In October, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, after two years of war. In the weeks since, sporadic Israeli strikes have killed at least a hundred people in Gaza, according to Palestinian health officials, but the ceasefire, however fragile, is holding, and so is a semblance of hope. Palestinians are now returning to destroyed city blocks, where services are scarce, and access to water, food, and electricity is limited. The few remaining schools are still doubling as shelters, and local charity groups are trying to circulate aid and other basic resources.
The United Nations estimates that at least 1.9 million people were displaced during the war. One of them is Shahd Shamali, who is twenty years old, and is currently living at a camp in Deir al-Balah, in the center of the Gaza Strip. For several weeks, we communicated via WhatsApp video calls. From my screen, I could see her sitting at a shared desk in a room, where others held their phones at chest height to catch the router’s range. When our calls dropped, as they often did, Shamali and I would switch over to text messages and voice notes.
Shamali was raised in Rimal, a neighborhood in western Gaza City, near the Mediterranean Sea. It was once a business and commercial hub, with ministries, banks, schools, and galleries within a few blocks of one another. Palm-lined boulevards cut between modern glass apartment buildings, and upscale restaurants overlooked the water. The neighborhood has since been reduced to a sprawl of tents and wreckage, storefronts hanging from cages of bent metal. Shamali and her family lived in Al-Jundi al-Majhoul Tower—a fourteen-story building that sat across from an ice-cream shop and a sports store and was home to hundreds of residents. On September 14, 2025, they learned of an impending strike, forcing them to evacuate the area.
In written responses to The New Yorker, the Israel Defense Forces said they act in accordance with international law, taking “all feasible precautions to minimize harm to civilians.” When asked about the strike on Al-Jundi Tower, the I.D.F. referred to a previously issued statement about a strike on a “high-rise tower in Gaza” on September 14th, which said that the building was being used by Hamas for “intelligence gathering” purposes.
I spoke with people in Gaza who recalled receiving an advance warning of ninety minutes before their building was struck by the I.D.F., whereas others told me they were given less than five minutes. Shamali and her neighbors in Al-Jundi Tower had twenty minutes. I asked her to describe her home, and the life she made there, before it was erased, and the consequential choices she and her family made in the brief evacuation window: what they took, how they got out, and where they went. “Those twenty minutes,” Shamali told me, “felt like two seconds.” Her account captures the kind of tragedy that Palestinians have endured, and how it shapes their thinking about what lies ahead, even after the ceasefire—their feelings about home and about the future, when both remain precarious.
