Books, a Dog and an Oud: What Palestinians Carried When They Fled Their Homes

When Israel's military offensive on Gaza began in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were uprooted from their homes, many of them ordered to move south under Israeli displacement notices. Families had only hours, and sometimes only minutes, to decide what mattered most to them. Over the years that followed, the same people would be forced to move again and again, and the small collection of items they carried on that first night became some of the few remaining links to the lives they had left behind.

The human cost of the war has been staggering. By September 27, 2026, Gaza's Ministry of Health reported that at least 74,018 Palestinians had been killed and 175,079 injured in the territory since the conflict started. Behind those figures are households emptied of possessions as well as people, and a landscape in which photographs, furniture, clothing and heirlooms were destroyed or abandoned as entire neighbourhoods were damaged or rendered uninhabitable.

Against that backdrop, journalists Maram Humaid and Abdelhakim Abu Riash asked residents of Gaza a simple question: what did you take when you fled, and what has stayed with you through repeated displacement? The answers were intimate rather than material. Some left with nothing at all. Others grabbed a single object they could not bear to surrender — a book, a musical instrument, a toy, a pet or a keepsake — and in doing so revealed what they considered inseparable from their identity.

Omar Abdel Hakim Hamad, 30, was at home in Beit Hanoon, in the north of the Gaza Strip, when a displacement order arrived at around midnight. Heavy bombardment was already under way, but he chose to remain a little longer, determined to salvage what he could from the house on the assumption that he might never be allowed to return. The first thing he thought of saving was his personal library of roughly 500 volumes.

In the time available, Omar managed to take about 200 of them, carefully prioritising older and rarer titles that he believed could not be replaced if they were lost. Since leaving Beit Hanoon on October 30, 2023, he has been displaced 13 times, moving first to Gaza City and later south to the Maghazi refugee camp, where he remains uprooted today. The books, he explains, are not merely property. "They are part of who I am," he says, tracing his passion for reading back to the age of 15.

Among the volumes he carried out is a 1933 edition of Kalila wa Dimna, the classic collection of animal fables, a possession whose age and rarity underlined why he fought to keep it. The choice also carried a heavier irony during the famine-like conditions that gripped Gaza for large portions of the war: Omar says he at one point considered swapping his entire library for one or two kilogrammes of flour. He is grateful that he held on to most of it instead.

Omar's story did not end with salvage. Today he runs the Phoenix Library in the centre of Gaza City, which holds about 7,000 books — some 3,000 of them rescued from libraries destroyed during the war, and another 4,000 acquired afterwards. The project illustrates a broader implication of the displacement: cultural life in Gaza is being reconstructed largely through the efforts of individuals who saved what they could, and through donations and purchases pieced together amid scarcity.

For Shahd Abu Khosa, 30, the decision was different. When she left her home in Gaza's al-Jalaa neighbourhood on October 16, 2023, she took her two dogs, Lily and Bobby. Her route ran from al-Shifa Hospital to Tal al-Hawa, south of Gaza City, then to a house and finally to a school being used as a shelter — a sequence of moves that mirrored the way families were shuffled across the strip as front lines shifted.

The journey was hard on both animals. Lily was terrified by the sound of bombardment and would hide whenever shelling began, while Bobby eventually died of starvation after food became unavailable. "I never thought of leaving Lily behind," Shahd says, describing the dog as a member of the family. During the famine, Lily survived on whatever the family itself was eating, including lentils and bread, as Shahd continued to divide their limited rations with her.

Shahd says she was once afraid of dogs, a fear that dissolved after her sister brought Lily and Bobby from Egypt. Lily became particularly close to her, staying by her side and sharing her food. Shahd describes the dog as loyal and gentle, saying she would sense when Shahd was in danger and try to protect her. Her hope now is that every pet in Gaza can find somewhere safe, with food, water and a place to sleep, "away from fear and harm, and without being thrown out".

The youngest figure in the account is Yaseen al-Qubt, 16, who left his home in Beit Lahiya on October 12, 2023, taking his oud with him as his family moved to az-Zawaida in central Gaza. Carrying a musical instrument out of a war zone is a deliberate act of cultural preservation, particularly for a teenager whose education, social life and routine were interrupted within days of the war beginning.

Taken together, the three stories show that what Palestinians saved was rarely of high monetary value. Books, a dog and an oud cannot be insured or easily replaced, but they represent continuity — of learning, of companionship and of artistic tradition — in a crisis designed to strip people of both. As the displacement count runs into double digits for many families, these objects have become portable homes.

The photo-essay also underlines what is lost when an entire population is repeatedly moved: not only shelter and livelihoods, but the accumulated fabric of everyday life. Omar's rescued shelves, Shahd's insistence on feeding Lily, and Yaseen's oud are small acts of resistance against erasure, and a reminder that survival in Gaza has been measured as much by what people managed to keep as by what they were forced to leave.