Diana Shams in front of her destroyed home. Photo / Courtesy of Diana Shams, via The Washington Post
Against all odds, Diana Shams was planning to celebrate her daughter Rose’s third birthday at home.
After they had been displaced seven times in two years by the war in Gaza, the prospect of an impending ceasefire in early October offered a glimmer of hope that she and her family could return to their Gaza City apartment.
By some twist of providence it had come through the conflict relatively unscathed.
More than 80% of buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, the United Nations estimates.
Then, just before the October 10 ceasefire took effect, in the very final hours of Israel’s full-on bombardment of Gaza, what they had dreaded came to pass.
The family’s home was flattened, in what neighbours told Shams was an Israeli drone strike.
Shams, 26, with her husband, Ahmed al-Helou, 30, and their son Kareem, 6, spent the early hours of the ceasefire mourning the loss of their home amid the rubble.
The Israel Defence Forces did not respond to queries about the strike.
The family celebrated Rose’s birthday atop the debris late last month.
The unlikely survival of the family home, an apartment above a furniture shop run by her in-laws, was a light on the horizon for Shams through years of war, displacement and the hardship of living on the run, sometimes in tents.
Though its destruction - along with that of the furniture store, the pharmacy her husband ran, and much of the rest of the neighbourhood - came on the same day as a tenuous step towards peace, her final hopes for a future in Gaza fled.
“I didn’t feel the happiness” that should have come with the ceasefire, Shams said in a text message.
After a sojourn that crisscrossed Gaza to avoid the brunt of the Israeli offensive that began in response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, the family had returned for the first time to their rubble-strewn apartment above al-Helou Furniture Centre on Nasser Street in February of this year.
Shams had decorated each room of the apartment, with its marble floors and built-in shelves, herself, some with calligraphic art and others with fairy lights and family photos.
But the family fled once again, with about 400,000 others, as Israeli forces closed in on Gaza City in the run-up to the ceasefire deal. After waiting days for a truck to take their belongings to Khan Younis, they eventually gave up and left everything behind.
Shams, a writer with a bachelor’s degree in translation, was determined to share stories about Gaza’s women and children, to give her children the best life and education possible, and to look as presentable and glamorous as she could, even during the war.
Nine out of 10 Gazans have been forcibly displaced, many multiple times, according to the United Nations, amid Israeli evacuation orders, airstrikes and ground operations.
Shams and her family were first forced to leave home on October 8, 2023, after the Israeli military dropped leaflets on a neighbouring building, warning residents to evacuate, she said.
They fled to an uncle’s house, returning the next morning to an apartment strewn with debris and coated with dust from a nearby strike.
A few hours later, they left for her parents’ home in Gaza City’s Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood, where they stayed a week, and from there they went on towards Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.
Her family lived in a relative’s house with six other families until December 2023, when the war came for them there too.
For Shams, the worst period of displacement began that month, when the family had no choice but to begin living in tents, first in the south, in Rafah’s Mawasi area, and later in Zuwaida, in central Gaza, as they sought to keep ahead of Israeli evacuation orders.
They struggled to find and afford food, medicine, water and human necessities, Helou said.
“We will go home soon and be safe,” Shams told herself and her children every day, she said.
“No matter how bad things get in this war, as long as we have a home to return to in Gaza City, we will be okay.”
Living in makeshift tents for 15 months, Shams learned how to cook over an open fire when there was fuel, to stay awake during a storm in anticipation of floods and to tell the difference between different kinds of drones by listening.
“One hums constantly, like it’s watching,” she wrote in a book about her life as a wartime mother that she self-published in October. “Another comes just before a strike. That one has a colder sound.”
While they were living in tents, Shams’ father, Shams Odeh, a journalist who had worked for Reuters and covered the war for PBS, would look for any chance to check on his house in Tel al-Hawa, built on the proceeds of a 20-year career.
Knowing it was there helped him keep calm, she said. In March 2024, they learned the house had been destroyed.
“The house wasn’t just shelter. It was a legacy,” Shams wrote. “One day, it was gone in a blink of an eye.”
Around that time, they began considering a life outside Gaza.
During a short-lived interim ceasefire that began in January, Shams and her family went home to Gaza City.
Their apartment was structurally intact, although the doors, windows and furniture were ruined. She salvaged what she could and felt grateful, she said.
She shared before and after videos of her clean-up on social media.
Creating the videos helped her process the trauma, she said.
She “wanted to let people see the willpower of Gaza’s residents of rebuilding their homes and starting again from scratch”.
Although that ceasefire ended in March, Shams and her family stayed in their home through September, when Israel began a Gaza City offensive, displacing the family for the seventh time, to a rented and “nearly destroyed” apartment in Khan Younis.
Before leaving the apartment, Shams photographed every room and tried to document every memory. She felt it could be the last time she saw her home.
That premonition was warranted.
Now, Shams wants to leave Gaza with her family, she said.
Her husband is on the same page. “I have endured all the hardships in this war because I knew that at the end I will be returning home,” the loss of which made his “fragile dream vanish in seconds,” Helou said.
“I have felt that I am no longer able to give my kids a home and be a good father.”
They are optimistic that Israel will open the Rafah crossing, permitting them to join Shams’ mother and brother in Cairo.
Shams is looking for translation jobs, and for online tutoring for Kareem, over whose lost education she constantly worries. Her husband is trying to find work in Gaza’s shattered economy.
Mundane tasks keep her busy: laundry, finding ways to charge phones and batteries, searching for food and blankets and warm clothes, and keeping her kids entertained and out of trouble.
There are many who want to stay and rebuild the Gaza Strip. “My own family is refusing to leave even though they have nothing left,” Helou said of his parents and other relatives.
There are also those who don’t have the means to leave, or no family outside Gaza to help them.
Shams said her immediate family could not stay in Cairo with her brothers indefinitely. They would have to find a country “that welcomes Palestinians”, she said.
“My main goal is to give my children a better life,” she said.
“I’m ready to begin again from scratch if it means they can grow up in safety and have a brighter future.”
Not knowing her final destination has not deterred Shams from making plans to leave, a prospect that she said feels like an extension of the past two years of displacement.
With each move, she said, she lost a layer of her identity and became more estranged from a future in Gaza.
“We are feeling uncertain and nervous as we overthink all the time about what will happen to us if the war returned and what is our destiny,” Shams said.
“It’s exhausting and frustrating to stay on edge and afraid all the time due to the unstable situations.”
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