I was born in a small house, delivered by the late midwife “Khadra al-Sharif”, in Yibna Camp in Rafah, southern Gaza. I grew up in the narrow alleys of the camp, playing football with my neighbors who were also my classmates and companions in my first stolen cigarette behind the “Beersheba School”. I knew Rafah, Khan Younis, al-Qarara, al-Zawaida, Nuseirat, al-Bureij, al-Maghazi, Juhr al-Deek, Gaza City, Jabalia, Beit Lahiya, and Beit Hanoun—places so close that it takes only fifty minutes by car to cross Gaza from south to north. This tiny strip held a dense history, voices, scents of soil, cafés, markets, a restless sea, and inherited dreams. I had never seen Gaza from above, not as planes or satellites see it, but from within—through its alleys, sand, and daily life, through school notebooks, the calls of the muezzins, and the noise of vendors. Like every Gazan, I knew my city through the senses, not maps. But the last war forced upon us an unfamiliar image: Gaza from above, transformed into rubble and barren desert, an open-air prison laid bare, destroyed and stripped of life. The war came to collapse the prison upon its inmates—house by house, alley by alley, camp by camp—while soldiers laughed, blowing up entire neighborhoods with the press of a button, turning destruction into a grotesque performance broadcast live. Yet what was destroyed was not only walls and stones but generations of Palestinians who had built homes, schools, shops, institutions, and infrastructure with toil and patience, shaping a future for those yet to come. Along with the buildings, an entire memory of struggle and resilience was erased—a history of survival in the harshest conditions. Targeting the homes was not simply targeting architecture, but memory itself: the family albums, old letters, home videos, everything that tethered people to their past and sustained their identity. Some scholars call this the killing of the house (as geographer Stephen Graham described, homes as social archives under assault). Others call it the killing of the city—reducing urban life to ruins in order to erase the everyday that gave it meaning. This material erasure was coupled with a symbolic one: in UN reports, destroyed neighborhoods became red boxes on maps; in satellite images, entire communities were rendered as pale color-coded blocks. Gaza was flattened into an aerial abstraction—silent, faceless. Here, we recall French historian Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoire—that when the physical site is lost, the continuity of collective identity is threatened, and images alone cannot replace lived stories. Politically, what is happening resembles what Brian Harley called the rule of maps: domination by redrawing space from above, erasing the human presence within it. This was not just a military campaign but a settler-colonial project to restructure Palestinian cities, stripping them of their names, histories, and turning them into empty, “reconstructable” voids. The core of the strategy is simple: erase the place from within, redefine it from without. The war on memory and image reached its most grotesque moment in the air-dropped aid scenes: children filmed chasing parachutes of food, only for them to crash and kill them—images broadcast casually, normalizing Palestinians as bodies scrambling for scraps rather than as citizens of a city, owners of homes, keepers of archives. It is a fatal reduction, turning a society into mere bodies clinging to survival. Yet even amidst the ruins, resistance emerged: testimonies written under bombardment, digital photos smuggled abroad, children’s hand-drawn maps to preserve the names of their neighborhoods, phone-based documentation shared across social networks. These are symbolic forms of resistance that restore names to the city and guard it from dissolving into official cartography. They embody what sociologist Halim Barakat described as a culture of steadfastness: memory itself becomes a tool of survival, preserving the city’s face and the community’s cohesion. What is unfolding in Gaza is not merely armed confrontation, but a battle over memory and the city—the right to narrate our past, build our present, and dream our future. While the settler-colonial project seeks to empty the land, erase its history, and impose an alternative visual narrative, Palestinians insist on reconstituting their memory as a political act. Gaza remains as its people know it—not as planes depict it: a living city, full of scent, sound, and story, resistant to the violence of aerial maps and abstract geometries.
This is my testimony… written as both a personal document and a public call. Preserve it, and share it as widely as possible.
This text may be republished in full or in part, in print or digital form, provided that proper credit is given to the source:
Karim Abualroos – Brussels
22 August 2025
(Translated by writer)
