The suffering of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip did not begin when the infamous collective punishment siege officially started back in 2007, but rather much earlier. I am a Palestinian Jerusalemite, born and raised to a family that has been living in Jerusalem since the seventh century. My mother is from Gaza; she grew up in a beautiful house that was built by her father, Munir al-Rayyes, the former mayor of Gaza, in the late 1950s after Israel destroyed their previous home during the 1956 War, also known as the Suez Crisis.

Credit: 
Courtesy of Munir Nusseibeh
Perspective: Our Shrinking Mobility—An Ominous Sense of Déjà Vu
My memory of Gaza traces back to my early childhood in the 1980s. This memory is full of warm and happy moments with my grandmother, uncle, aunt, and cousins. Our family trips to Gaza involved playing with relatives, visits to a family farm, rides on carts pulled by a horse or a donkey, walks around the citrus trees, collecting fruits, and visits to the beach.
During the Palestinian uprising of 1987, known as the First Intifada, Israel’s measures of suppression in the Gaza Strip were stricter than the rest of the occupied Palestinian Territorities (oPT). I frequently witnessed harsh curfews in Gaza during family visits where people would not be allowed to walk on the streets during day or night. I saw forms of humiliation when the Israeli army would force Palestinians to clean the walls of their homes facing the street that featured Palestinian national symbols and slogans. I also witnessed a high level of police and army brutality against Palestinians, which was much worse in Gaza than in Jerusalem. Despite these horrific experiences, the period of the Intifada did not prevent me from visiting Gaza, and my Gaza-based relatives also continued to visit my family in Jerusalem.
In the early 1990s, the promise of a comprehensive peace process was on the horizon, leading to the launch of what became known as the Oslo Accords. Palestinian and Israeli leaders decided to establish a Palestinian autonomous authority in parts of the oPT. This decision was seen as the first step in the process, leading to negotiations agreed upon by Palestinians and Israelis. Indeed, this process brought about positive changes to Gaza: The authority that was established in Gaza began to work on building infrastructure, and some forms of Palestinian political life were suddenly possible through elections and engagements. One of my uncles, Nahedh, had been living in Syria at the time, and because of the process, he was able to return to Palestine and serve as a legislative council member, judge, and later minister in the Palestinian Authority.
Although these developments occurred, Israel also started quickly introducing new policies that separated Gaza from the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and restricting access into Gaza, which I witnessed and experienced firsthand as a child.
Prior to the peace process, we easily traveled to Gaza. Within about an hour, we could drive to my grandparents’ house. After the peace process began, however, Israel installed a checkpoint that progressively restricted our access.
First, Israeli authorities introduced a policy that prevented us from driving our own cars into the Gaza Strip. We had to park outside the checkpoint, pass through on foot, enter Gaza, and take a shared car or taxi to our destination.
Then, they introduced a permit that people needed to obtain in order to cross the checkpoint. While it was initially easy to obtain, they gradually complicated the process, even rejecting permit applications at times.
There was a period when they froze the permits and only allowed people to apply for them at certain times. During the Eid holidays in the mid-1990s, Israeli authorities announced that they would remove the ban on entering Gaza, and people only needed to send a fax requesting a permit and call to check that they had received it. My parents completed the correct process and took my family to the Erez checkpoint, a border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel; however, the soldiers denied the permit and sent us back. The next day, we went through the same experience. Only on the third and last day of the Eid holiday did they allow us into Gaza.
As the years went by, access to Gaza became increasingly difficult, and when the peace talks collapsed in 2000 at the Camp David Summit, it became almost impossible to enter Gaza. Since then, only a few exceptions have been made to allow Palestinians from elsewhere to enter Gaza. My mother only entered Gaza in 2010 when my uncle passed away; I managed to visit in 2008 as part of an international organization team. Regarding my family members who lived in Gaza, only those who had a life-threatening disease and managed to obtain a medical entry permit for treatment were able to leave and make it into Jerusalem or elsewhere in Palestine for the requisite care.
The peace talks that took place over time did not promise peace. My uncle Nahedh, who was also a poet, wrote a poem in the early 1990s that he titled “Nightmares during the Day,” expressing pessimistic thoughts following his return to Gaza and anticipating that the “cage” he returned to “will soon be locked.”1 Today, because of the current genocidal campaign in Gaza following the 2023–24 Gaza War, everything that I once knew in Gaza does not exist in the same way. Israel has destroyed all the necessary means for life in Gaza. My grandparents’ house with all of its contents has been burned, including books, manuscripts, poems, and old furniture. All my relatives from Gaza have been displaced and their property destroyed or burned. Al-Rimal, the neighborhood where my grandparents’ home was located, has been devastated. Neighbors and relatives who remained in the area have been butchered.
The separation between the West Bank and Gaza has been systematic since the beginning of the peace process. Although Israel accepted to include a text in the Oslo I Agreement that stipulated that the West Bank and Gaza were one territorial unit, Israeli policies have progressively worked to isolate Gaza from the world, especially from the rest of Palestine. The nine-meter Separation Wall around the West Bank, built in the early 2000s shortly after the Oslo Accords, is still a reality that one cannot believe.
As we approach a new reality in Palestine, Israeli leaders are again publicly announcing their intention to annex parts of the West Bank to Israel. Simultaneously, limits on Palestinians’ mobility within the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, are quickly increasing. New checkpoints and roadblocks are installed, and daily new closures of main roads and checkpoints have become part of our routine experience in and around Jerusalem.
Once the ceasefire/truce took effect in the Gaza Strip on January 19, 2025, Israel immediately installed a number of new roadblocks and checkpoints, forcing whole Palestinian communities to be confined to their neighborhoods or cities. Over the past few days, many colleagues at the university have been unable to even reach their offices. Meetings have been canceled or moved online.
It seems, unfortunately, that we are witnessing a new reality in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, where more segregation and fragmentation of the Palestinian people is in progress, filling me with an ominous sense of déjà vu. What lies ahead?
Notes
Nahedh Munir al-Rayyes, “Nightmares during the Day” [in Arabic], in Mamalik al-narinj (Ramallah: The Palestinian Ministry of Culture, 2007), 17.