The place I was born in Gaza is gone – so now where do I call home?

I remember the day I tried to visit the West Bank. It was November 2018, and I had reasoned with myself that maybe, just maybe, this time would be different.

I had left Gaza years ago, built a life elsewhere, carried a British passport. Maybe that would help. Maybe it would mean I wasn’t just a number in a system designed to erase people like me.

It didn’t.

At the border, the Israeli official barely glanced at my passport before his eyes landed on my place of birth. “Gaza”, he murmured, and just like that, the walls slammed shut. He handed my passport to another soldier – a British-accented one, no less – who looked at me with the same indifference I had seen before. “You need permission,” he said flatly.

I asked how to get it. He handed me a crumpled scrap of paper with an email address and a phone number. That was it. No explanation, no procedure, no official process. Just a flimsy piece of paper, as if my right to move, to visit my own land, could be dismissed with a shrug.

I called the number a hundred times. No answer. I emailed the email address – it bounced back. That was the end of it. My journey to see friends and relatives, to walk in a city that should have been mine to visit, was cut off in a single moment.

I wasn’t denied entry because I had done anything wrong. I was denied because I existed. Because to them, I am not a person with rights, with history, with belonging – I am a problem to be managed, an inconvenience to be controlled.

This is what it means to be Palestinian. To know that the land you call home is not yours to touch. To live with the knowledge that even if you escape the open-air prison of Gaza, its bars follow you. The checkpoints, the paperwork, the endless, meaningless bureaucracy – none of it is about security. It is about control. It is about breaking people down until they give up, until they stop trying, until they disappear.

But history is full of stories like this. It is full of people being denied their right to return; their right to exist in the places they once called home.

My family home in Jabalia, in the north of Gaza, has now been destroyed.

I have to be grateful that my family themselves have survived 15 months of Israel’s unceasing bombardment. They abandoned their home in search of safety, food, and water – but safety was nowhere to be found. Food and water were scarce. They were at the breaking point. And then the ceasefire came.

But it was a brief moment of relief, for what awaited them on their return home was devastation. Once a place of warmth and memories, it had been burned to the ground.

Standing before the charred remains, they weren’t just looking at a destroyed building – they were staring at the loss of a lifetime. The walls that once held their laughter, their childhood, their milestones – gone. And with it, the fragile sense of stability they had fought so hard to hold onto.

Now, they join the hundreds of thousands in Gaza who have no home to return to, wandering through the ruins, searching for shelter in a land where almost nothing remains standing.

It is beyond comprehension. And for me, the pain is unbearable. The house where I was born, where I grew up, and where my family built their lives is no more. My family is now scattered, sharing overcrowded accommodation with strangers, some forced to live in tents, with no certainty of what tomorrow will bring.

It is a grief too deep for words, an injustice too vast to comprehend.

After the Holocaust, when the world had already failed Europe’s Jews once, many of those who had survived tried to return to the homes they had been torn from. They found their apartments in Paris occupied by strangers who refused to leave. They knocked on the doors of houses where their families had lived for generations, only to be met with indifference, sometimes outright hostility. “It’s not yours anymore,” they were told. “Go somewhere else.” No amount of proof, no official papers, no desperate pleading could undo the theft of home, of belonging.

This is what it means to be unwanted. To be told, after enduring unimaginable suffering, that your place in the world has been erased. That your home is no longer yours. That your existence is an inconvenience, a problem to be dismissed with a shrug.

I think about that day often. I think about the way the soldier looked at me – not with anger, not with hostility, but with absolute indifference. He had done this before. He would do it again. I was nothing more than another Palestinian turned away, another life rerouted by an occupation that has spent decades perfecting its cruelty.

And yet, this story is nothing. It is one denial among millions. It is a single thread in a tapestry of suffering in Gaza. It is the same story playing out now, with far higher stakes.

The bombed-out homes, the people being starved, the hospitals turned to rubble – it all follows the same logic. A system designed to make life impossible, to make every Palestinian feel like they are alone, that their suffering is an accident, an unfortunate by-product of war rather than the strategy that it is.

Today, Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, is in Saudi Arabia for discussions about Gaza’s future. Trump’s so-called plan for the region – to displace Palestinians, relocating them to neighbouring countries, in order to redevelop the coastal land as the “Riviera of the Middle East” – will fail, like all the others. Because Palestinians have always understood the truth: this has never been about peace. It has always been about erasure. And every delay, every obstacle, every crumpled piece of paper handed out in place of a right – it is all part of the same machine.

I never got to visit the West Bank that day. I may never be allowed to. But what I do know is this: we will not disappear. No wall, no checkpoint, no system of apartheid, no brutality can erase who we are. And one day, the world will have to reckon with that truth.

Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone is on BBC Two, 9pm on Monday 17 February, and on BBC iPlayer