The name Rafah mentioned images of Sea-Breze evenings, Friday picnics under the figs and streets so familiar that they looked like the palm of my hand. Now, the name echoes differently – I hear evacuation orders, war cards and titles provided for erasure.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently declared the opening of the “Morag corridor”, a safety corridor that contrasts through the southern part of the Gaza Strip, extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the East. Appointed for a former Israeli colony located between Rafah and Khan Younis, the partition continues Israeli encroachment on the territory. With buffer zones around the border and another corridor in the north, Israel now controls 50% of the Gaza strip.
For many Palestinians, especially those born and raised in Rafah, the announcement reads as a death sentence. The news abounds that Israel plans to annex Rafah, which makes it a permanent buffer zone. While the tanks massage me near the border and the bulldozers cock the earth, the residents of Rafah, inappropriate and provocative, wonder if the city they know will never come back.
When I read the announcement, I felt like something had broken in me. Not because the level of horror and tyranny was unexpected – we, in Gaza, are used to the ground moving under our feet – but because the name Rafah, my rafah, had always been as the last place: somewhere that they could not take. Suddenly, it was no longer a house but a line on a map, redesigned without our consent.
*
Rafah has never been only a city. It was the edge of everything – the story of my family, our sorrow and our resilience. During the first twenty-seven years of my life, I have never seen what is beyond. Born from a moved family from the village of Barbara in 1948, I knew Rafah as exile and inheritance, a place wrapped in dust and devotion. Childhood took place there under low roofs and fig trees, where the smell of baked bread encountered the call to prayer, and each alley held too heavy to forget.
I did not know what was going beyond Rafah before 2019. It was the first time that I had permission to leave Gaza – such a rare experience for someone of my generation that it was like going through another life. I had grown up listening to my grandfather telling stories from Barbara, the village he loved and lost. “It was one of the most beautiful Palestinian villages,” said my grandfather Awda; His name means back. “Endless thoroughs of olives and oranges … it’s my land.” His voice would soften with memory, his blind eyes in search of something that no longer. I have never walked to the feet in Barbara, but through her words, I had walked her orchards, felt his groves and tasted his sweetness.
Rafah has become the replacement for this memory. Not the land that we had lost, but the one that tried to keep us. The city was small – only 55 square kilometers (35 square miles) – but it held a multitude. The refugee camps in Rafah, like Yibna and Shaboura, were not only names – they were villages reborn in exile, each alley echoing a past that refused to die. I could cross the city on my bike in an hour, zigzaging in familiar streets, calling neighbors who felt more like cousins. We lived side by side in the alleys so close that you could hear the neighbors stirring their tea.
Rafah’s walls were all my geography. The sand where I ran barefoot in the heat of summer. The fortune market in the center of the city, overflowing with tomatoes and gossip. The mosque where the whole city seemed to expire on Friday. And the road – the only road – which extended to the sea.
This sea was our myth. Occupied for most of my life until the “disengagement” of Israel of the Gaza Strip in 2005 is seated on the edge of Rafah as a promise never held. But my uncle Saad, who worked as a rescue diver, was authorized to go and took me the control points. He let me walk on this prohibited beach. I remember the sand between my toes, hot and well, the genre that slides like silk through your fingers. The waves whispered secrets that had waited generations to hear. That day, I touched something closer to freedom than ever before.
*
For those of us raised in Rafah, it is more than geography. It is also memory. It is a meaning and a house. It is also a permanent feeling of our status as refugees. It was in Rafah that I first understood what it meant to be a refugee – but only through stories. As a child, I could not grasp the depth of my grandfather’s trauma. How could I, when my own feet had never had to flee? He spoke of gunshots in the night, mothers grabbing their babies and running towards the unknown. I did not experience this terror, but I inherited its weight.
I became a man carrying this heritage. The word “refugee” was buffered on my identifier. My mission remembered. Narrative. Make sure that the world does not forget the villages erased in 1948. I thought it would be enough.
This was not the case.
In 2023, the war came to our door. The house where my wife and daughter slept have become a target. I gathered our lives in a single suitcase – documents, diapers, a camera and a pair of tiny shoes – and I fled Gaza for Egypt. We crossed the border as my grandfather had done: not knowing if we would never come back. My daughter, Sarah, was only three years old. She became a second refugee before she could write her name.
*
A year and a half after the war, while the world closed its eyes, the Minister of Defense, Israel Katz, described Rafah as a security buffer. But on the ground, the message was clear: Rafah would have left. The last inch of Gaza’s soil may no longer be for us.
What does a city erase?
I sat in silence, my brilliant phone screen in the dark. What does a city erase? Not just its buildings – but its inhabitants, their memories, their names? I thought of my grandfather, lemon tree which he planted in exile. I thought of the court where my daughter took her first steps.
Now there is nothing left to come back.
While I was holding my daughter Sarah Close, I felt the words forming in silence: “What kind of life will she live in her second exile when she did not even experience her first?” I couldn’t repel thought. “Will the curse of Palestinian exile haunt the last of us in disappearance? What does this world of us want? ” They were not rhetorical questions – they were echoing in my head while I watched Sarah sleep, her tiny frame curled up next to mine, the world outside of her far too violent for the dreams she deserves.
*
Many residents of Rafah shared my mourning.
Mothers like Salsabeel Jabr Abdullah Awad, 30, do not remember Rafah in general. Her childhood was not only shaped there – she was engraved in the walls and floors of a cramped house in the Shaboura camp. The ground was not tiled; It was just a hard carpet placed on dusty concrete. Three small parts wrapped around a shared courtyard. There was a steep staircase and made by hand that his father built with his own hands, leading to the roof where they hung the laundry, the sun themselves or the roasted seeds in a saucepan bumpy under the afternoon sun.
In the front room, which his father called “The Men’s Room”, a steel office was seated next to the shelves filled with worn spines of Arab literature. The room had two doors – one leading to the aisle, the other opening inwards of their home. In summer, his father opened the two to catch the breeze which drifts in the narrow alleys of the camp. When the wind passed, it was transporting more than air. He brought the smell of roasted coffee of neighbors and the deaf noise of the bouncing football balls on the concrete walls.
There were seven sisters in this little house. They gathered around the same battered table to share food and tea, with sugar so sweet that it clung to the teeth. The bath had a bathtub, but nobody was bathing there – it was for the covers and the winter detergent. The house was humble, the roof low, but inside there was heat. Laugh. A feeling of security.
When his father, a retired Arab teacher, finally saved enough to build a new house, his mother cried while leaving the old one. The new house, although bigger, was empty at first. But over time, it became the place where they grew up. The place they celebrated diplomas, weddings and EIDs. His father, a proud man who had studied in Alexandria and taught in Libya, refused the comfort of sending his daughters to the university.
“He never let us break the breakfast,” she said. “He had rules – like broken beans must be on the table. Sweet tea. No exception. We have followed these rules like rituals. I teach my own children the same now.”
Salsabeel now lives in the north of Gaza with her husband and two children. Their house was damaged. They fled several times. Her voice trembles when she describes war as the darkest period of her life. But it is the news of the Corridor of Netanyahu – Rafah transformed into a military stamp – which cut the most deeply.
“What does Rafah be able to annex?” Does that mean that I will not go back to my father? This rafah will not exist? “
Salsabeel Jabr Abdullah Awad
She had scrolled her phone when she saw the title. His breath took. His fingers froze.
“What does Rafah think about it?” She whispers. “Does that mean that I will not go back to my father’s?” This rafah will not exist? “
His father had paid his life into this house. He had bought the land before his birth, finished reimbursing him ten years later, then built space by room, floor per floor. The pantry was filled with marinated olive pots and thyme. There was an iron door on a small shelter in their garden. When his father took him there, they slept under mosquito nets and woke up with the sun that shone through the lemon tree.
“I know every corner of this city,” she says. “Each store, each shortcut, the face of each neighbor. Rafah is not just where I come from – that’s where I left for the university and I felt as if I had crossed the borders. But when we returned Rafah, through Kfar Morag, it was as if my lungs started to work again.”
Even now, the corridors have transformed into military zones and the reservoirs in motion, Rafah’s muscular memory remains. Salsabeel closes her eyes and sees his father’s yellow car, shaking hen nests as they went to the sea. His little sister in the trunk, tightening with pleasure. His mother in the kitchen sorts from the Greens. His father is sitting cross with his grandchildren, laughing while taking lemons.
Her father, now elderly and proud, still refuses charity. “What will happen to him?” she asked. “A man who gave everything for his land-will he eventually sleep on a sidewalk?”
The Morag corridor could claim to offer security to Israel. But what he erodes – quietly, daily – is dignity. Memory. Membership. The corridor can be a geopolitical strategy for some, but for it – and for thousands of others – it’s a sentence. A threat. A line that they are told not to cross.
This story is not over. The tanks are still there and our city is currently shaved on the ground. Families, although dispersed, always whisper the name of their city as if that could summon it.
