From Nakba to genocide: A Gaza grandmother’s lifetime of loss and resilience

At 95, Fatema Obaid has endured daily Israeli bombardment, starvation and the loss of 70 family members.

Yet the Palestinian grandmother, who survived the 1948 Nakba, refused to leave Gaza City when ordered to do so by the Israeli military during the 2023 genocide. 

For her, fleeing again would mark the beginning of a “crueller Nakba” - one she refuses to relive.

“In the first Nakba, it is true that hundreds of thousands lost their land, homes and villages,” Obaid told Middle East Eye.

“But in this Nakba, we have lost an entire history,” she said from an unfinished apartment in western Gaza City, where she is displaced alongside her grandchildren.

“We lost entire families, and entire generations have been destroyed for decades to come. What they could not do in 1948, they are doing now.”

Originally from Gaza City’s Shujaiya neighbourhood, Obaid was temporarily displaced during the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist militias attacked Palestinian towns and villages across historic Palestine, forcibly expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to make way for the creation of Israel - an event many scholars describe as ethnic cleansing.

Obaid later returned to Shujaiya, an area that remained outside Israeli control after the 1949 armistice agreement, but lay close to the new de facto border between Israel and the Gaza Strip.

More than 75 years later, she relived the same trauma she endured as a teenager - only this time with far greater brutality.

“There is no comparison between the first and the second Nakba,” she said.

New Nakba 

Like many Palestinians in Gaza during the Nakba, Obaid experienced both displacement and giving refuge.

She and her family were forced to flee their home for several months amid the violence and chaos that swept across Palestine in 1948.

At the same time, Gaza was inundated with Palestinians forcibly expelled from towns and villages that later became part of Israel.

Families arrived with almost nothing after fleeing killings, bombardment and attacks by Zionist militias, believing they would return within days. Instead, Gaza became a place of permanent refuge, overcrowded with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians uprooted during the Nakba.

Today, around 1.6 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants live in the enclave, making up roughly 73 percent of Gaza’s population.

Since October 2023, however, Obaid has been displaced more 10 ten times after her home and entire neighbourhood were reduced to rubble and absorbed into Israel’s newly imposed no-go zone.

“I have lived in Shujaiya since I was born. Even after marrying my cousin, I moved only a few streets away,” she recalled, adding that they fled for a few months in 1948 but eventually returned.

“Only during this Nakba did we lose our homes, our neighbourhood and all of eastern Gaza,” she added.

“They bombed our house and killed more than 70 members of my family - my sons, grandchildren, nephews, their children and many others from our extended family.”

During the Nakba between 1947 and 1949, Zionist militias and later Israeli forces killed an estimated 13,000 to 15,000 Palestinians and permanently displaced around 750,000 people - roughly 75 percent of the Palestinian population at the time.

In the current genocide in Gaza, Israeli forces have killed more than 72,000 Palestinians in two years, while nearly two million residents have been displaced. Around 1.5 million remain uprooted despite the ceasefire agreement, most now living in makeshift tents.

Staying in Gaza

Shortly after Obaid was forced to flee her home for another part of Gaza City in October 2023, the Israeli military issued repeated mass expulsion orders instructing residents to move south.

As hundreds of thousands of residents initially refused to comply, Israel imposed what United Nations experts considered a systematic starvation that was “used as a savage weapon of war” to force Palestinians out.

For months that followed, residents were deprived of basic food items, including wheat flour, and struggled to find drinking water. Famine was officially declared in Gaza City in August 2025 by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). 

95-year-old Hajja Fatima Obeid stands as a witness to the 1948 Nakba, having lived through the initial displacement of the Palestinian people, only to find herself facing renewed displacement during the latest genocide in Gaza.

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) May 12, 2026

Still, Obaid refused to leave the city. 

“There were days when we could not find even a sip of water,” Obaid said.

“We counted every sip we drank, could barely find food, and were forced to flee from one place to another each time.

“It destroyed my health, but I did not want to leave Gaza City. I did not want to be buried outside it at the end of my life. I did not want to relive a catastrophe we have endured for nearly eight decades.”

A father’s gift 

Back in her home, Obaid had kept almost everything from her childhood and marriage, including her wedding dress and the clothes and cooking pots gifted by her family and in-laws before the wedding.

“For more than 80 years, I kept my long white wedding dress in the closet. I also kept the jackets and clothes of my husband, who passed away around 20 years ago,” she told MEE.

“All of them are gone, along with all the money I had saved throughout my life. And not just that, but also everything we managed to acquire in each place we were displaced to,” she continued.

“Every time we fled, we fled in terror. We had no time to gather any belongings. We couldn’t even take a bottle of water with us. I escaped wearing only this same dress.”

The only thing that survived with Obaid was a pair of earrings her father had gifted her when she was a child.

“I have kept them all these years. I could never sell them or replace them, because they were once held in my father’s hands. They carry his memory with them. I never take them off, and that is why they have survived with me,” she said.

“They are the only thing left from before the Nakba. They survived two Nakbas, while so many members of my family were killed. These earrings are still alive.”

Last remaining witnesses 

Obaid is among the few remaining witnesses of the 1948 Nakba in Gaza who have lived through the ongoing genocide.

Since October 2023, Israeli attacks have killed at least 4,813 elderly Palestinians. 

Many others have died from hunger, untreated illnesses, and the collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system amid Israel’s blockade and repeated forced displacement orders.

“People laugh when I say only one and a half of my sons are still alive; one who survived, and the other who was severely injured and is currently unable to walk,” Obaid said.

“All my life, I have lost many things. My mother died shortly after I was born, and I have lived a harsh life ever since,” she recalled.

“At this age, I have lost my sons and many members of my family, endured starvation, and suffered repeated displacement.