SINCE even before the Nakba, 72 years ago, Israel has destined me and my family to homelessness. 

The Nakba never ended, it is ongoing, and it is beyond ethnic cleansing and systemised displacement.

My grandfather was born in Wadi Hunain, a small agricultural village that was among the earliest villages to be ethnically cleansed. 

My village helped many Jewish immigrants during the 19th century get settled and own lands in a nearby town named Ness Ziona, which later swallowed the lands of Wadi Hunain in expansion. 

Years later, settler mobs raided the village and drove its residents all the way to refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, mainly Rafah and Nuseirat. 

Fast forward to the modern day, those camps still house those same refugees, their children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. 

At least two generations were born with a refugee identity, not knowing where to belong, and how to feel about the homes their ancestors were expelled from or the camps they grew up in.

I was among those refugees, and like many others who were not left alone by Israel, I was displaced once more in 2004 when Israeli bulldozers levelled my grandparents house and forced us to sell our small apartment in Rafah Camp’s block O to spend the next seven years living in rental houses after owning our own house for a few years. 

Through the labour of my father and I, we managed to build another house near the Rafah beach and thought it was finally our sigh of relief. 

But unemployment and Gaza’s conditions drove my family to once again leave for Egypt, where my father’s relatives on his mother’s side are from. We sold our house to become homeless once again. 

Today, both my family and I live away from each other in rental apartments trying to make ends meet. 

I live in Gaza City, away from the camp I grew up in, and my family lives in Cairo, because it is much cheaper to live there off our savings and what was left from selling our house. 

The Nakba might have happened 72 years ago, but our Nakba is ongoing.

Aziz Abuzayed is an activist, research assistant, and a project coordinator at Pal-Think for Strategic Studies. He currently resides and works in Gaza City. He was an exchange student in the US in 2010, and hopes to continue being an ambassador of Palestine in a diplomatic level. He is part of a collective of young Palestinian writers called We are Not Numbers (wearenotnumbers.org), a collective of young writers from Gaza who put the human stories behind the numbers.