see from where I was standing. I stopped imagining next week or next year. I was doing nothing but trying not to die, and somehow, that became enough to fill an entire day. We stayed. We survived.
But survival in northern Gaza was not living. It was simply not yet dying.
Living Under the Choice of No Choice in Northern Gaza, by Ahmad Sbaih
Image courtesy of Khaled Al Qersahli. Families fleeing south from northern Gaza, September 2025.
July 11, 2026
