Peace and potato chips: Gaza dreams big and small for 2024

Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip - It is bitterly cold, and people are trying to build adequate shelter to protect themselves in a new refugee camp set up in Deir el-Balah to cope with the overwhelming numbers of people fleeing in search of safety.

In the camp, which is close to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, children run from tent to tent, borrowing items, carrying messages, or looking for someone to play with because that’s what children do.

Al Jazeera spoke to five Palestinians in the camp about their hopes and fears for 2024 amid Israel’s devastating war on Gaza.

As the drone of Israeli aircraft filled the air, Um Shadi recounted the horrors of the past few weeks.

“We’ve been moving as fast as we can to stay safe, out of our home when we were hit, my daughter’s home was hit, everything was hit,” she said.

The family came to Deir el-Balah last week after the Israeli army dropped leaflets on the school they were sheltering in, telling everyone to leave and head south. “So we ran, grabbed the kids and ran," Um Shadi said.

“We spent the first night in the open air. Everyone woke up ill because it was so cold. A wonderful man gave us a tent, and we’ve been trying to find wood to burn for warmth and materials to close off the tent better.

“For the new year, I pray for ‘faraj’ [joy or relief after sadness and calamity]. Please God let everyone go back safely to their homes, please protect the people, all the people. I pray this war ends… every minute I pray.

“I mean, look at us. The kids get one meal a day at most. These are my grandkids - my three daughters and three sons are married. My husband has cancer. We’ve put his name on the list of people who need to leave for treatment, but he’s not been called up yet [to be taken to Egypt for treatment].”

“We had a beautiful home in Bureij. My widowed daughter had her own villa; my husband was a contractor. We had a good life, but now we are dirty, desperate, like beggars,” Um Shadi said.

“May God never forgive the world, the nations of the world that are just sitting there watching this happening to us.”

Wael, Um Shadi’s shy second-grader grandson, found it difficult to talk to Al Jazeera at first.

His grandmother encouraged him, coaxing him to talk about how their home had been bombed, how Wael had jumped from the debris after he and the rest of the family were rescued by “the men” as he called the Palestinian Civil Defence rescuers.

Thinking for a second, he delivered his opinion that living conditions in the school the family had fled to were resoundingly “bad!” before moving on to what he was wishing for.

“I want the war to be over,” he said, lapsing into silence again punctuated by shy “Yeses” when asked if he wished for safety for himself, his siblings and his parents.

Eventually, he stopped talking entirely, looking silently around.

Aida el-Shouli and her family do not have a tent, instead they have four wooden posts with fabric stretched around them to make an open square enclosure. They will have to make do with that.

Aida was on the ground, patting out rounds of dough to make bread for her children - two boys and a girl who were gathered around her and holding their youngest sibling, a six-week-old baby girl. Aida gave birth to her in a school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Nuseirat, where the family had fled.

“I’m from the Jabalia camp, but we were displaced. We went to Mughraqa, then Nuseirat, and now to Deir el-Balah.

"I was so pregnant, and I walked 4km (2.5 miles) from Mughraqa to Nuseirat, pulling a loaded cart with our things on it. My parents-in-law were with us - my son here was leading his grandfather by the hand. It was horrible.

"Then we got to the school and I saw the crowding, the people everywhere, the dirt, the state of the bathrooms.

“I think I went into shock and straight into labour.”

Amid the death and destruction, Aida had a “sebou” (celebration held seven days after a baby’s birth) for her daughter, with flowers and tree boughs as decorations.

“We celebrated a bit. I mean, it was all I could do. I didn’t even have clothes for her. What she’s wearing now has been given to me as charity. I want this war to end so we can go home. I know we don’t actually have homes anymore, but we’d be at home. Neighbours help each other; here we don’t know anybody.

“My own family is in the north, I don’t know anything about them. Are they alive? Dead? Who knows? When the communications came back on yesterday, I was trying for hours to call them, but couldn’t connect. If they’ve died, at least I would know, but this not knowing is horrendous."

“What have we done? What have we done to have this happen to us? We want this to end. For the kids, but also for us. We’re worn out. Once this is over we’re all going to need psychological support.

“I have a question for the world: Even if this fighting stops, what do we do? How can we live? Will we still be freezing to death in the open? Who will rebuild our homes?”

Sitting outdoors, Abu Tariq was surrounded by a constantly shifting cloud of small children - including some of his grandchildren. Some were playing, and others were baking bread on a makeshift griddle over a wood fire under his supervision.

A father of 10, Abu Tariq left Shujayea and, after a stopover, reached an UNRWA school in the Nuseirat camp and finally Deir el-Balah about a week ago.

“The school wasn’t bad, there were bathrooms and rooms and all that," he said. "Then they dropped the leaflets and the school head said they couldn’t be responsible for our safety, he said everyone has to take care of themselves.

“We ended up here in my daughter’s house in Deir el-Balah, but then she and her husband had displaced people coming in waves to stay with them so I decided to come here to stay with my sons and their kids.

“I had my plans for all sorts of scenarios. I expected I might come up against sickness, poverty, war even. But something of this scale? This was entirely unimaginable. We’ve withstood pain and death and destruction that others would never be able to withstand."

“I dream of going home, even though my home is mostly destroyed. If I was told I could go back, I’d be up at dawn … or I’d get up right now even and start walking back there. I would be happy to set up a tent on top of the rubble of my home and live there.

“I ask God that next year be better than this year, and that he guide those people to stop their massacres and stop their indiscriminate bombing. What else can we do or say? We’re humans, and they are humans like us. He made them as he made us, so we have to pray to God.

“I also hope the world finally looks at us with kindness and mercy, with a willingness to help.”

With those words, Abu Tariq pressed hot loaves of bread into everyone’s hands, refusing to listen to any protests, determined to share what little he had on this day.

Noor el-Bayed and her family have been in Deir el-Balah for about a week, their second displacement since leaving Jabalia for Nuseirat already. The shy girl tried hard to smile.

She described being afraid of the bombings, the loud noises of heavy weapons and explosions that are still all around even in this camp in Deir el-Balah. She also misses her school, she said.

Noor also fears for the safety of those she loves, she said. The thought of a “martyr” in the family is one of the things that she is scared of after having seen so many people who died in the bombings.

“I want this next year to be a good one,” she said. “I want to be able to eat, and to drink.

“Before the war I could buy chips and chocolate and juice. I would eat all those things,” she said, adding that out of all those things, it is cheese-flavoured potato chips that she misses the most.

“For next year I want cheesy chips, chocolate and strawberry juice,” she declared, adding that she wanted to have all those treats in her own home in peacetime.

“And,” she said hauntingly, “I want all of you to still be alive.”