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Iin the darkened room of an Istanbul hotel full of refugees from Gaza, the light from Ahmed Herzala’s phone screen illuminates a picture of his destroyed home in Gaza City. The building, with its curved black-and-white-striped exterior that wrapped around a street corner, was a place of celebration, where the family gathered for birthdays, graduation ceremonies, or when his sisters visited the home at the beginning of each summer .
The apartment building where Ahmed lived with his wife, children, parents, two brothers and their families was often filled with members of their extended family, the sounds of singing and the smell of home-made sweets and maftoul, chicken stew and couscous. But the photo he showed on his phone was paired with another showing the entire block reduced to rubble. His extended family is now scattered across Gaza or in exile around the world.
“My parents were afraid that if we left, we would never be able to come back in our lifetime, and unfortunately that’s true,” Ahmed said. “It wasn’t just our building, the whole neighborhood was destroyed.”
When a relative texted him the photo showing the destruction of their family home earlier this year, he spent hours staring at it, zooming in to examine the piles of debris that symbolized the erasure of years of memories.
Life in exile also catapulted Ahmed, his wife Diana and their children into the unknown. The Turkish authorities who evacuated an advanced pregnant Diana and their family so she could give birth in Istanbul, granted them two-year humanitarian residency permits and arranged for them to stay in a hotel, a salvation Ahmed described as a stroke of luck. But there is little information about how long they will be housed there, how they can find work or school for their children: Dana, 14; Abdullah, 12, and Omar, seven.
Ahmed’s phone buzzed with news of siblings left behind, including panicked voicemails from one of his sisters, fearing she would not survive the bombing. After Hamas fighters attacked a series of Israeli towns and kibbutzim on October 7, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages, Israel immediately launched an assault on Gaza by land, air and sea. More than 35,000 were killed and entire neighborhoods wiped out, along with the area that formed the economic heart of the strip where Ahmed taught English.
More than 80 percent of housing in northern Gaza, a formerly bustling cluster of densely populated cities and refugee camps that were home to more than a million people, has been destroyed, according to UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing Balakrishnan Rajagopal.
“Everything that makes housing ‘adequate’ – access to services, jobs, culture, schools, places of worship, universities, hospitals – everything is equalized.” he said.
Each of the three Herzala brothers, who lived in the house with their parents in Gaza City, fled, including Ahmed’s older brother, who fled south as food supplies in the north dwindled. Their parents also fled, joining their eldest son in Romania after he fled there in the early days of the war, although Ahmed’s father died soon after they reached Bucharest.
“The grief killed him,” Ahmed said, referring to the pain of exile. He was unable to attend his father’s funeral, learning of the death in Istanbul, where he joined Diana in February, weeks after she gave birth to their youngest son, Ryan. It took Ahmed two months to be reunited with his family.
Even with the problems and trauma of exile, escaping Gaza is considered a luxury available to a small minority. Fleeing the territory, which has become impossible since Israeli forces took control of Gaza’s only southern checkpoint at Rafah, costs thousands of dollars in brokerage fees for those who can raise funds.
Ahmed is unsure what his future holds after teaching for 15 years at a school run by Unrwa, the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees.
“Unrwa was doing its best, but it was built to ease the situation for refugees. It can’t change anything,” he said, recalling how he would often buy some of his students snacks and juice at recess because many would arrive at school hungry amid poverty levels of over 80% and a 16-year Israeli blockade.
He was proud of his work and was shocked when the principal of his school posted on a WhatsApp group for teachers who work there that anyone fleeing Gaza would be put on unpaid leave. “This is a punishment for those who successfully escaped,” Ahmed said.
Unvra said the financial challenges meant that whether the organization was able to pay staff expelled from Gaza or whose jobs were withheld was still being questioned among senior management and was a dilemma for the agency.
The agency is grappling with a deep financial crisis that has threatened drastic cuts to its role as a provider of education and basic health care to Palestinians in the Middle East, including the hiring of some 22,000 teachers, after Israeli authorities accused 12 of its staff of involvement in the attack on October 7.
An independent review later found that Israel had not provided evidence to support its claims. Some of Unwra’s major donors suspended funding before restoring it in recent weeks, but Britain and the US remains reluctant. US lawmakers voted to block any effort to restore federal funding for the agency until 2025, a decision by an Unwra spokesman said caused an 87% budget deficit after years when the US was its largest donor.
As Ahmed frantically searches for work in his new home and tries to imagine a new life outside of his experience as a teacher, he is haunted by their exodus from Gaza City. The only way to leave was on foot. Ahmed, an advanced pregnancy Diana and their children walked two hours to cross the Gaza River.
The route also took them past the muzzle of an Israeli tank. Ahmed placed himself in the line of fire, his wife and children lined up to his right.
“I told my wife, here’s some money and the address we’re going to. If they kill me, just keep going,” he said. “We pretended to our kids that everything was fine, but it wasn’t.” He later added, “I still can’t fathom how I did it.”
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