When I first heard that President Donald Trump was making comments about the future of Gaza, I was in New York City, at a special screening celebrating the new season of my friend Mo Amer’s Netflix show, “Mo.” Then another friend texted me: “Hideous Trump press conference in which he says America will take over Gaza. We’ll talk tomorrow.” I was shocked. But whom would the United States take Gaza from? Israeli forces levelled entire neighborhoods and then withdrew. My friend Ahmad, from Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza, told me that people have returned to their neighborhoods not to resume their old lives but “to live over the rubble of their houses.” But even the rubble in Gaza has meaning to us. It is where our loved ones lived and died. When the time comes, we are the only people who will be removing what must be removed, only to reuse it to rebuild.
Gazans “are going to have peace,” Trump said. “They’re not going to be shot at and killed and destroyed like this civilization of wonderful people has had to endure. The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative. It’s right now a demolition site.” He did not talk about who had done the shooting and killing and destroying: the Israeli military, with support from the U.S. government.
Instead, Trump spoke of turning the Gaza Strip into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” as if no one lives there. Later, when asked how many people would need to be forced out of their homeland, Trump said, “All of them . . . Probably we are talking about 1.7 million people, maybe 1.8 million. . . . I think they will be resettled in areas where they can live a beautiful life and not be worried about dying every day.” He has also said that he had a feeling that the King of Jordan and the President of Egypt “will open their hearts” to Palestinians while the area is reconstructed—as if someone other than Gazans will be doing that hard, slow work.
I won’t bother correcting Trump’s numbers. Instead, I have a question. Who said Gazans are worried about dying? There are many people around the world who worry about dying, including some Americans who don’t have health insurance or who live in areas that are at risk of wildfires. But our worry is not about dying. Palestinians are worried about being killed by Israeli soldiers, settlers, bombs, and bullets. How do you stop people from being killed? Not by removing the people who have been shot and bombed—but by stopping the people who are doing the shooting and bombing.
Since the start of the fragile ceasefire in Gaza, in late January, more than a hundred Palestinians have been killed and many more wounded. I have been hearing from loved ones who are returning to the places where they lived before October 7th. My wife’s family went back to their neighborhood and found their three-story home still standing. So much of Gaza has been bombed that many families cannot say this. Inside, though, the house was completely burned. There was hardly any trace of closets, mattresses, or blankets. I could hear, in a video they sent, the cracking of the floor tiles as they walked. The walls and the ceiling looked charred.
My friend Saber, a father of two kids, was in no hurry to return north. After October 7th, he fled northern Gaza for a tent in Khan Younis. In November, 2023, the apartment building where he had lived was bombed. On January 27th of this year, the day that people were allowed to return to the north, he knew that there was nothing to return for. He did not set out until the next day. “I walked for five hours,” he told me. He stayed for two days. “Then another five hours back to my tent in Khan Younis,” he said.
On January 28th, Doctor Hosam Hamouda, a young physician who volunteered at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, returned to Beit Lahia, the city where I lived before October 7th. I asked him to check on an English-language library that I had founded, in 2017. The library had a reading room filled with bookshelves. It also had a hall where we held events, often for children. Another room functioned as a classroom, where kids could take English lessons or draw. There was a big screen on which we showed cartoons, movies, and educational videos. A storage room held drawing materials, gifts, biscuits, and juice, waiting for the kids. A wall was decorated with their art work. In photos that he sent me, a small number of books remained on one shelf, covered by debris. The rest of the library was in ruins.
It pained me when I remembered how long it had taken each book to land on the shelves, the eight-week journey from the U.S. or Europe to Gaza, the moment I grabbed each box when it arrived at the post office, hailed a taxi, and headed to the library to arrange the books on the shelves. But now the post office is destroyed, the streets are ruined, and barely anyone has or reads books.
Before I could think about rebuilding the library, Hamouda sent me a message asking if I could help him raise funds to start a medical tent in the neighborhood, which has no functioning hospitals, clinics, or pharmacies. If someone in Beit Lahia feels sick, Hamouda said, “they would have to go to Gaza City to see a doctor.” The taxi fare alone—about fifty shekels, or fourteen U.S. dollars, one way—is too much for most patients to afford.
My brother Hamza sent me photos of the cemetery in Beit Lahia. He pointed out a path that Israeli tanks had apparently followed. It crossed from one end of the cemetery to the other, wiping out graves along the way. On one resting place, there was a metal staircase from a bombed house. The graveyard was covered with grass and encircled with destroyed homes. I thought about my uncle and brother who are buried there. Are their graves still intact? As we pull our dead out of the rubble, where should we put all the new bodies?
In the summer of 2014, Israeli strikes destroyed more than twelve thousand housing units and severely damaged another sixty-five hundred. Almost a hundred and fifty thousand units were rendered uninhabitable. But the end of the violence was the beginning of reconstruction. One of my neighbors used to go out on a donkey cart and collect concrete from destroyed houses. He sold each cartload for ten shekels—less than three dollars—and it was crushed in quarries to make gravel for new structures. Other men extracted rebar from damaged walls and ceilings. The metal rods could be straightened and remolded to reinforce new walls and ceilings.
In northern Gaza, there is no running water, no electricity, no hospitals, and not enough clothes, blankets, or mattresses. Still, people are determined. Last week, the journalist AbdalQader Sabbah posted a video on Instagram. He pointed to a group of tents in the middle of what looked like a demolition site. Some of the tents had been blown down by strong winds. But the next day, reporting from the Jabalia refugee camp, he posted a video of men doing construction work. Nearby, there were two United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools, one of them clearly burned and the other severely damaged. The men were working to build the walls of a five-story house.
I know Gazans who would like to leave. My friend Waleed, from the Jabalia camp, has been dreaming of going somewhere else “since the first month of the war, whether Trump had said anything or not.” Yet the border crossing is still closed in both directions. According to Gaza’s director of field hospitals, in a recent three-week period, thirty-five thousand patients needed to leave Gaza for treatment. Only a hundred and twenty of them made it out. Meanwhile, many of the people who left after October 7th are stuck in Egypt, waiting to return so they can be reunited with their families. My mother and sister, who went to Doha so that my sister could get medical treatment, have been unable to get back to my father and siblings.
For someone like me, the question of when to go back to Gaza is a difficult one. My wife and I have three children, and we often think about returning to our homeland, but we cannot do so until we Palestinians are in full control of the Rafah crossing—when to open it and when to close it. The crossing has not been opened to returnees since the end of 2023, and it has not been open to anyone departing since May, 2024, when Israel occupied and largely destroyed the Gazan side. I don’t want to go back to Gaza and find myself locked in.
Since Trump’s press conference, many people I know in Gaza have been afraid of the opposite—leaving and being locked out. My friend Saber called Trump’s comments terrifying. “Most of the people refuse to move an inch and are willing to live in tents all their lives,” he wrote to me. “Especially after they realized that leaving might mean no return.” My mother-in-law has a different fear. What if our family rebuilds, only to be forced to leave? She worries that all of the work will be wasted.
I am often shocked to hear Palestinians talk about their hopes. We mention the most basic things. We want to get jobs, build houses, go to the beach, maybe travel abroad and know that we can come back. Even the things we collectively dream of—having our own airport and seaport, meeting tourists and showing them around, visiting Jerusalem and praying at Al-Aqsa Mosque, returning to the villages and cities where our parents and grandparents lived—seem commonplace to many people around the world. We deserve these things and more.
Palestinians do not need President Trump to talk about Gaza as if it were an empty hotel room that needs redesigning. What we need is for the rest of the world to hear about Gaza’s basic, immediate necessities. We need to erect tents and fill them with teachers so that children who have missed sixteen months of learning can go back to school. We need to dig through the debris for whatever remains of our brothers and sisters and parents and children so that we can bury them. We need heavy equipment to clear away fifty million tons of rubble and replace it with places to live and work. We need to replant devastated fields so that Palestinian farmers can grow our food again. We need to replace sites of death with hospitals where people can heal. We need an end to the state of siege that surrounds us. And the people who shape this future need to be us Palestinians—not the people who made Gaza look like a demolition site, or who now seem to think that an entire people should be demolished, too. All of these things are important. But nothing is more important than staying. ♦
