How the landmarks of everyday Gaza have disappeared under the rubble of war
This article first appeared on our partner site, Independent Arabia
In Gaza, we never needed a map to find our way. We knew where we were by the landmarks of everyday life: an ancient tree, a neighbourhood bakery, a bank on a street corner, the distant view of a tower block that meant we had found the place we were looking for.
Before 7 October 2023, Gaza was more than a narrow strip of land on the coast. It was made up of cities and refugee camps, markets that welcomed people every morning, farmland stretching along the edges of towns, factories and small workshops, universities and hospitals.
Its built environment was diverse too, with high-rise and low-rise buildings, historic and religious sites, refugee camps that had evolved over decades, industrial facilities and agricultural land.
Gaza was not without its crises. High population density, the blockade, shortages of services and unemployment were all part of life before the war. But the place was familiar to its residents: every neighbourhood had its landmarks, and every street had its own memory.
I knew I had reached Tal al-Hawa when I came to the bank at the beginning of the street. To me, the bank was more than a building; it was a landmark marking the entrance to the neighbourhood of Tal al-Hawa.
It was a prominent building with a distinctive facade, and a large doorstep in front where we would sometimes sit. Beside it was a vegetable seller, and from there began the scene I had known for years.
Rows of closely packed, uniform, adjoining towers, each around seven storeys high, alongside markets, restaurants, schools and mosques, and a street I often walked.
From the bank’s doorstep, I could watch the life of the place unfold: the vegetable seller calling out his wares, people leaving the bank and walking along the street, cars moving constantly, with a garden in the background and the towers forming the familiar scene I knew.
At the time, none of this seemed extraordinary. It was simply the life of the place. This is how we remember our cities: through what we see as we move through them, and through what we know will be there when we arrive.
When Israel allowed people to return to Tal al-Hawa, I went back to the place I loved. The first thing I saw, however, was not the neighbourhood I knew. In front of me was an entire row of towers whose shapes I had known for years, but which had now fallen.
Six or seven towers, roughly, were no longer standing as they once had been. Part of one tower remained upright, blocking the view of what had once been behind it.
I looked at the scene and said to myself: “This can’t possibly be Tal al-Hawa.” I was not looking only for my home. I was looking for the landmarks by which I had always recognised the place: the bank, the towers, the bakery, the street.
But the scene I knew was no longer there in the same form. The street I remembered had been dug up and its route had changed; sand covered parts of it, the streetlights had disappeared, and the facade of the bank whose appearance I knew so well had been shattered. The building that had once been an unmistakable marker of the beginning of Tal al-Hawa no longer looked as it once did.
