The War We Carry

For Palestinians forced out of Gaza, survival means bearing a second trauma: the endless dislocation of exile.

Illustration: Zainab Al-Qolaq

A few days after my family and I left Gaza and began our lives as exiles, we found ourselves inside a dim immigration office in Cairo—the latest in a string of appointments for an entry stamp of approval to Egypt.

The fluorescent lights buzzed faintly, and everything about the room felt temporary yet interminable. It was the kind of place built to process people quickly but not kindly. Rows of hard plastic chairs lined the walls.

I was clutching a faded blue folder, creased and soft at the edges. Inside were the scraps I hoped would justify my presence on this side of the border: a birth certificate folded too many times, a college degree printed in both Arabic and English, visa forms half-completed, a utility bill with someone else’s name crossed out and mine written in. Documents that felt less like proof of identity than reminders of how much of it had already been lost.

I am many things: a father, a husband, a son, a Palestinian, a Gazan, a journalist, a survivor. But in this room, none of that mattered; here, I was just another refugee reduced to a handful of papers, my life shrunk into a fragile scaffolding of dates and stamps.

The room smelled of bureaucracy—photocopier ink, recycled air, the faint trace of cheap perfume worn by someone behind the counter. A low murmur of voices, a soft chorus of Arabic dialects, filled the space. I recognized some of the accents instantly; others were still foreign to my ear. The Egyptian accent bent certain words in ways I wasn’t yet used to. Occasionally, the sharp scrape of a chair dragged across linoleum would slice through the hush.

I glanced around the room and met the eyes of others also waiting. Some were holding folders like mine; others were simply sitting with nothing in their hands. They seemed like they had already surrendered everything. I didn’t know their names; I couldn’t recall their faces from home. But I recognized them all the same. There was something unmistakable in their stillness, in the way they stared at the floor or at nothing at all. It was a look I had seen in the mirror for weeks now: a quiet, precise, ever-present kind of grief.

They, too, were from Gaza.

My phone buzzed. I shouldn’t have checked, at least not in this room, but the urge was too strong. The notification lit up the screen: “Breaking: Another air strike in Gaza City. A neighborhood leveled in the north, many casualties reported.” The words swam for a moment. I blinked hard, trying to will them into coherence. A video, grainy yet undeniably real, began to autoplay. Smoke billowed from a burning street as a man ran cradling a small, limp body in one arm. Another man shouted into the camera, trying to name the street and the dead. Somewhere off-screen, a child wailed. I leaned in, drawn against my will, as the waiting room dissolved.

A single child’s shoe lay amid the broken rebar. It was too small to belong there, too intact and too innocent. I stared at it, and relief rose inside me: My son was safe and far from this. And then, just as quickly, shame followed—because his safety had come at the cost of someone else’s child. Because it meant we had left.

The clerk’s voice, flat and mechanical, jolted me back to the present. The normalcy of it all was disorienting. My mind reeled back to the day we left Gaza. The bus crossing the border was silent. My son clutched my hand so tightly it hurt, but I didn’t let go. I told myself that I had a duty to deliver my family to something called safety. I couldn’t bear to look back, so I told myself that we were only looking forward now, because we thought we were surviving.

But sitting in this quiet, indifferent room, I wasn’t sure. Was this survival? Or just another kind of disappearance?

My name was called, or something like it. The immigration officer didn’t even try to get it right.

“This document isn’t enough,” he told me, pushing the folder back without looking up. His tone was practiced and stripped of human weight, the voice of someone used to treating people like paperwork. I opened my mouth—I wanted to explain. Maybe to tell him how I had crawled through the remains of my home gathering proof that I existed. How I had spent the morning at another office to get the stamp he now said didn’t count. But what would be the point?

I nodded instead. Picked up the folder. Walked out into a late afternoon sun so harsh it made my eyes sting. The chill of the office still clung to my skin.

Palestinians have endured the pain of exile for many generations. Now, almost two years into Israel’s horrific war in Gaza, we are forced to write yet another chapter in this seemingly endless story.

For some of us, this exile has meant Egypt. Before May 2024, when Israel sealed the Rafah crossing—effectively the only way out of Gaza once the war began—more than 100,000 of us managed to flee. But once we reached the other side, survival took on a new shape: We became people without a place, without paperwork, without permanence, like bureaucratic ghosts. Our bodies walked Cairo’s streets while our spirits still crouched at the Rafah crossing, waiting for the gate to open and to be let through—and waiting to be recognized as someone worth letting in.

Egypt was the only real option; other neighboring countries had effectively closed their doors. Yet even in Egypt, entry did not mean arrival. Egypt has refused to grant residency to refugees from Gaza. For them, there is no clear path to legal status.

Which is how I ended up in that government office, trying to make sense of what, if anything, might allow me to stay, work, or live without fear of deportation. But the answers were always shifting, and the questions themselves seemed designed to confuse, not clarify. Like the time I was told I needed proof of employment to apply for a visa, but couldn’t legally work without one.

In Egypt, every step forward is a negotiation with invisibility. The forms are always missing a line, the requirements changing without warning. Our residency is temporary and fragile, like paper left out in the rain. One smudge, one missing stamp, and whole months disappear as though they had never happened.

Our fate in neighboring states is not much better. In many Arab countries—Lebanon and Jordan as well as Egypt—Palestinians remain barred by law or practice from dozens of professions, from engineering to medicine, while work permits are limited to the point of being effectively unusable. The Casablanca Protocol, a set of provisions agreed to at the 1965 Arab League summit, was meant to ensure certain legal rights for Palestinian refugees residing in the countries of the Arab world, including guaranteeing their right to work on par with citizens as well as their freedom of movement (i.e., the right to leave and to return, and the issuance of travel documents). But these provisions have since waned or been made obsolete by new policies that deny Palestinians the right of equal citizenship.

For war-displaced Palestinians, this bureaucratic squeeze turns the job market into a minefield. Even highly educated professionals are forced into precarious or informal work—if they find any at all. It’s a reality grounded in statelessness, political exclusion, and shifting administrative rules, resulting in a denial of basic rights like healthcare, education, and property ownership.

One woman who also fled, Amal, left Gaza in May 2024. (She asked me not to name the country where she now lives.) But without legal status or residency, her life remains precarious. She moves from one under-the-table job to the next, always vulnerable to exploitation, always one step away from losing everything. Each job ends because her employers grow wary of her undocumented status or just stop calling.

“Every month, I wonder if I’ll make rent,” Amal told me. “I’m surviving, yes, but only just.”

In Egypt, most Palestinian exiles rely on charity groups and community-run initiatives. At one distribution site I visited, women stood in long lines, their children tugging at their sleeves or chasing each other in circles. One woman balanced a baby in one arm and a bundle of supplies in the other. The weight of the diapers and canned goods seemed to drag her down, but she pressed forward. At the back of the room, a boy played with a toy truck he’d made from an empty plastic bottle, while a woman muttered to her toddler, “If we wait a little longer, maybe they’ll call our name.”

There was one moment that stayed with me. A child, no older than 6, approached me with a piece of bread in his hand. “Do you want some?” he offered. I shook my head, unable to speak.

Exile for Gazans is an unraveling. We fled a place turned to ash, only to find ourselves facing a different kind of suffocation. No state, no passport, no one to speak our name—just a trail of e-mails unanswered, offices that close early, and state agents who look through us as if our very presence is a mistake.

Many days, it feels like I’m trapped in a limbo between a life I fled and another I haven’t yet begun. The air is quieter here and the ground is still. But I walk like someone who’s bracing for impact, as if the war might still find me in the creases of the day.

I left Gaza, but not completely. My body crossed the border; the rest of me stayed behind. In the half-light of morning or the hush before sleep, I still hear the war breathing and see the faces of friends I can’t reach, colleagues filing dispatches between air strikes, and family counting the water bottles and hours without fuel.

Exile has taught me a strange math: Every safe night feels like a theft, every meal like a betrayal. I’ve learned how guilt settles in the lungs: quiet but heavy. I’ve learned how to live in two places at once and belong fully to neither.

Rebuilding a life in exile feels like trying to reassemble a shattered mosaic, the pieces scattered across distances that can’t be bridged. We thought it would be easy to adjust to life in Egypt—a neighboring country, Arab and Muslim—but there were big differences in how we saw things and how we lived. The Egyptian dialect is vastly different from Palestinian Arabic. Sometimes it feels like speaking an entirely different language. Cultural differences compound the sense of displacement: Social norms, humor, and even food are foreign. And while the dishes can be delicious, they are not the flavors of home.

Some mornings, I’d wake to the soft hum of my son reciting the alphabet in Palestinian Arabic. Hearing him speak our language felt like a triumph. But it was also a reminder of the fragile threads of culture, history, and belonging that exile wears thinner with each passing day.

Our apartment walls, plain and unfamiliar, held little of Gaza, but we tried. Fruit stickers hung beside a map of Palestine, its contested borders tightly drawn, etched deep into our identity.

At night, I hummed the lullabies my mother once sang to me, hoping they would carry my youngest home even if he never set foot there.

Zainab is a writer from Gaza fighting her own quiet battle against cultural erasure in Cairo. She organizes poetry readings and storytelling nights in a rented community hall, gathering Palestinians in exile to share fragments of their past.

“We have to keep telling these stories,” she said. “If we don’t, they’ll fade, and so will we.”

For Mohammed Rabee, a journalist who’s now in exile in Turkey, the struggle is different but no less draining. “Western editors want stories that fit their narrative,” he told me. “They frame us as either victims or militants, nothing in between. When I push back, they say I’m biased.”

These hardships are systemic, part of the architecture of dispossession, trauma, and uncertainty that shapes our lives. It’s no wonder that mental health struggles are widespread.

“What we see most often is a deep sense of loss,” said Dr. Hala, a therapist working with exiled Palestinians in Europe. “Loss of home, identity, and belonging. It shows up as anxiety, depression, profound fatigue. They’re fighting on every front, for survival, dignity, and recognition.”

Each night, as I tuck my son into bed, I wonder if I’m doing enough to give him a sense of home in a place that still feels foreign to me. The photos of Gaza, the stories I tell, the lullabies I sing—they’re my attempt to build something enduring out of what exile has left behind. But the cracks always show. This life is both beautiful and fragile, real and imagined, rooted and uprooted all at once. And I know I’m not alone.

Palestinian exile stretches like a web linking those still in Gaza, those displaced, and those scattered across the world. The thing about being Palestinian is that statelessness follows us, whether we live in Palestine or not. In Gaza, people long for freedom. In exile, we long for the same thing. For more than seven decades, occupation has entrenched our dispossession. Refugee camps have become generational homes. Lives are built around waiting for return, for recognition, and for justice.

Much as I sit to educate my son about home, my friend Noor tells her daughter a bedtime story in Gaza, a story about a tree that grew despite the stones thrown at it. Her grandmother told it to her during another war in the 1980s. That grandmother had been displaced in 1948.

Noor’s world is shattered now, just like her grandmother’s and mine. Like me, she and her daughter are at home and homeless all at once.

We’ve become the keepers of our own history. But even this task is fraught, constantly undermined by dominant narratives that frame our struggle as a relic of the past rather than a fight for survival.

In the face of erasure, grassroots solidarity has become a beacon. Across the diaspora, Palestinians are building informal systems of support that governments and institutions refuse to provide.

In Berlin, Amani, a refugee, runs a legal aid group for newcomers navigating the maze of asylum processes. “No one helped me when I arrived,” she said. “I won’t let that happen to anyone else.” She translates documents, attends court hearings, organizes rights workshops.

In Turkey, a group of exiled journalists has launched a digital platform to amplify stories from Gaza, publishing testimonies, photos, and videos smuggled from inside.

“We can’t be there,” said Samir, one of the founders, “but we can make sure the world sees what’s happening.”

These efforts, however different, share one purpose: preserving the spirit of Palestine in exile. Through cultural festivals in Paris, political protests in London, and storytelling nights in Amman, Palestinians are holding on to who we are.

Exile may scatter us, but it cannot sever our connection. From Gaza to Berlin, Brooklyn to Beirut, and Istanbul to Amman, these stories draw a collective portrait of resilience in the quiet, powerful act of enduring.

Late at night, I watch Gaza through the screen of my phone. The footage, which is shaky at times, was filmed by a friend who’s still there; it shows children managing to play on a rubble-strewn street, their laughter rising above the hovering drones.

Outside my window, the world is orderly and silent. It couldn’t be more different.

I pause the video, close my eyes, and let the echoes of home wash over me. For a moment, I am back there—walking streets that no longer exist, in a world that survives only in memory. But when I open my eyes, I’m still here. Sitting in a space that still doesn’t feel like mine.

I ask myself a question I’ve asked a thousand times before: How can we keep Gaza alive in our hearts while building a future elsewhere?

The answer never changes: We don’t have a choice—we need to do both. Despite the distance and the silence of the world, Palestinians carry Gaza’s story as a duty. Our existence is persistence, and our voices are a bridge connecting past to present, Gaza to the world, and despair to hope.

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This piece has appeared in the September 2025 Issue of The Nation. You can access the story online here.