Khadija was displaced form her family home. There was where her life was rooted and where she raised her five children. Today, everything she owned exists only as memories and a small bag of torn photographs carried with her through nine displacements.
She now lives in a displacement site in Gaza City, run by the Danish Refugee Council, after exhausting every other place she could flee to. She shares a worn tent with three girls aged 12 to 16 and four orphaned grandchildren, her son’s children. He and his wife were killed in what was declared a “humanitarian zone” in Khan Younis. When they died, she fled alone with all seven children.
Around 600,000 people live in displacement sites across Gaza and more than a million live outside formal sites, with thousands of tents already flooded or collapsed after the first serious rains.
Thanks to a hybrid partnership model, DRC and its partners reach the hardest-to access communities across more than 72 sites, providing area based integrated, life-saving assistance and maintaining continuity of basic services.
Khadija has been displaced nine times. Each time she thought she had reached the last place she would need to flee, bombardment forced her to escape again; from Beit Hanoun, Jabalia, Gaza City, Nuseirat, Khan Younis, Deir al-Balah, Al-Zawaida. With each flight, a piece of her life was left behind.
Her memories of home remain vivid. She speaks of orange trees, clementines, and bread baking on a clay oven. She remembers her son calling his sisters to dinner after evening prayer saying, “Mama, your bread beats them all.”
She speaks softly of a neighbour named Abdullah, exchanging food during Eid and lighting lanterns during Ramadan. Today, none of them remain — some are under rubble, others in mass graves, and many simply displaced with no sense of where night will fall.
Life in the camp is harsh. Water arrives in two small buckets a day, rationed carefully. Food consists mostly of aid parcels, flour, canned items, sometimes only tea and dry bread. The tent leaks when it rains and cracks when the ground dries. There is no privacy for women, toilets are few, and the elderly body she carries aches daily.
There’s not much life left in me, what’s gone is more than what remains.
/ Khadija
She suffers from high blood pressure and joint pain, with no access to medicine. Her grandchildren have no school or toys. They ask her “Grandma, when will we go home?” She answers “Soon, Inshallah,” though she cannot promise it.
The household has no income. After her son’s death, they rely solely on humanitarian assistance, neighbour support, and prayer. Some nights they sleep without eating.
What she needs most is clear: a dignified shelter, food, and medicine, especially with winter approaching. Last winter, rain soaked their mattresses, the tent collapsed, and they burned cardboard and plastic to stay warm. The children developed chest infections. The fear of repeating that winter sits heavy in her voice.
If assistance arrives, she says it would be plastic sheets and wooden planks to reinforce the tent before rain comes again.
Yet she still clings to hope — found in the sound of children laughing while playing with stones. As long as they laugh, life continues.
Khadija wants the world to hear her story, not for pity but recognition.
“We are human too. We dream of a warm home, clean water, and a roof that doesn’t fall on our heads.”
* Names have been changed to protect the identity of those interviewed