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, fragile as it is, holds, as does a semblance of hope. Palestinians are now returning to destroyed neighborhoods, where services are scarce and access to water, food and electricity is limited. The few remaining schools are still serving as shelters, and local charity groups are trying to keep aid and other basic resources flowing.
The United Nations estimates that at least 1.9 million people were displaced during the war. One of them is Shahd Shamali, twenty years old, who currently lives in 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 get the range of the router. When our calls dropped, as they often did, Shamali and I switched to text messages and voice notes.
Shamali grew up in Rimal, a neighborhood in western Gaza City, near the Mediterranean Sea. It was once a business and commercial center, with ministries, banks, schools and galleries within a few blocks of each other. Palm tree-lined boulevards separated modern glass apartment buildings and upscale restaurants overlooked the water. The neighborhood has since been reduced to a collection of tents and rubble, storefronts hanging from curved metal cages. Shamali and his family lived in the Al-Jundi al-Majhoul Tower, a fourteen-story building across the street from an ice cream parlor and sports store and home to hundreds of residents. On September 14, 2025, they learned of an impending strike, forcing them to evacuate the area.
In the written responses to The New YorkerThe Israel Defense Forces said it was acting in accordance with international law, taking “all possible precautions to minimize harm to civilians.” Asked about the attack on the Al-Jundi Tower, the Israeli military referred to a previously released statement regarding a strike on a “high-rise tower in Gaza” on September 14, which said the building was used by Hamas for “intelligence gathering” purposes.
I spoke with Gazans who remembered receiving a warning ninety minutes before their building was hit by the Israeli army, while others told me they received less than five minutes. Shamali and his neighbors in Al-Jundi Tower had twenty minutes. I asked her to describe her home and the life she led there, before it was erased, as well as the consequential choices she and her family made during the brief window of evacuation: what they took, how they got out, and where they went. “Those twenty minutes,” Shamali told me, “felt like two seconds.” His account describes the kind of tragedy Palestinians have endured and how it shapes their thinking about what awaits them, even after the ceasefire – their feelings about home and about the future, while both remain precarious.
