A year on from the initial stages of the genocidal war launched by Israel in October 2023, many Palestinians who fled the Gaza Strip now find themselves suspended in time in Egypt. They live between relief that the fighting has paused and the stark realisation that their return home will bring them into a landscape unrecognisable and unsafe. Their displacement may be temporary, yet the damage to their homeland is profound and enduring.

Among them is Suzy Ahmed, who fled Gaza to live in Cairo in March 2024. “Our home was completely destroyed… schools and hospitals have turned into rubble,” she says. Her online efforts to support her community, and help her children study, cannot erase the pull of a place she still calls home, even if it has become a heap of stone. She states simply: “Gaza stays in the heart… even if it has become a pile of stones.”

For Muneeb Sadiq, a student who lost his home and now continues his degree online from Egypt, the idea of going back is almost unimaginable. “Returning now is a leap into the unknown… There’s no infrastructure, no services, and no safety,” he warns. He fears falling once more beneath the machinery of war, and asks: “There are no guarantees when facing Israel’s killing machine.”

On the border front, the crossing at Rafah Crossing remains a choke-point. The Palestinian authorities in Cairo once announced that the exit point would reopen for refugees in Egypt wishing to return to Gaza on 20 October. Hours later, the Israeli prime minister blocked the move, tying the reopening to the hand-over of Palestinian prisoners. As it stands, thousands wait, perhaps years, before the possibility of homecoming might be realised.

Meanwhile, the statistics underpin an overwhelming devastation. Latest assessments show that 92 % of housing units in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, a figure that equates to some 436,000 units. Recovery will take decades, perhaps an entire generation. The once-vibrant cityscape lies in ruins; whole neighbourhoods have vanished or are uninhabitable.

In Egypt, the exiles keep vigil not only for the reopening of a crossing or the end of displacement, but for the essence of a home they may never recognise. They carry memory and hope in equal measure. Their interim life on foreign soil stands as a testament to resilience, but also a silent indictment of the scale of destruction they left behind.