Um Khalid

Off a dusty road on the outskirts of Rafah, Um Khalid (Nabila Qishta) welcomes us into a newly built concrete-block house with fantastic yellow loofah flowers starting to climb up the façade. Devastation and rubble surround the well-tended dooryard; the skeletons of two completely destroyed buildings loom over it. A tractor rolls by, carrying fodder to some sheep penned among the debris next door. Um Khalid explains:

My family has owned this land for a long time, but after my father died, my brothers decided it wasn’t worth the effort to continue farming it since so much of what they earned had to go toward taxes and irrigation. We couldn’t pay, and the family scattered: some to work in Saudi Arabia, others to the Emirates. The rest stayed in Khan Younis.