For Gaza family living in tent city, campfire is the only home

RAFAH, Gaza Strip – For the Maarouf family, living in Rafah’s tent city after fleeing their house in Gaza at the war nearly three months ago, home is now the small campfire they sit around each night.

Supplies of wood, scavenged from ruined buildings, were exhausted long ago in the devastated Palestinian enclave, and the small fires of displaced, destitute people are now fed with bits of cloth or plastic.

“There is no safety. We’re scared, I swear. My children are scared and say to me, ‘Dad we’re out in the open.’ I tell them ‘God help us, where can we go?'” says Shadi Maarouf, his face lit up by the firelight.

The Maaroufs, from Beit Lahia close to the northern border with Israel, fled on the first day of Israel’s bombardment, launched in response to Hamas’s October 7 terror onslaught in which 1,200 people were killed and 240 were kidnapped into Gaza.

The Maaroufs sought refuge in a shelter in another northern district but found it to be unsafe and moved on.

They stayed in al-Nuseirat, in central Gaza, for a month but airstrikes came close too often. Then they moved south, to Rafah, right on the frontier with Egypt.

The family now sits around the campfire outside their tent made of pieces of wood and tarpaulin. They hold their four-month-old baby and play with her or warm their hands near the stuttering flames.

Shadi Maarouf, his wife Safeya and their six children huddle for warmth against the biting cold. “This life in Rafah is a tragedy,” Maarouf says. “We sleep in fear,” says Safeya Maarouf, who struggles to find diapers and baby formula for her daughter.

“What can we do? There is no shelter. The life and conditions are difficult, for us and everyone else, all the people, not just us. All the people are suffering, they are all in pain. There are no bathrooms, no water, no warmth, no safety. We sleep in fear,” she says.