I Carry the Key to My Destroyed Home in Gaza to Keep Alive My Dream of Returning

Por Alaa Dmeida — Truthout

The word “ceasefire” entered the news on October 11, 2025, but it has still not entered our lives as a reality.

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On the night of March 18, 2025, while we were observing Ramadan, my family and I woke to the sound of very loud explosions, one after another.

We all woke up frightened and began asking my father, “What happened? Has the war returned?”

My father did not answer. No one knew anything.

We stayed together, waiting for morning, not knowing what was happening.

We had not expected the first ceasefire to be broken. We had already spent nearly a year living through war, and we had been looking forward to Ramadan with the hope that it would come without the bombing and fear.

The first ceasefire in Gaza had lasted nearly two months before Israel resumed its airstrikes that day, ending the period of relative calm that had begun on January 19, 2025.

Then everything became quiet. We ate suhoor, the early morning meal eaten before the daily fast of Ramadan begins, we prayed Fajr (the pre-dawn prayer), and went back to sleep.

But we were overwhelmed by grief and exhaustion. We loved Ramadan, and we had been waiting for it for a whole year, hoping that it would finally be a time to feel some happiness after a year of displacement, hunger, war, and exhaustion.

I remember thinking that even Ramadan, the holy month that we had hoped to celebrate after everything we had been through, had not granted us even one year of peace.

After the war resumed, we were displaced to a school near our home in Jabalia.

As the months passed, life became more difficult, and hunger began to set in. But we stayed. We held on to our neighborhood and our home. We remained there alongside our relatives and neighbors.

Then Eid al-Adha came. That year, it fell on Friday, June 6. For some reason, I was very excited about Eid. I cannot remember why. We prayed Eid al-Adha, listened to the Eid sermon, wore our nicest clothes, and congratulated one another on the end of Ramadan. But the celebration did not last long.

Friday is the weekly holy day for Muslims, when we gather for Friday prayers after a sermon. When the time for Friday prayers approaches, men would normally begin making their way to mosques or prayer areas.

But suddenly, the bombing began.

The sky above us filled with helicopters dropping bombs, while terrifying artillery shells were fired around the area.

We had decided to stay, but an evacuation order was then issued for the entire area. We were forced to leave, abandoning the school that had been our shelter, our home and our neighborhood in Jabalia.

For days, we hoped we would be able to return. We thought the evacuation might only be temporary, perhaps part of an expansion of the Israeli military operation, and that we would return within a week or two.

Then, on June 11, my father decided to go back toward Jabalia to check on our home. When he came back and told us that it was gone, we were devastated.

Shortly afterward, another evacuation order was issued for the area where we were staying. We left again, this time for the Daraj area of Gaza City.

But the displacement did not end there. As the bombing intensified in Daraj, we were forced to leave again.

On September 22, we arrived at Al-Awda Camp in Al-Zawaida, in central Gaza. The name of the place carried a deep meaning for us. “Al-Awda” simply means returning home — returning to the place where we belong and to the life we had before the war. Despite everything we had been through, we were still holding on to that hope.

The key to our home was still in the bag I had packed when we were first displaced. I carried it with me every time we were forced to leave one place and move to another.

We knew our home had been destroyed, but that did not erase our desire to return. We did not know what that return would look like or what we would find when we got there. We simply wanted to reach the place that had once been our home and see with our own eyes what remained.

The key to our home was still in the bag I had packed when we were first displaced. I carried it with me every time we were forced to leave one place and move to another. I never used it, but I never left it behind either.

I knew it could no longer open the door I remembered because the door itself was no longer there. Still, I kept carrying it.

At the time, I did not know that I would continue carrying that key for another year. The key meant more to us than a piece of metal. It was a symbol of return.

For Palestinians, keeping a house key after displacement is not new. In 1948, our grandparents and great-grandparents were displaced from their homes, and many carried their keys with them, hoping they would one day return.

Generations later, that hope has not disappeared.

We carried the same idea with us — that even if the house disappeared, we could still return to the place where it once stood.

The key was small, but it carried a history much larger than itself.

I did not carry it because I believed it could open a destroyed house. I kept it because discarding it up felt like giving up the possibility of return.

On October 10, 2025, while I was studying for my final exams, my father came into our tent and told us that a ceasefire agreement had been announced.

Despite the announcement, we cautiously waited for the ceasefire to officially take effect.

Then, on the night of October 11, I woke up to the news: The ceasefire had taken effect, and we could return to northern Gaza.

After carrying the key through months of displacement, I was hearing the word “return” again — this time as something that might actually happen.

About two days after the ceasefire took effect, we began our journey north. But we could not return to our neighborhood.

Our home and our area were still within what was known as the “Yellow Line.” We could not even reach our home. So we went to Yarmouk Camp in Gaza City and stayed there with our family.

We had returned to northern Gaza, but we could not return home.

In 1948, our grandparents and great-grandparents were displaced from their homes, and many carried their keys with them, hoping they would one day return.

The days that followed the so-called ceasefire did not feel like peace. The Israeli military kept killing people. The sounds of gunfire and bombing had not disappeared, and people trying to return to their homes continued to face danger.

Nearly a year later, the violence still has not stopped. Israel has killed at least 1,460 Palestinians and injured 5,116, according to the latest figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Although the word “ceasefire” had entered the news, it had not entered our lives as a reality.

For us, it was difficult to understand what the ceasefire meant when Israel still prevented us from reaching our home.

Mohammed Abu Yasser, whose home is still standing but remains inaccessible to him, described what it feels like to know that your home is still there while being unable to return to it.

My house is still there, but I cannot reach it. I know that because I can see it from a distance. It is strange to know that your home is standing somewhere and that you are still unable to go back to it.

For some people, returning north meant going back to a damaged house and trying to make it livable again. For others, it meant remaining displaced even after reaching the north. For us, it meant living in Yarmouk Camp and waiting.

One month passed. Then another.

We followed the news and waited for signs that life would begin moving again — that homes could be rebuilt, that people could find somewhere to settle, and that returning could become more than simply reaching the place where they had once lived.

But time kept moving, even when our lives seemed stuck.

Abu Yasser told me:

Before the war, I thought home was a place you could always return to. After years of displacement, I understand home differently. It is the people, the memories and the feeling that you belong somewhere. That is why losing access to a place can feel like losing part of yourself.

During that year, children were born, other children grew older, and I graduated from university. Families continued trying to rebuild their lives wherever they could find a place to stay.

A year has passed, and the key is still with me. We do not know when we will return, what we will find when we get there, or whether the place we return to will look anything like the place we left.

But I still carry the key to our home, yearning to return to our neighborhood and the places we knew before displacement.

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Alaa Dmeida is a Palestinian writer from Gaza. Her work explores displacement, memory, and life under war. Her writing has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Progressive, Palestine Deep Dive, We Are Not Numbers, The Massachusetts Review, and Baladi Magazine.

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Fonte: Truthout