A man looks out of the window of a bombed school in Khan Younis on May 24.
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KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — Mona Abu Issa is cooking canned corned beef in a large cast-iron skillet on the grate. Stir in a few slices of onion and green pepper – prized fresh vegetables. A firewood burned below.
“There’s no gas, so we have to light a fire,” the 27-year-old explained.
This makeshift kitchen is located outside, with wood smoke blackening the nearby concrete brick walls. This is one of the only walls still standing around.
Khan Younis was the center of intense fighting, Israeli airstrikes and shelling months ago. The city is now in ruins. There were piles of rubble as far as the eye could see. The skeletons of former buildings jut out from the skyline.
One of them is a multi-story school that Abu Issa, her two young children and her extended family (20 people in total) now call home. It is mostly crumpled, but four classrooms are partially standing. Each house is home to four different families.
Abu Issa and her family arrived from the southern city of Rafah in mid-May about three weeks ago.
Early in the war, the Israeli military declared Rafah safe, and about a million Palestinian civilians fled there from the north. But in early May, Israel began a military offensive against Rafah and continued deep into the city. Much of the city is now under evacuation orders, and even those who were not under evacuation orders have not been spared the violence.
Palestinians fled the city after an Israeli airstrike last month on a camp for displaced persons. More than a million people have left, but options for where to go are extremely limited, according to UNRWA, the U.N. agency that aids Palestinian refugees.
In the classroom where Abu Issa now lives, children run around in the open space. Sheets hang from the ceiling to create privacy. There is also a blackboard hanging in front, and someone has written Muslim prayers in chalk. Washed clothes are being dried on ropes stretched across the classroom like a giant net.
“We know about the displacement because we resettled some families in Rafah,” Abu Isa said. She explained that her family had resettled eight other families in their home at different times, all of whom had fled from the north.
They never thought they would be displaced. But a few weeks ago, the Israeli military dropped leaflets from the sky ordering nearby civilians to evacuate.
“I was so panicked,” Abu Issa recalled. He said the displaced families they were sheltering told them, “The leaflets are coming and you have to leave.”
“They announced the decision in the morning. We were having lunch at home and as soon as we finished lunch, the explosions started,” her brother Ibrahim Abu Issa, 24, interjected.
Ibrahim said the family only had time to buy some clothes and enough canned food for a month.
They initially fled to Mawasi, a stretch of sand outside Rafah that the Israeli military declared a humanitarian zone. People had pitched tents there, but Abu Isa’s family didn’t have one. So they continued north to Khan Yunis, a city they knew had been destroyed but was the only other place they could think of.
It was a family they were sheltering who tipped them off about the classroom, and it has been their temporary home ever since. They feel lucky that they found it.
“When we came here, everything was destroyed,” Ibrahim said. “So we cleaned and mopped the floor. We laid out some mats and organized some things.
Khan Younis, May 24. Abu Isa’s family sits in a classroom of a bombed-out school that serves as their temporary home.
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They sorted furniture and supplies and used them wherever possible. Ibrahim shows off a small toilet cubicle they made in the corner. One wall is a tall metal cabinet; the door is a blackboard attached to its side.
There is a toilet inside, which the family spent about $30 on with their little savings. Khan Younis no longer has running water—almost none—so they cut a hole in the wall behind the toilet so excrement can fall underneath.
Ibrahim said the toilet was important because his disabled grandmother Mariam, who is in her 80s, was with them.
She was a little girl in 1948, when Israel was created and Palestinians were forced to move from their own land to places like Gaza in the war. Her family walked a little more than 40 miles from Jaffa, outside Tel Aviv, to get there.
“this [Israeli] The military told us Gaza was safe, so we settled here.
Her family built their home in Rafah, where she has lived ever since. But now, Mariam is displaced again.
“Where can people go? Where?” she asked.
No place is safe, she said. People have nowhere to go.
