For nearly three years, many of us had lived with a constant longing for home. Gaza was no longer merely a place on a map; it had become an absence that shaped everyday life. And so people returned not because conditions had improved or because rebuilding had begun, but because the pull of home remained stronger than the uncertainty waiting for them there.

During the journey, I spoke with a man who, like me, had spent the war years in Egypt. Unlike many Palestinians, he had legal residency and Egyptian citizenship. He had stability, work opportunities, and a life that was far more secure than anything waiting for him in Gaza.

Yet he chose to return.

He told me that no amount of stability could compensate for the feeling of being separated from his family and homeland. Physically, he was in Egypt. Mentally, he said, he remained in Gaza. Every day began and ended with phone calls, news updates, and worries about relatives living through the war.

“I was comfortable there,” he told me. “But my heart was never there.”

He knew he was returning to destruction. He knew there would be shortages, uncertainty, and hardship. Yet the desire to be home outweighed the advantages he was leaving behind.

Maha, another woman I met on the journey, described years of instability in Egypt. Without residency papers, finding work had been difficult. Housing was uncertain. Building a future felt impossible.

“The Gazan struggles wherever they go,” she told me.

For her, returning to Gaza was not a choice between comfort and hardship. It was a choice between hardship in exile and hardship at home.

She knew she would be returning to a tent rather than a house.

“I would rather live in a tent in my own country,” she said, “than remain a stranger somewhere else.”

It took me three exhausting days of travel, waiting, and repeated security procedures before I finally arrived. By the time I reached Gaza, I was physically drained. Yet the difficulty of the journey had done nothing to diminish my determination to return. 

The outside world was increasingly speaking about ceasefires, negotiations, and what might come after the war.  But the Gaza I returned to did not feel like a place emerging from war. It felt like a place still trapped inside it. The distance was painful, but it also created an illusion. I believed that because I followed Gaza so closely, I understood what life there had become.

Returning made me realize how much remained invisible.

Crossing into Gaza, I expected the destruction. I expected the overwhelming feelings of love and sorrow. What I did not expect was the feeling of disorientation.

Places that had once helped me navigate the city were gone. Streets I had known since childhood looked unrecognizable. Buildings that had stood for decades had vanished. In some areas, I struggled to understand where I was, even when I knew exactly where I should have been.

Yet amid that surrealness, there were moments that felt instantly familiar. The voices, the accents, the conversations between strangers, the vendors trying to sell whatever they could—these were reminders that Gaza was still Gaza, even after everything it had endured.

When I finally went to my family’s home, for a moment I could hardly believe they were really in front of me. For years, our relationship had existed through phone calls, voice notes, and unstable internet connections. I had followed the war through their stories, often waiting anxiously for messages confirming they were still alive after a night of bombardment.

Now, we were together again. We embraced without saying much at first. We cried. I kept looking at their faces, trying to make up for nearly three years of seeing them only through a phone screen. The reunion was joyful, but it was also marked by the weight of everything that had happened while we were apart.  We were no longer the same people who had said goodbye before the war. As we sat together, conversations moved constantly between joy and grief, between stories of survival and memories of people who should have been sitting with us but were not.

In the days that followed, I visited relatives, neighbors, and friends I had not seen in years. Again and again, I found myself face to face with losses that had once existed for me only as news updates or phone calls. Mothers spoke about sons they had buried. Fathers showed me photographs stored on their phones. In many homes, an empty chair seemed to tell its own story.

Some of the hardest visits were with mothers who had lost children during the war. From Cairo, I had written about casualties and death tolls. Sitting across from grieving mothers was different. There were moments when words felt inadequate. Sometimes the only response was silence. Sometimes it was tears. Their grief was no longer a statistic or a headline. It was sitting in front of me.

One of the hardest moments was realizing how many people around me were carrying grief that had become part of daily life. I had been carrying that grief with me in Cairo. But returning made it much more immediate.  The losses I had known through phone calls and news updates were suddenly all around me, in the people I loved and the homes I visited. There were tears of happiness because we had survived long enough to see one another again. But there were also tears for those who never had the chance to return, reunite with their families, or celebrate another holiday.

My first Eid back in Gaza after years away reflected that same contradiction. For the first time in years, I was celebrating with my family instead of speaking to them through a screen. Yet nearly every visit carried reminders of those who were absent. Joy and grief existed side by side, inseparable from one another.

In Cairo, I spent years reporting on Gaza from a distance. Like many Palestinians outside Gaza, I organized my days around news updates and messages from home.

But the headlines could not fully capture the countless adjustments people had made simply to get through another day. Nor could they show how those adjustments, developed over years of war, were beginning to fail.

One of the first things I noticed was how conversations rarely centered on politics alone. People talked about water, bread, transportation, electricity, and cooking. They discussed where to find basic necessities, how much time a task would take, and what had become impossible since the last time they had tried. The war had reshaped daily life so thoroughly that survival itself had become a full-time occupation.

Cooking was one of the clearest examples.

Before returning, I knew that fuel shortages had become a major problem in Gaza. What I did not understand was how deeply they had altered everyday life—or how even the alternatives people had relied on for years were beginning to disappear.

When cooking gas became unavailable, families adapted. They turned to firewood. People collected branches, cut down damaged trees, and searched for anything that could be burned. Like so many other aspects of life in Gaza, cooking became an exercise in improvisation.

But after nearly three years of war, even that solution is becoming harder to find.

Large areas of agricultural land have been damaged. Orchards that once provided fruit and shade have been destroyed. Trees that survived the bombing have often been cut for fuel. As a result, many families now struggle to find enough wood to prepare even a single meal.

In conversations with residents across Gaza, I repeatedly heard the same story. People described burning cardboard aid boxes, scraps of wood, paper, and whatever combustible material they could find. What began as a temporary adaptation has become an increasingly desperate search for substitutes.

The problem is no longer simply the absence of cooking gas. It is the gradual disappearance of the alternatives that helped people survive without it.

For nearly three years, I had lived with a constant sense of separation.

When I finally returned, I expected relief. And in some ways, I found it. I have no regrets. Returning has been incredibly difficult, but I still believe it was the right decision. Being with my family was worth it.

But returning also forced me to confront how much both Gaza and I had changed.

Years of exile had altered my understanding of home, identity, and belonging. And years of war had altered Gaza in ways that no article, photograph, or phone call could fully convey.

What I did not expect was how quickly the feeling of being home would return.

Gaza is not the city I left nearly three years ago. Entire neighborhoods have disappeared. Families have been scattered. Many people now live in tents where homes once stood. The challenges of daily life remain overwhelming, despite the ceasefires and political discussions that often dominate headlines.

And yet, people continue to return.

I returned for the same reason.

After years of watching Gaza from afar, I wanted to be with my family, to walk the streets of my city again, and to reclaim a sense of belonging that distance could never replace. What I found was a Gaza still living with the consequences of war, long after much of the world had begun talking about moving on.

The war may no longer dominate every headline, but here it remains present in daily life, in visible and invisible ways. Returning reminded me that home is not defined by buildings alone. It lives in the people who remain, the memories they carry, and the determination to stay connected to a place even when everything around it has changed.