'This time, we stay' The families vowing not to leave Gaza

Saaed Salem's eyes filled with tears as he surveyed the remains of his north Gaza neighbourhood on a freezing February morning.

- Malak A Tantesh GAZA and Emma Graham-Harrison

He was resting in a chair that had somehow survived the war, surrounded by grandchildren and rubble, his hope for the future and the ruins of his past.

His family had lost one home in 1948, when they fled Hirbiya village, now the site of Zikim kibbutz inside Israel, to escape shelling and reports of atrocities by Israeli forces.

"We locked our house, took the key and walked towards Gaza, believing we'd return in a few days," said Salem, who was then five. Waiting at the end of an exhausting trek was a new reality of refugee camps and permanent exile in the north of the Gaza strip.

'We will not leave. We will not repeat the Nakba'

"When the truth became clear, that we had abandoned our homes and others had taken them, we wished a thousand times we had stayed and faced death instead. The regret never left us." He was one of 700,000 Palestinians forced from their homes in the "Nakba", or catastrophe, in the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel.

So when Israeli troops moved into Gaza in October 2023, more than seven decades later, Salem and his family defied orders to evacuate to the south of the strip. "We had sworn not to make that mistake again," he said.

They stayed in north Gaza during the war, with about 400,000 others, even as a blockade within a blockade meant the north got even less aid than the south. A global watchdog warned of impending famine there last year.

"We endured famine, thirst, bombings, fear, everything. We lived among corpses, under ruins, eating food that wasn't fit for animals. But we never left northern Gaza," he said. "Each time the Israeli army ordered an evacuation before a ground invasion, I moved only to a nearby neighbourhood. And as soon as the invasion ended, I was the first to return."