On this day, my memory is clouded with distortion. What moments could I call normal? If I had to choose between the present and any past moment, I would have to admit that the Israeli occupation has stripped away every infrastructure of normal life I could have had as a Palestinian born in April 1990.

Until October 6, 2023, my challenges revolved around sustaining both personal and professional endeavours—completing the finishing touches on my new home and moving into it, ensuring the continuity of 28 magazine space (the gallery) in Rafah, and maintaining Beit Al-Ghusain, the historic cultural house in Gaza’s old city. I was part of various teams and collectives of writers and artists working to build a Palestinian cultural scene in Gaza despite the Israeli siege imposed since 2007.

Until that October, my dreams and aspirations for the future filled me with hope. I had the power to pursue what I longed for.

Since October 7, 2023, I have been living a life unrecognizable even by the standards of occupation. On May 8, 2024, I was forced to leave my home in northern Rafah after receiving an evacuation order; my neighbourhood had been declared a high-risk combat zone. I carried with me the solar power system, mattresses, blankets, gas cylinders, sacks of flour, bags and suitcases of our clothes, some kitchen utensils, a small table, and our laptops. My sixth displacement was, paradoxically, my return home on January 20, 2025. It now seems like an absurd metaphor—someone re-entering the White House.

What memories do I want to summon now to help me navigate this return? I know the house’s layout, the water and electricity networks. Yet, searching for anything here felt like an exercise in searching my memory for this place.

The moment of return was never imagined—not since I was forced into the unknown, to what the army calls a “humanitarian zone”. On the night of January 20—the night of returning home—I stood for a long time, staring at the ceiling of my room, at the colours of the paint, the curtains, the wardrobes, the bed, the tiles. This moment had never once taken shape in my mind throughout my displacement. The thought of coming back had never accompanied me. Even now, every act within the house feels like an attempt to revive my knowledge of it after eight months of absence.

The house was not present with me while I was forcibly away. I had expected it to be demolished, like more than 90% of Rafah’s buildings, according to municipal statistics. I had expected to be granted the chance to travel while displaced. I appeared reconciled with my experience in every place I lived, spending days and nights imagining futures that did not include the house. This, too, was an essential exercise in surviving the genocide that has lasted over fifteen months.

I remember imagination—imagination as a challenge to the brutal reality of life under the genocide. Fear was a companion to imagination, as were loss, as were bullets, missiles, and shells. In May, imagining the future meant searching for a place within the so-called “humanitarian zone” in Mawasi Khan Younis. I had imagined that as long as I could sleep while fearing the advance of a military convoy, then I would also be able to sleep on the sand, in the street, inside a small makeshift room of plastic sheeting and wood, with a bathroom beside it, facing one of the houses in that zone. I spent the entire month of July there, immersed in dust—dust in my food, on my hands, in my mattress and blankets, on my feet, in the water.

Imagination was my defiance. Imagining a future where the house was no longer an option saved me from the dust that engulfed everything. Imagination was my resistance to reality—it meant claiming life without dust, with dignity, with humanity. Both here and beyond. Imagination always declared peace and shaped pathways toward seizing moments of it. I remember wishing, with the arrival of 2025, that the war would end and that I would survive to experience moments untouched by fire.

By returning home, I dismantled a layer of my existence in that other place—not because the house had collapsed, nor because the genocide had ended. But with the war that had raged from October 2023 to January 2025 now suspended, and with space reopening—except for the 700-1400 meters of restricted zones to the east, south, and north—a layer of existence was peeled away. It was a layer that had encompassed my life and the lives of over a million others in Mawasi Khan Younis, from the places we were forced to inhabit to the makeshift homes, water stations, small stalls, central markets, and transport networks. These were now being dismantled and reconfigured within the limited space made available for people to return to their cities and neighbourhoods—90% of which lie in ruins across all governorates.

I am in the house—my house, my family’s house. This is the moment of surpassing the possible future.