Before the leaflets fell from the sky telling her to evacuate, before all that was left of her home was its western wall, before the food shortages left her baking her own bread, before her daughters slept under a chalkboard in an abandoned kindergarten, before a sniper killed an in-law who was bringing back blankets because it was getting cold — that is, before the war came to Gaza and obliterated most of what she remembered of life there — Nevin Muhaisen, a middle-school teacher and mother of four, was listening to her doctor give her some good news. Nevin, he said, was pregnant.
It was early August last year. Nevin had dressed that morning, put on some makeup and gotten her daughters — Zaina, Lina, Maise and Doa’a — ready for the day. Her husband, Mahmoud, flagged a taxi, and the couple set out from the warren of buildings in her neighborhood in eastern Gaza City to a leafy street near the center of the capital. She looked up at the clinic. The doctor worked most days in Al-Shifa Hospital and had come highly recommended. There was a long wait to see him; the high demand must have been a good sign, Nevin thought. And now, 90 minutes later, she was there with Mahmoud hearing the news. Nevin had been aware she was having another child. But the doctor knew something that even the mother did not. “You’re carrying twins,” he said.
The couple walked down a boulevard in front of the clinic, past the men playing backgammon in the park and the hookah bars where smoke hung heavy in the summer afternoon. She was 36. Mahmoud was 39. Theirs hadn’t been a love story in the romantic sense: Nevin’s two aunts married Mahmoud’s uncles years before, and their families arranged for Nevin and her sister to marry Mahmoud and his brother. But even at their first meeting, she laughed and felt relaxed with Mahmoud. Their life together began in a tiny bedroom in her in-laws’ apartment where the couple lived for two years before they moved into their own home in Shajaiye, the neighborhood where both their families lived. Zaina and Lina, now 14 and 13, came into their lives first, the two girls growing close because just a year separated them. Next came Maise, now 11, who loved order and memorizing the Quran; and then Doa’a, who, though the youngest at 7, was the most stubborn and strong of the sisters.
The couple stopped for some lemonade in a cafe and thought about the new life they would now be bringing into Gaza. Yes, there had been wars after the births of each of her last three children. But it had been close to 10 years since they had needed to evacuate. And what if one of the twins was a son? Or both? They had never had a son. But they were struggling financially, Mahmoud pointed out, especially because of the home they just built. Nevin was about to start work at a new school, and there would be more income, she replied. As one partner expressed doubts, the other resolved them. Nevin assured her husband that she had been a mother four times before and knew everything would be fine. “When God sends a baby, He will handle the rest,” she said. They took a taxi home.
The good news, however, was followed by bad. After several checkups, the doctor told Nevin that he could no longer find a heartbeat on one of the twins. It was the first trimester of the pregnancy, when miscarriages weren’t uncommon. The other fetus was still growing, the doctor said. It was Oct. 2.
On the warm morning that followed just five days later, she would have rather stayed asleep. “It’s time to wake up!” her daughter Maise said. Not during any of her pregnancies had the mornings been so difficult; she thought of the two flights of stairs at her school, the stairs that had felt impossible to climb because of her exhaustion each day. Now Maise, who had gotten up before the rest of the family to do her morning prayers, was gently shaking each of her sisters awake, starting with Doa’a, who still slept next to her mother. Nevin lifted her head from the pillow and wiped the sleep from her eyes.
Suddenly, a boom. Maise was back in the bedroom, screaming and flinging open the windows. There was no mistaking the noise now — rocket fire — first a crack, like thunder, and then a long hiss that petered out into the sky. They had been startled before this year by that sound. Hamas had called them “test rockets,” new weapons for its next war against Israel, they said. But there were too many this time to be a test. All of the children were screaming now, looking at their mother for what to do.
At the moment when this family needed answers, there were none — only the morning programming on television, continuing on as if nothing had happened. The rockets kept hissing into the air. Finally the newscaster from Al Jazeera was talking about the attack. But it wasn’t just about the rockets now; it was about an incursion into Israel.
Immediately her thoughts turned to the practical. There would be no school that day. The children would stay home, and she and Mahmoud would walk the length of their crowded neighborhood in search of sugar, flour, feta cheese — anything that was for sale, at whatever quantity they could carry. There had been some luck, she thought: Nevin had just gone to the pharmacy and picked up a month’s worth of folic acid and vitamins for her pregnancy. No war had lasted much longer than the prescription, she thought. Maybe they would just close the door and wait out whatever happened.
Yet when she returned, Nevin could see little safety in her surroundings. She now saw windows that could shatter into a thousand tiny knives and blind her daughters. Walls that might crumble in an airstrike and bury all of them. This had been her dream home, one they spent two years completing before moving in just the year before. Their final purchase had been the curtains in April. That night, the children slept in their living room as Mahmoud stayed up, listening to the news.
Nevin awoke the next morning to a Facebook post that was circulating from an Israeli lieutenant colonel. The message was in Arabic, and the tiny red boxes on the map below it showed the blocks that Gazans were now ordered to evacuate. One was theirs.
The thought of leaving Shajaiye was impossible for her. How could she abandon her home over a Facebook post? Nevin and the adults of the family — Mahmoud, his parents, Nevin’s brothers-in-law and her sister — deliberated over what to do next, and finally made the decision to leave. The parents would depart first, then Nevin’s sister-in-law, whose home was closest to Israel. The attack would come soon, they knew.
Nevin looked up. “Leave me here and you go,” she said.
“You’re pregnant!” he shouted back.
Nevin, trying to buy time, refused to leave until she could make something to eat. She took her daughters with her to the kitchen. No one interrupted her at first. She cooked the green beans and rice slowly; she ate them and packed the leftovers. Mahmoud took her by the arm. They flagged a taxi for the next neighborhood, Zeitoun, with only a few things packed in the girls’ school bags, hoping to be back for more when the attack was over.
In an abandoned kindergarten, they moved the tiny desks and chairs and laid down their blankets. Another room was their kitchen. As they slept, explosions poured down in the area of the evacuation map and began to level it.
For days, Nevin begged her family to come with her back to their home in Shajaiye, and finally they relented. She breathed a sigh when they saw the building was still intact. Nevin’s body was exhausted from the pregnancy again. She took a nap on the sofa and woke up to the sound of artillery in the distance. She needed to go, but first she needed to sit on each of the beds of her children. She needed to look at every piece of furniture again. This was the last time she would see her house during the war. Nevin knew she was saying farewell to it.
On Saturday around 2 a.m., all their phones rang at the same time. The message, recorded in broken Arabic, called for another evacuation, a much larger one this time. Everyone in Gaza’s north was ordered to move south immediately, more than a million people. A day later, the ground outside the school was covered in Israeli leaflets telling them to flee. Still, Nevin did not want to go. Then her mother, Halima, who had already left for southern Gaza, called. “You need to come to Rafah, think of your daughters,” she said. “You’re pregnant.” It was Nevin’s 13th week.
Getting to Rafah meant driving nearly the entire length of the Gaza Strip, more than an hour’s car journey across a war zone. It took Mahmoud three hours to find a taxi driver willing to go to Rafah. He wanted six times the normal price, and he wanted to leave right away.
They raced down mostly empty roads, Nevin bracing her stomach with both hands to cushion her belly whenever they sailed over a speed bump. One roundabout was filled with the charred remains of cars and trucks, smoke still rising from a recent bombing. “Why were they hit?” Maise asked.
In Rafah, Nevin’s fear abated only at the sight of her father, Jamal. His embrace was warm, and the house, though not theirs, almost felt like home. More relatives kept arriving; in all three dozen family members packed themselves into a living room and two bedrooms. Mahmoud went to a less-crowded house — just 14 people. The couple slept apart for the first time since they were married.
Nevin’s life before the war had been largely confined to Gaza City, but as the days went by she felt little sense of liberation in Rafah, with its strange accents and unfamiliar streets. Approaching the fifth month of her pregnancy, she saw a doctor for the first time since the war began. There was backup power that day, and the ultrasound machine was working. Her baby was a boy, the doctor said.
“His name will be Sobhy,” said Mahmoud, Arabic for “bright like the morning.”
One day when the airstrikes sounded far away, Nevin pushed herself to venture outside into the market. A faint blue feeling of longing grew in her for her neighborhood, which was still being bombed. She wanted her son to be born back home in Shajaiye, she thought. She was someone who grew attached to things and places. Her pillow, her sofa. Her land. She wondered: Do places feel nostalgia for the people who have left them as people do for the places they have left? After a month in Rafah, the apartment now too crowded, Nevin and her family left for another city called Deir al Balah.
She began to bleed near the end of November. A temporary cease-fire was announced, and for days, the world watched to see if the war might be ending. Nevin, well into her second trimester, kept bleeding. She thought: I am losing the other child now.
That any hospital could take Nevin was itself a miracle. Al-Shifa, where her first doctor had practiced, had been wrecked by a near two-week siege. Al-Nasr Hospital in the south would be next. At the strained emergency room that accepted Nevin, strangers were looking for outlets to charge their phones and begging nurses for clean water. The doctor told her that Sobhy would be fine. But she needed to stay in bed for at least a month.
And so Nevin lay on her mattress on the floor in Deir al Balah, listening to the news of the temporary cease-fire on an Israeli radio broadcast in Arabic — they told their side of the war, but it was the only signal that reached her bed. Prisoners were exchanged for hostages; an extension was announced, the broadcast said. But Nevin’s hope fell when a deadline passed and she could hear the airstrikes again. She now knew this war would not be over by the time Sobhy was born. Doubts filled the dark bedroom where a dozen other family members slept. She didn’t want to think about the premature babies who died in their incubators at Al-Shifa after the generators ran out of fuel.
In December, there was no bread in the bakeries. There were three dozen relatives living in the apartment now, all of them hungry, more always coming as their neighborhoods were demolished by soldiers who controlled them. The electric stove was useless — there had been no electricity since she arrived — and so someone started ripping the wires out of it; where the motors and coils had been, they added coal and a match. The stove was ruined, but at least it was heating up. Nevin could feel the baby kicking as she kneaded dough. They spent five hours baking, trying not to breathe in smoke.
The weeks went by, and the war ground on. Nevin hated this life. She hated the people who took the bags of aid and resold them at prices higher than before the war. Salt and sugar were 10 times more expensive now. They no longer could afford potatoes. She hated the parachutes landing with boxes of supplies; it was humiliating. She had taught her daughters to be strong women, yet here they were, living like caged animals awaiting death.
One morning in February, as Nevin was tidying the room, she could see that her daughter Zaina had scrawled some numbers on the wall in pencil. “What’s this?” Nevin asked, looking at the arithmetic.
Zaina, the eldest daughter, had inherited her mother’s eyes but not her attachment to places. Zaina wanted out of Gaza. She wanted to be a surgeon one day and study in Germany; she didn’t want her life spent saving children her age from bombs. Her mother, Zaina knew, could get on a list to leave Gaza to give birth in Egypt. The numbers on the wall, Zaina told Nevin, were her calculation for how much it might cost. It was thousands of U.S. dollars, an impossible sum.
One night when there was finally a phone signal, Nevin called a Palestinian friend in Romania. The women didn’t know each other well — they had only met on Facebook, where they had common friends — but it helped Nevin to talk to someone outside Gaza.
“Let me help you get out,” the woman said.
Nevin knew the sentiment was genuine, as it always was with Palestinians abroad. But a divide separated the women, like the pane of glass that separates a visitor from an inmate at a prison. Only one woman was sitting in a war. The two said good night to each other, and Nevin tried to sleep, jammed on the floor with her daughters and more relatives seeking shelter.
There were now 38 people in a fourth-floor apartment meant for a single family, without running water or electricity. The war had left Nevin no privacy: just the buzz of a drone watching her from above or a child of a cousin stumbling through the door when she needed a moment alone in the bathroom. The kindergarten floor had been better than this — they had space in that classroom. The children told Nevin they were bored, that they wanted to go home.
Something started to snap in their mother. She looked over at her husband. “I need to see the beach,” she told Mahmoud.
Nevin had always loved the sea in Gaza. No matter how trapped she felt there, when she walked to the shore, when she saw the Mediterranean carrying on endlessly to the horizon, she felt as if she was looking at infinity, and for a moment, Nevin felt free. Before they reached the beach, Mahmoud and Nevin stopped at a tent camp to check in on a relative there. The couple then set off again and Nevin could feel her body relaxing as she approached the shore.
Yet when they reached the top of the bluff, there was only silence. There were no waves that day, no seabirds and no families like before. There were just Israeli warships.
Below, a child was fishing, alone. He couldn’t have been 12. What was he doing there? Some instinct told Nevin to climb down and warn the boy that the warships could kill him at any moment. But that same instinct told her that she was a mother of four — of five, soon — and that the ships could kill her too if she got any closer. “Let’s go,” she told Mahmoud.
It was now Nevin’s eighth month of pregnancy. Sobhy moved so much that she could no longer sleep many nights. The boy was telling her that he was almost ready for the world. But the world was not ready for this boy.
There was no doctor. Nevin pictured going into labor at night. No taxi would dare to drive her then. If the phone lines were disconnected, there would be no calling an ambulance. Zaina’s hope of humanitarian passage for her mother to give birth in Egypt seemed to fade with each day; Israel was preparing to invade Rafah, the very city they would need to reach to escape. Besides, there was no money to leave. “I am now chasing a mirage,” she said. “The nightmare of me giving birth here is now going to happen.”
Nevin looked at the figure in the bank account. Then she looked at her daughters who were playing a game beside her. She looked at the numbers again. This was no mirage. This was the money they needed to leave Gaza.
The war had brought tanks and airstrikes to Nevin’s life, but it had also brought her a guardian angel. After her late-night call with Nevin weeks earlier, the Palestinian woman in Romania started collecting funds to pay an agency to arrange for humanitarian passage for Nevin so that she could give birth in Egypt with her family. The friend had pushed donation links to Palestinian contacts throughout Europe. Now the money was there, enough to move Nevin and her children from Gaza for good.
A week passed as the agency made arrangements to put them on the humanitarian list. Nevin only told Mahmoud and her daughter Zaina, fearing she might jinx their luck. Finally at midnight the phone rang. Nevin took the call out of earshot. Everything is in order, the caller said. It was time to go. The agency made no promises about Mahmoud, but other Gazans assured Nevin that wasn’t unusual; he would likely be waved in with his family at the border. The next morning Nevin told her sister there was something she needed to say. Mahmoud was standing in a corner, near her sister’s husband. Nevin tried not to cry. She tried not to think of the years the four had spent together, two brothers and two sisters, two families that had lived through peacetime and conflict. She tried not to think she was abandoning them now.
She just tried to get one phrase out, to start. “We are leaving,” Nevin said.
On a Wednesday in March, Nevin got into the taxi with her four daughters and Mahmoud, one hand on her belly above her unborn son as they headed to Rafah. The road was a graveyard to Palestinians, only traversed by Israeli tanks. Rubble sat where there had been towns. A vast tent camp stretched out to the south, eventually to be bombed in an airstrike. Nevin had spent so much time in hiding during the war, she had no idea until now just how little remained of the place that she was leaving.
In Rafah, they stopped to see her father and mother. Jamal, the strong man who raised her, was more gaunt than she had ever seen him; he had lost 30 pounds in the war and was now about to lose his daughter as well. Nevin and Jamal had always had a tradition when she said goodbye after visits. They would embrace, kiss and then her father would give her 15 shekels. “That’s for you to get some sweets,” Jamal said this time. “I am praying for the child to come healthy.”
Fifteen minutes later, they were at the border: a Palestinian checkpoint, a no man’s land and then Egyptian officials standing before a vast desert. One Palestinian lugged a mattress. A large number were wounded. Just 500 people had papers to cross south that day — 500 of two million people who were trapped in Gaza. An official started collecting passports.
“He can’t pass,” the official said. He was pointing at Mahmoud.
Nevin had spent the entire war worrying about her unborn son. But it was her husband who was facing problems that day. She pleaded with the border guard: She was pregnant, she needed the father beside her when she gave birth, she said. Was this a question of a bribe? The Palestinian guard grew angry, pushing the family back in the direction of Gaza. He threatened to cancel all their papers. “Enough!” Mahmoud yelled. “You’ll go without me.”
She couldn’t believe what was happening; they were within sight of their freedom. The war had taken her home from her, her mother and father, her sister, her privacy, her beach, her life — she was giving them all up, willingly now. But she could not, in this instant, give up her husband too.
The next moments moved by quickly. They approached the no man’s land where a bus was to take them to the Egyptian side; Nevin and the girls went above with the passengers, their bags of belongings in the hold. Mahmoud talked to the daughters, trying to calm their panic.
“Don’t cry, I’ll be coming soon,” he said.
It was Mahmoud who she saw crying when Nevin looked out the window as the bus pulled away. She had never seen her husband cry like that.
Sobhy Muhaisen was born just after 4 p.m. on March 24 at El Fayrouz Hospital in Ismailia, Egypt. He weighed six pounds and 10 ounces, a bit less than his sisters when they were born, but he was healthy, a nurse assured her; there had been no complications. Nevin had gone into labor just 12 days after arriving in Egypt.
The anesthesia still hadn’t worn off when Nevin asked her family for the phone. She wanted to speak to Mahmoud.
“Did you name him Sobhy?” was the first thing he asked from Rafah. Yes, that’s what she had named him, “bright like the morning.”
In early May, Mahmoud got permission to join his family, as Israel prepared to seize its border with Egypt making the crossing impossible for Gazans. They met him at the bus station in Ismailia on a brutally hot afternoon, and Nevin showed Mahmoud their son for the first time.
Sobhy had made it from her womb and into the world outside, just as her family had escaped Gaza and into the world outside. Nevin realized this was as close to a happy ending as this war would ever provide her family: Sobhy was now lying in Nevin’s lap, with any possible future before him. His mother wanted him to learn English. She wanted him to be an important person one day.
Yet Nevin also knew this was unlikely to happen here in Ismailia. In May, Sobhy’s doctor found a small hernia in his digestive tract, and Nevin had to pay for his surgery in a private clinic because the public ones did not take Palestinians. The same laws barred her daughters from attending Egypt’s public schools so they were taking online classes organized by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Israel had never welcomed Gazans, but Egypt, in its own way, didn’t either. As Nevin sat in a rented apartment in a strange neighborhood, she looked at other countries, equally unfamiliar, where they might finally settle: France, Italy, the Netherlands.
The life of the Muhaisen family as refugees had now begun.
In Nevin’s dreams, she traveled back to her home in Shajaiye; in her nightmares, she could see an Israeli settlement built on its ruins.
Nevin had wanted to stay in Gaza. But in the end, she chose motherhood over land. She chose Sobhy.
Emma Kehlbeck and
Additional research and translation by Abu Bakr Bashir.