This article was originally published by Truthout
Israel tries to debate, cast doubt, and erase our belonging to the land, but our love for Palestine will not cease.
I have never chosen to adopt the title of “refugee,” yet it keeps haunting me. It is scribbled on my Palestinian national identification card and follows my name in human rights conferences. It serves as a cruel mark to be treated as marginalized and homeless. It is a word I have unconsciously repeated in my head as I sat through history lectures, summing up the root of the dystopia we are living in. Each time, I feel a lingering urge to uproot it from my own identity.
I asked my history teacher once: “Until when will I be labeled a refugee?” Steadily, she said, until “we return to our homeland again.”
My roots trace back to Beersheba, a town in southern Palestine. Although I have never stepped foot there, I have imagined it after hearing my grandmother’s stories. I felt its sand slipping through my fingers when I touched her wrinkles, and I believed that our return was inevitable because she continued to hold on to the key to our home there — the home we were expelled from during the 1948 Nakba.
And tragically, my grandmother was killed — but her lingering belief was not: The land never dies.
The Zionist project continued to expand after 1948, seizing more swaths of land and stripping its Indigenous people of their property while attempting to drain every means they had to resist. On March 30, 1976, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories rose up against Israeli policies of a new order of land confiscation in al-Jalil. It was the first unarmed mass uprising and protest after years of intimidation following the Nakba, yet it was met with the deadliest violence — six Palestinians were killed, and hundreds were injured, along with others arrested. The sacrifice was too costly. But it was still a turning point in Palestinian history, as Israeli military forces retreated from the expropriation campaign.
Ever since, Palestinians — inside, across the diaspora, and beyond — have commemorated this day in honor of those who stood so unflinchingly, refusing to abandon their homes and renewing their unbreakable commitment to the land and to its people.
Five decades later, Land Day in Gaza resonated heavily. After two years of genocide drenched the land in blood and buried it in rubble, over 93 percent of Gaza’s residential buildings have been flattened, and its Indigenous people have been displaced, turned into refugees on their own lands. More than 53 percent of Gaza’s territory is now out of reach, sitting under complete Israeli control, while the remaining population of nearly 2 million — those of us who have survived annihilation — are crammed into less than half of Gaza’s 141 square miles.
Yet, this year, Land Day coincided with Israel’s Knesset approving a new death penalty bill to execute Palestinian prisoners convicted of “terrorist acts” by hanging. The timing of the law was never accidental; it was deeply meant to shatter the collective pride that sweeps through this day every year, and to trap Palestinians in endless atrocities, overshadowing such historic days, and attempting to force us to relinquish our right to remember.
“I was born on March 14, 1945, in Beersheba — just days apart from the commemoration of Land Day,” Dr. Mohammed Khattab, a Gazan professor of medicine, told Truthout. He has witnessed the Nakba and the successive aggressions that followed, including the devastation inflicted on Gaza over the past two and a half years. This violence, he says, is part of Israel’s genocidal expansionism toward the vision of a “Greater Israel.”
“Since Zionism came to the fore,” Khattab said, “there has been a persistent intent to expand from the Euphrates to the Nile, while stripping Palestinians of their right to exist, to self-determination, and to represent themselves free from external pressure.”
“I was displaced to Rafah, where my tent was pitched near the Gaza–Egypt border. Like hundreds of thousands who met the same fate, we endured dire and humiliating living conditions,” Khattab said. Determined to ease those conditions, he said, “I did what I could — I shared antimicrobial medications, as supplies were scarce, to help those whose health was deteriorating.”
“We bitterly endured all of this so as not to lose our land,” Khattab said. “Clutching to land is like clutching to life itself — and giving it up is like ripping the soul from the body.”
He described two stark, painful scenes. “Back in 2023, when people in northern Gaza were first ordered to forcibly displace, they fled with what little they had,” Khattab recalled. “Parched on Salah al-Din Street, I welcomed them along with my sons and other volunteers. With ashen faces and no clear destination, they took the water and dates we offered them.”
He also witnessed their return to northern Gaza in January 2025: “I could see the sorrowful joy in their faces — it was an epic moment, full of relief at being able to return, yet deeply painful as they came back to ruins.”
Reflecting on the scale of devastation incurred on Gaza, Khattab said Israel is “deliberately turning Gaza — our land — into an uninhabitable space to force us to leave. But the land is ours, and so is history. We are not the ones who should leave. They are mercenaries, brought from across the world, seeking to build their state on the ruins of our nation.”
Khattab’s own life is one example of the history of which he speaks. He went to school in Palestine before traveling to Egypt for his higher education studies. After graduating, he returned to work in Gaza, before later moving to Germany to go to medical school and earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. Over the years, Khattab worked across several countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq, Sudan, and Libya. He then returned to Gaza and contributed to improving the Faculty of Medicine at Al-Azhar University.
He paused, then said, “I have not left Gaza since 1995,” describing the years since as an ongoing Nakba. For Khattab, leaving Gaza is not an option. He has even taken it upon himself to speak with those who are considering leaving. “I do not judge those who seek to leave in the face of such catastrophic realities,” he said. “No one should. But we should not make decisions out of anger or desperation.”
Khattab continued, “I have met many young people waiting for the border to open so they can leave in search of safety and life. But when I sit with them and we talk, many begin to reconsider. We come to realize that our land loves us in a way no other land can. It recognizes our footsteps — and it will keep them immortal.”
Still, he is increasingly concerned about the impact of unabated attacks on Gaza’s land. He said that toxic residues, unexploded ordnance, and the billowing smoke of white phosphorus would have long-lasting, devastating effects on people’s health, behavior, and heritable genetic makeup, as well as on the land’s agriculture.
Saeed Al-Taban, a 29-year-old content creator originally from Beersheba, has been displaced five times within Gaza, losing both his home and his neighborhood.
“Land means everything to me. Each time the killing machine accelerates, it has never deterred me. Instead, it makes me hold on even more — it deepens my love for the land,” he told Truthout. “The land is as sacred as honor. Since 1948, we have been dying for it. It is impossible, after decades of struggle, to abandon it.”
“While Land Day is remembered today, what never leaves my mind is a scene I once documented — people pulled from beneath the rubble, battered but undaunted, saying, ‘We die, but we do not compromise on our land, nor leave it,’” Al-Taban said. “Our love for the land, our belonging to it, could not be debated, doubted, nor erased by the imposed Israeli war crimes.”
Al-Taban had traveled many times, yet returned to Gaza shortly before October 7, 2023. “I love my land, and I vow to rebuild it — my home, my future, and the family I hope to raise here, on its land — and to rise again like a phoenix,” he said. “The sacrifices have been too costly, but I am still holding on to my land, and this may differ from one another in my generation.”
Eight years ago, in 2018, Gazans marked Land Day with the Great March of Return. Thousands peacefully protested near the Israeli separation fence of barbed wires and sensors, calling for their right of return to their original homelands and for an end to the blockade on Gaza.
The protests lasted for 21 months, during which more than 200 Palestinians were killed, among them 46 children, and hundreds of thousands were injured with life-changing disabilities, as Israeli forces continued what has been described as a “shoot-to-maim” policy.
Al-Taban commented, “I was among them, witnessing how fiercely our people rose to reclaim their right of return, debunking the Israeli premise — that the old will die and the young will forget.”
Al-Taban is still in denial about the genocide. He said that most of the time, he felt that starvation, killing, and displacement were a nightmare — something unreal, something the mind refuses to fully hold, because what has been inflicted on us is beyond what anyone can truly comprehend. The emotional toll is complicated by the desire to stay on the land.
“I was working on a video themed, ‘How much do you love Palestine?’ I asked people without filter and randomly, and all of them — all of them — agreed on … unapologetic love [of Palestine], even though [such love] has hurt most of them,” he said.
Al-Taban sighed, then concluded, “There is no land without a nation, and there is no nation without land.”
And I say: Palestine is ours. As my grandmother said, “The land never dies,” even if we do.
This article was originally published by Truthout and is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Please maintain all links and credits in accordance with our republishing guidelines.
Hend Salama Abo Helow is a researcher, writer and medical student at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. She is also a writer with We Are Not Numbers and has published in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Institute for Palestinian Studies, Mondoweiss and Al Jazeera. She believes in writing as a form of resistance, a silent witness to atrocities committed against Palestinians, and a way to achieve liberation.
