"An hour after the evacuation tower was destroyed in Gaza, my brother sent me a text message saying that our grandfather owned an apartment in that building, which he bought from his savings and left it for his children to inherit after him, but it turned into rubble," writer Leila Al-Erian said.

Palestinians throughout the generations have never been able to forget that "the homeland is disappearing, and that it can be taken from them at any moment."

An Israeli air strike destroyed the Al-Galaa Tower, a 12-storey residential tower in Gaza that houses the offices of Al-Jazeera and the Associated Press. It collapsed like the towers made by children from magnetic tiles or Lego games, and disappeared within seconds.

In a report published by the American New York Times (Nytimes), Al-Erian said that she has worked for Al-Jazeera for 13 years, and that her colleagues and families who lived in 60 apartments in the Al-Galaa Tower had to make difficult choices about what to take during their rush of bombing.

My grandfather Abdul Karim

The writer added that her grandfather Abdul Karim knows this feeling well, as he had previously lost several houses that he owned.

Abdel Karim was born in Gaza in 1933, and became an orphan on his fifth birthday after the death of his parents of cancer, as he was from the generation of the Nakba, the Palestinians who suffered from the terror, loss and displacement that accompanied the establishment of Israel in 1948. While in high school, he was talking about the bullets that occurred. Israeli warplanes launched it over Gaza, which tore apart the ground under its feet.

Israel bombed Gaza in its successive wars (Al-Jazeera)

Death march in Lod

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been driven from their homes, and massacres have occurred in cities and villages across the country, prompting refugees to pour into the small coastal Gaza Strip.

Laila's grandmother (Enaam) - at the age of 12 - was one of the 70,000 people who walked from Lod, Ramleh and the surrounding villages (East Jaffa), in what was later known as the death march in Lod.

She learned that her father - a police officer in Jaffa - had been executed by Israeli forces and buried in a mass grave.

Al-Arian stated that many refugees carried clothes on their backs and hung the keys to their homes on their necks, as her grandmother told her that her mother carried them and walked until her toenails fell, due to the takeover of their homes by Jewish settlers who arrived from Europe.

When her grandmother arrived with her family to Gaza, she was crowded with refugees from all over Palestine, thousands of whom were forced to sleep in tents provided by the United Nations.

When he got married to Laila

By the time her grandparents met in 1956, her grandmother was working as a seamstress to help support her family, as she was unable to return to school and did not go beyond sixth grade.

Inaam was distinguished by her small size, curly brown hair, bright almond eyes and shy smile, and she wore clothes that she had sewn from the fifties fashion.

When Laila's grandparents got married, it was difficult for them to find jobs, so they became part of the Palestinian diaspora.

Although they moved to the Arab countries, which needed their professional experience and educational level, they remained strangers to them.

Life has become a struggle to build a new home while preserving the memory of the person who was robbed of you, and desperately searching for a way to get it back.

Laila El-Erian: My mother remembers the trips to Gaza, where she plays in the mulberry groves and the Mediterranean Sea in her line of sight, with sand under her feet (communication sites)

Memories of Umm Laila in Gaza

In 1958, her grandfather moved to Saudi Arabia with his wife and one-year-old son to teach Arabic.

He saved everything he could from his meager salary to take his children to visit Gaza in the summer, and my mother remembers those trips home, as she played in mulberry groves and the Mediterranean Sea in her eyes with sand under her feet.

After years of modest living, her grandfather bought a small plot of land on the coast of Gaza, and was planning to build a house on it.

In 1967, while sitting in a café with his friends in the Saudi city of Jeddah, her grandfather heard the news of the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, so he turned his face black and fainted from the shock.

Israel issued a decree stating that no Palestinian would be recognized as residing in the Strip if he was not in Gaza prior to the war.

Thus her grandfather was not allowed to return.

My grandfather searched for a nationality, and when he got the American passport, he returned to settle in Gaza (Pixabay)

Searching for a nationality

After a few years, her grandfather was forced to leave Saudi Arabia due to force majeure, so the family moved to Cairo and rebuilt their lives again.

Laila's grandfather bought an apartment from an Egyptian family.

On the other hand, he was not allowed to register it in his name because he is Palestinian.

When he left Cairo with his family on a short trip, the Egyptian family moved to the apartment and took it over completely, only to remain homeless again, she says.

Although her grandfather worked and lived in 4 different Arab countries, he was denied citizenship.

It should be noted that his longing for Gaza never left him, but he needed citizenship in order to obtain a passport that would enable him to return to the homeland.

The writer said that her mother, who settled in the United States when she was 18 years old, took her grandfather to live with them in Florida for long periods in the 1990s, which prompted him to apply for US citizenship.

Laila loved those moments when she was sitting with her grandfather on the balcony in the afternoon, sipping tea with sage, watching the rain, and sharing jokes with her, and Laila testing his knowledge of the basics of American history and rule in preparation for his nationality test.

Grandpa returns to Gaza

Once he obtained his US citizenship, her grandfather determined to return to Gaza.

On the other hand, her grandmother, whom he married for nearly 50 years, refused to return as long as the land remained under the grip of the occupation.

In 2004, her grandfather moved to Gaza, while Leila's grandmother remained in the Emirates alone.

When he returned to Gaza, the grandfather gave up smoking and spent most of his time in the open air between planting olives, grapes and berries in his family's grove and relaxing in his small apartment overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. He reconnected with members of his family, from which he had separated for years, and ate figs that he dreamed of tasting when he was In exile.

In 2007, and in an attempt to destabilize the Hamas-led government, Israel imposed a crushing blockade on Gaza that is still continuing, and turned the area into a prison, and obtaining medicine for diabetes from which the grandfather suffers is almost impossible, as well as repeated power cuts. On using kerosene stoves to cook his meals.

The Evacuation Tower, which was recently destroyed by the occupation, has become a monument after an eye in Gaza (Reuters)

The frequency of wars on Gaza

As a result, the wars on Gaza became more frequent, and Laila remembered her grandfather's description of each war as more brutal and terrifying than the war that preceded it.

He was telling them how the bombs were shaking the walls of his home while he was trying to get to sleep.

During the bombing of Gaza in 2008 and 2009, Israeli bombardments destroyed agricultural lands and weakened food supplies.

In fact, a section of the Layla family's orchard was hit by white phosphorous shells, and its charred soil could no longer grow crops.

Six years later, during the devastating war of 2014, Grandpa's small apartment on the Gaza beach was bombed.

The author stated that her grandfather's seven children were unable to visit him in Gaza, as each of them lived in a different country, which reflects the difficult reality of the Palestinian exodus.

In 2019, Layla's grandfather passed away, but part of her is relieved that he is not alive to witness what many in Gaza today describe as the worst attack the Strip has ever experienced.

Before his death, her grandfather poured all his savings into buying an apartment in Al-Galaa Tower (one of the tallest buildings in Gaza), and he used to live on his apartment rent in the absence of retirement funds or government checks.

Unlike the Al-Galaa Tower, which was evacuated before it was bombed, families did not have a chance to escape the inevitable death after the Israeli airstrikes destroyed their homes without warning;

The primary aim of the occupation is not only to strip and destroy the Palestinians of their property, but also to deny them the right to mourn for them.

The moment when the evacuation tower began to collapse in Gaza, following Israeli raids on it (Al-Jazeera)

Grandfather's house in the evacuation tower

The writer said that the tower was the house that her grandfather built after he spent his life in exile, the house for which he held out until his last breath.

Moreover, this tower reflects the feeling of longing that brought him back to Gaza, and every moment of joy, pain and loss in his life was etched into the walls of that apartment.

In fact, it was the place he hoped his grandchildren would one day be able to visit.

When she thinks about all the homes her grandfather lost, Laila realizes that he did not expect any physical structure to be his lasting legacy, and instead left them something that no one could take away from them.

It is their struggle for home, hope, patience and boldness that all displaced Palestinians pass on from generation to generation.

In fact, "we are building, and they are destroying, but that will not prevent us from rebuilding again."