In the darkened backroom of an Istanbul hotel packed with refugees from Gaza, the light from Ahmed Herzallah’s phone screen illuminates a picture of his destroyed home in Gaza City. The building, with its curved black-and-white striped exterior that wrapped around a street corner, used to be a place for celebration, where the family gathered together for birthday parties, graduation ceremonies or when his sisters visited home at the beginning of each summer.
The apartment building where Ahmed lived with his wife, children, parents, two brothers and their families was often filled with members of their extended family, the sound of singing, and the smell of homemade pastries and maftoul, a stew made of chicken and couscous. But the picture that he displayed on his phone was spliced with another, showing the entire block reduced to rubble. His extended family is now scattered around Gaza or exiled across the globe.
“My parents were fearful that if we left, we would never be able to go back during our lifetime, and unfortunately this is true,” said Ahmed. “It wasn’t just our building, the entire neighbourhood is destroyed.”
When a relative texted him the photo showing the destruction of their family home earlier this year, he spent hours staring at it, zooming in to examine the piles of rubble that symbolise the obliteration of years of memories.
Life in exile has also catapulted Ahmed, his wife, Diana, and their children into the unknown. The Turkish authorities, who evacuated a heavily pregnant Diana and their family so she could give birth in Istanbul, granted them two-year residency permits on humanitarian grounds and arranged a stay in a hotel, a saving grace that Ahmed describes as a streak of good luck. But there is little information about how long they will be housed there, how they might find work, or school for their children: Dana, 14; Abdullah, 12 and Omar, seven.
Ahmed’s phone buzzes with news of siblings who stayed, including panicked voice messages from one of his sisters, fearing that she will not survive the bombardments. After Hamas militants attacked a string of Israeli towns and kibbutzim on 7 October, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostage, Israel immediately began an assault on Gaza from land, air and sea. More than 35,000 have been killed and whole neighbourhoods obliterated, along with the district that formed the strip’s economic heart, where Ahmed used to teach English.
More than 80% of housing in northern Gaza, previously a lively cluster of densely-populated cities and refugee camps that were home to more than a million people, has been destroyed, according to the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Balakrishnan Rajagopal.
“All that makes housing ‘adequate’ – access to services, jobs, culture, schools, religious places, universities, hospitals – have all been levelled,” he said.
Each of the three Herzallah brothers who lived in the house with their parents in Gaza City have fled, including Ahmed’s older brother, who fled south as food supplies dwindled in the north. Their parents also escaped, joining their eldest son in Romania after he fled there in the earliest days of the war, although Ahmed’s father died soon after they reached Bucharest.
“The grief killed him,” said Ahmed, pointing to the pain of exile. He was unable to attend his father’s funeral, learning of the death in Istanbul, where he had joined Diana in February, weeks after she gave birth to their youngest son, Rayyan. Reuniting with his family took Ahmed two months.
Even with the problems and trauma of exile, escape from Gaza is considered a luxury available to a small minority. Fleeing the territory, now made impossible after Israeli forces took control of Gaza’s sole southern crossing at Rafah, cost thousands of dollars in broker’s fees for those able to raise the funds.
Ahmed is unsure of what his future holds after teaching for 15 years at a school run by Unrwa, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
“Unrwa was doing its best, but it was built to relieve the situation for refugees. It can’t change anything,” he said, recalling how he would often buy some of his students snacks and juice at break time because many would arrive at school hungry amid a poverty rate of over 80% and a 16-year Israeli blockade.
He took pride in his work, and was shocked when the headteacher of his school posted to a WhatsApp group for teachers who work there that anyone fleeing Gaza would be put on leave without pay. “This is punishment for those who successfully escaped,” said Ahmed.
Unwra said financial challenges meant that whether the organisation was able to pay staff displaced from Gaza or whose jobs are on hold was still in question among senior management and presented a dilemma for the agency.
The agency has struggled with a deep funding crisis that threatened drastic cuts to its role as a provider of education and basic healthcare to Palestinians across the Middle East, including the employment of about 22,000 teachers, after Israeli authorities accused 12 of its staff of taking part in the 7 October attack.
An independent review later found that Israel had not provided evidence to support its claims. Some of Unwra’s major donors paused funding before reinstating it in recent weeks, but the UK and US remain reluctant. US lawmakers voted to block any efforts to reinstate federal funding for the agency until 2025, a decision that an Unwra spokesperson said had caused a 87% budget shortfall after years when the US was its largest donor.
As Ahmed frantically searches for work in his new home and tries to envision a new life beyond his background as a teacher, he is haunted by their exodus from Gaza City. The only way to leave was on foot. Ahmed, a heavily pregnant Diana and their children walked for two hours to cross the Gaza River.
The route also took them past the barrel of an Israeli tank. Ahmed placed himself in the firing line, with his wife and children lined up to his right.
“I told my wife, here is some money and the address where we’re headed. If I am killed, just go on,” he said. “We pretended to our kids that everything was OK, but it was not.” He later added: “I still can’t fathom how I did it.”
