The Home We Built but Never Lived In

Before the war in Gaza, the paintings waited for a home.

They are still stacked quietly in a corner of my parents’ house, wrapped in plastic, untouched by dust or sunlight. I bought them during my engagement, imagining the walls they would hang on in the apartment my husband and I spent months preparing together. At the time, our conversations revolved around ordinary things: furniture, curtains, kitchen shelves, the color of the living room walls.

In Gaza, preparing a home takes years of sacrifice. Couples save slowly, postponing comforts and carefully planning every detail. My husband and I visited the apartment constantly while we were engaged, checking on construction, discussing decorations, and imagining the future inside those rooms. I remember standing in the empty space before the furniture arrived, trying to picture what our life would look like there years later.

But we never truly got to live in it.

Our apartment was located in the area later marked by the Israeli military as part of the “yellow line,” a designation that meant intense military operations and, ultimately, total erasure. Like countless homes, ours was reduced to rubble during the war.

The destruction did not happen quietly. Entire neighborhoods disappeared at once. Streets that once carried children’s voices became filled with dust, shattered concrete, and collapsed buildings leaning into one another. Places that once felt familiar suddenly looked foreign.

Losing our home scattered us emotionally as much as physically.

What I remember most is not the moment our apartment was destroyed. It is everything that came afterward. The feeling of never fully unpacking. Of keeping important documents in one bag because we might have to leave again. Of looking around each new room and wondering whether it was worth arranging our belongings when we could be gone a week later.

Since the beginning of the war, my husband and I have moved from one temporary place to another, carrying only what we could manage. Every displacement comes with the same exhausting uncertainty: where will we go next, and how long can we stay? Living this way slowly changes a person. You stop making plans. You stop feeling anchored to anything. Even simple routines begin to disappear.

Now, we live in a small rented apartment, a place that does not truly feel like home. It lacks the warmth and spirit we once imagined for ourselves, yet we keep trying to leave traces of our identity inside it. Small decorations, carefully arranged corners, and ordinary routines have become our way of resisting despair and holding onto our love for life and beauty. We know this apartment is temporary, but we force ourselves to adapt so grief does not swallow us whole. At the same time, like many families across Gaza, we follow every discussion about reconstruction plans and every fragile sign about a permanent end to the war, clinging to the hope that one day we may rebuild our destroyed home and finally settle in a place that belongs to us, a place where we, too, can belong.

Sometimes I find myself thinking less about the apartment itself and more about the life we were supposed to have inside it. We never hosted my family there. We never sat together after long days of work discussing ordinary problems. We never experienced the quiet stability newly married couples search for when they build a home together.

War interrupted our lives before they had the chance to properly begin.

What makes the loss harder is how ordinary our dreams were. We did not want luxury. We wanted stability. A dining table. Family photographs on the walls. Morning coffee in our own kitchen. A place where our future children could grow up safely.

Now those dreams feel painfully distant.

Sometimes I think about how many apartments across Gaza are frozen in time like ours. Closets that were never filled. Kitchens that never hosted a family meal. Children’s bedrooms that existed only as plans discussed between parents. We are not the only family carrying an unfinished future.

Sometimes I return to the paintings still sitting at my parents’ house and wonder whether they will ever leave those boxes.

Will we one day rebuild our apartment from the ground up? Will we finally hang those paintings on walls of our own? Or will our home remain another unfinished dream buried beneath Gaza’s rubble?

I still do not know the answer.