Paul Adams
BBC News, Jerusalem
Getty Images
Jabalia, in northern Gaza, was once a bustling and tightly-packed refugee camp
Jabalia, viewed from the air, is breathtaking.
A Hiroshima-like wasteland stretches as far as the eye can see. The mangled carcasses of buildings dot the churned-up landscape, some leaning at crazy angles.
Great undulating waves of rubble make it all but impossible to make out the geography of this once bustling, tightly packed refugee camp.
And yet, as a drone camera flies over the wreckage, it picks out splashes of blue and white where small tent camps have been set up in patches of open ground.
And figures, clambering over broken buildings, moving along streets of dirt, where food markets are springing up under tin roofs and canvas awnings. Children using a collapsed roof as a slide.
After more than six weeks of Gaza’s fragile ceasefire, Jabalia is slowly coming back to life.
Many, like Nabil, who returned have found their homes damaged or completely destroyed
In the neighbourhood of al-Qasasib, Nabil has returned to a four-storey house that’s somehow still standing, even if it lacks windows, doors and – in some places – walls.
He and his relatives have made crude balconies out of wooden pallets and strung-up tarpaulin to keep out the elements.
“Look at the destruction,” he says as he surveys Jabalia’s ocean of ruins from a gaping upper floor.
“They want us to leave without rebuilding it? How can we leave. The least we can do is rebuild it for our children.”
To cook a meal, Nabil lights a fire on the bare staircase, stoking it carefully with pieces of torn-up cardboard.
Laila, right, fears for younger generations who are not getting a regular education
On another floor, Laila Ahmed Okasha washes up in a sink where the tap ran dry months ago.
“There’s no water, electricity or sewage,” she says. “If we need water, we have to go to a far place to fill up buckets.”
She says she cried when she came back to the house and found it wrecked.
She blames Israel and Hamas for destroying the world she once knew.
“Both of them are responsible,” she says. “We had a decent, comfortable life.”
Soon after the war began in October 2023, Israel told Palestinians in the northern part of the Gaza Strip – including Jabalia – to move south for their own safety.
Hundreds of thousands of people heeded the warning, but many stayed, determined to ride out the war.
Laila and her husband Marwan clung on until October last year, when the Israeli military reinvaded Jabalia, saying Hamas had reconstituted fighting units inside the camp’s narrow streets.
After two months of sheltering in nearby Shati camp, Leila and Marwan returned to find Jabalia almost unrecognisable.
Marwan and Laila managed to stay in their home for the first year of the war
“When we came back and saw how it was destroyed, I didn’t want to stay here anymore,” Marwan says.
“I had a wonderful life, but now it’s a hell. If I have the chance to leave, I’ll go. I won’t stay one more minute.”
Stay or go? The future of Gaza’s civilian population is now the subject of international debate.
In February, Donald Trump suggested that the US should take over Gaza and that nearly two million Palestinian residents should leave, possibly for good.
Faced with international outrage and fierce opposition from Arab leaders, Trump has subsequently appeared to back away from the plan, saying he recommended it but would not force it on anyone.
In the meantime, Egypt has led Arab efforts to come up with a viable alternative, to be presented at an emergency Arab summit in Cairo on Tuesday.
Crucially, it says the Palestinian population should remain inside Gaza while the area is reconstructed.
Donald Trump’s intervention has brought out Gaza’s famously stubborn side.
“If Trump wants to make us leave, I’ll stay in Gaza,” Laila says. “I want to travel on my own free will. I won’t leave because of him.”
Across the way sits a nine-storey yellow block of flats so spectacularly damaged it’s hard to believe it hasn’t collapsed.
The upper floors have caved in entirely, threatening the rest. In time, it will surely have to be demolished, but for now it’s home to yet more families. There are sheets in the windows and washing hanging to dry in the late winter sunshine.
Most incongruously of all, outside a makeshift plastic doorway on a corner of the ground floor, next to piles of rubble and rubbish, stands a headless mannequin, wearing a wedding gown.
Sanaa had to abandon her wedding dress business when she fled south at the end of 2023
It’s Sanaa Abu Ishbak’s dress shop.
The 45-year-old seamstress, mother of 11, set up the business two years before the war but had to abandon it when she fled south in November 2023.
She came back as soon as the ceasefire was announced. With her husband and daughters, she’s been busy clearing debris from the shop, arranging dresses on hangers and getting ready for business.
“I love Jabalia camp,” she says, “and I won’t leave it till I die.”
Sanaa and Laila seem equally determined to stay put if they can. But both women speak differently when they talk of the young.
“She doesn’t even know how to write her own name,” Laila says of her granddaughter.
“There’s no education in Gaza.”
The little girl’s mother was killed during the war. Laila says she still talks to her at night.
“She was the soul of my soul and she left her daughter in my hands. If I have the chance to travel, I will do so for the sake of my granddaughter.”
