LAST month, Sufian Abu Ghassan joined hundreds of thousands of Palestinians defiantly trekking back to their battered neighborhoods after a ceasefire paused Israel’s 15-month war on Gaza.
The 70-year-old was relieved that Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians had stopped, for now.
However, he knew the mass destruction brought on by Israel’s war would make life difficult. His taxi business was destroyed, his home damaged, and there are hardly any provisions in Gaza, even drinking water.
At least he and his family had survived Israel’s carpet bombing and siege and starvation tactics and had returned to northern Gaza, the only home they ever knew.
On the night of February 17, Abu Ghassan heard a broadcast from Israeli drones, threats designed to trigger the greatest generational trauma in Palestinian history.
Israel was threatening battered, exhausted Palestinians with a “second and third Nakba”.
The Nakba is the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages by Zionist militias to make way for the creation of Israel in 1948.
Seventy-seven years after the Nakba, which Israel has never recognised, the country is again threatening to expel millions of Palestinians from what’s left of their homeland.
Most of the people in Gaza – 70 percent of about 2.3 million – are descendants of those forced to flee militia violence during the first Nakba, their villages and towns subsumed by Israel today.
The vast majority yearn to return to their homelands – just like Palestinians similarly rendered refugees but having fled to the occupied West Bank or neighbouring countries due to the Nakba.
Many, like Abu Ghassan, are determined never to be uprooted from what’s left of Palestine.
“Israel wants to expel all of us … but that’s impossible. None of us will leave … dying here would be better,” he told Al Jazeera.
Abu Ghassan has already been uprooted five times since Israel’s war on Gaza began, following a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
The attack saw Palestinian fighters break out of the enclave, long described as an “open-air prison” due to Israel’s suffocating land, air and sea blockade that caused a protracted humanitarian crisis since 2007.
About 1,139 people died and 250 taken captive in the Hamas-led attack.
Israel quickly launched what United Nations experts and rights groups describe as a potential genocide against Palestinians, uprooting nearly the entire population, deliberately starving people and reducing most of the enclave to rubble.