ABU JABAL

Tahani and her daughter Sidra return home after seven months of living in tents, hospitals, and schools. However, the journey home brings back many memories and emotions that were hidden in their displacement bags, moments of panic, and pain. These feelings Tahani will never be able to ignore: feelings of loss, regret, and the reality that nothing will ever be the same. Tahani and Sidra lost their mountain, as they call him, a son and brother they lost to a bullet in the neck in the first hours of the genocide in Gaza as they were fleeing their home due to the intense shelling. After the ground invasion of Rafah and the withdrawal from Khan Yunis following its destruction, the displaced people in Rafah no longer had any place to stay. Tahani decided to return to Khan Yunis, only to be shocked by the scale of the destruction. She found everything she had left behind had disappeared, and she found no place to seek shelter except the grave of Abu Jabal, and "Jabal" in Arabic means "mountain." The journey back to home, or to its ruins, is the dream of hundreds of thousands of Gazans living in a few schools and tents by the sea, due to the Israeli army preventing them from returning to their neighborhoods and cities. However, no one is usually prepared for what they will see, nor can they anticipate the events that await them.