Minutes after fighting in Gaza ended on Sunday, Islam Dahliz, his father and brother set off for the neighborhood where they had lived until Israeli forces ordered them to leave. They were looking for the family home, but the landscape around them confused their senses. Familiar landmarks, streets, neighbors’ houses – everything was rubble.
Then Mr. Dahliz recognized the local wedding hall, he said, or what was left of it. This meant that their house was – had been – behind them, at a point they had already passed. They simply hadn’t recognized it, this house that Mr. Dahliz’s father had built more than 50 years ago.
“It took us a few minutes to accept that this pile of rubble was our home,” said Dahliz, 34, who works with local aid groups. They stood there, speechless.
His father, Abed Dahliz, 74, felt short of breath, he said. His sons had to help him return to their tent to rest.
“I was shocked when I saw my whole life – everything I worked for – burned to the ground,” said Abed Dahliz, a lifelong farmer, his voice soft and trembling. “The house that I built for so many years, investing my savings, is no longer there.”
This was not the moment they had hoped for and imagined all these months, as they were forced to move from tent to tent, packing their bags and starting over four times in total. They had imagined a return. A shot of their lives.
In their last makeshift tent in a park in western Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, they huddled Sunday morning, when the ceasefire was due to take effect, glued to the radio. Islam Dahliz was on the phone, updating social media accounts for the latest news. The whole family became tense when they learned that the truce might collapse due to a last-minute hitch: Hamas, Israel said, had not delivered the promised list of Israeli hostages to be released from Gaza.
Then, at 11.15am, the radio reported that a ceasefire was in effect. The father and brothers got into the car, they said, and headed home.
The house was a spacious two-story house on al-Imam Ali Street in Rafah, built in 1971 and shared, like many houses in Gaza, by three generations of the same family. The parents lived in one apartment and Mr. Dahliz, his wife and their children had another. He had invested his savings in a new kitchen, furniture and bedding when he returned to Gaza from Hungary, where he had studied agricultural science, he recalled.
His brothers Mohammed and Anas also lived there with their families, with another brother half a mile away. It was large enough that during the first seven months of the war the Dahlize could house about 10 more families evacuated from other parts of Gaza.
Next door was their farm, started by their father and looked after by Mohammed, 40. Olive trees and date palms stood side by side with greenhouses where they grew parsley, lettuce and arugula. They had rabbits, chickens and 40 sheep, which Mohammed took out to graze in the fields every morning.
Mohammed Dahliz remembered his father planting palm trees when he was a child, he said. He remembered his young children before the war, he said, chasing chickens and laughing, collecting their eggs for breakfast.
The Israeli military said it struck residential areas because Hamas fighters were settling into civilian buildings, although a New York Times investigation found that Israel also weakened civilian protections to make it easier to bomb Gaza during the war.
When Israeli forces invaded Rafah in May and ordered all residents of eastern Rafah to leave, Islam Dahliz said, vegetables were just starting to sprout. The families who had taken refuge with the Dahlize dispersed. The Dahlizes gathered some clothes, tarps and other materials for a makeshift tent and chose a spot as close to home as possible.
But for months they didn’t see her again, even though she was just a few kilometers away.
From time to time their cousins managed to sneak into the neighborhood with updates. Their house was still standing, they said. Then they said it was standing, but that some of its doors and windows had been blown out.
In the fall, the Dahlizes combed through satellite images circulating on social media: still intact. Then they checked again on December 8, Islam Dahliz recalled. All they saw where the house had been was a gray shadow.
Now their palms and olive trees were cut down, the trunks scattered on the ground. Israeli tanks had left traces all over their territory. Little was directly on their property, other than a few concrete pillars with rebar protruding from them.
“I feel lost, completely lost,” Mohammed Dahliz said. Then, getting angry, he said: “This was an agricultural area, a place of peace. He posed no threat to anyone, no danger to the soldiers. We had no ties to politics, no reason to be involved in this violence.”
Islam Dahliz’s daughter, Juan, 9, screamed when he showed her photos of the destruction, he said. “Remember, Dad, when you threw me a birthday party in the great room?” he asked, sobbing.
Monday morning, the brothers and their father drove to their neighborhood a second time, down a street full of other families, each vehicle packed with passengers and piled-up belongings. They were all there to save whatever they could. Across Rafah, people filled worn-out flour sacks and patched bags with scrap metal that they perhaps could sell or reuse and firewood.
Mohammed Dahliz was just hoping to find some of his daughter Jana, 14,’s old toys, the kind he brought her for her birthday or whenever she reached a milestone at school. She had begged him to look for them, he said.
“I just want to find a piece of his childhood,” she said. “I’ve been looking since morning, hoping to find something that belonged to her.”
Digging through the greyness, Islam Dahliz came across his old school certificates, a discovery that brought a smile to his face. But otherwise they hadn’t found much. Firewood, a few pillows, an empty tank they hoped to repair.
He clung to the plans, no matter how fragile.
If – if – the two sides negotiated a definitive end to the war, as they should have done during the initial phase of the ceasefire, the Dahlize would hire a bulldozer to remove the rubble, first from the farm, then from the house. They would install some pipes, build a basic toilet and set up a water tank, he said.
“It won’t end the suffering,” he said, “but at least it will be closer to the home where we made so many memories.”
But for now, dusk was falling. They should have returned to their tent. What was left of the Dahlizes’ old lives barely filled the back of a small car.