Gaza Exile: 7 Heartbreaking Truths Behind One Woman’s Powerful Fight to Keep Home Alive

One year after escaping Gaza, journalist Noor Harazeen embodies the anguish of over 100,000 displaced Palestinians in Egypt. While physically safe, she’s consumed by survivor’s guilt, knowing her extended family and colleagues endure starvation and relentless bombardment back home. Her days are haunted by Gaza’s devastation, a torment shared by thousands who fled yet remain psychologically trapped there. Their sole focus is the Rafah border’s reopening—even returning to rubble and tents feels preferable to exile.

Noor tends a pot of Gazan sage (meramie), its scent a fragile tether to a homeland slipping further away. Stories of families fleeing past Israeli tanks and corpses mirror her grandmother’s Nakba trauma, deepening her fear this exile may become permanent. Ceasefire talks offer no solace; only the chance to walk home, however broken, sustains their hope.

Gaza Exile: 7 Heartbreaking Truths Behind One Woman’s Powerful Fight to Keep Home Alive

In a Cairo apartment, Palestinian journalist Noor Harazeen tends to a pot of sage—meramie in her dialect. Its earthy fragrance is a time machine. For a breath, she’s back in Gaza: sipping tea with family, hearing streets buzz with life, feeling the sun on the Mediterranean shore. Then reality returns. It’s been a year since she fled Israeli bombardment through the Rafah border. A year of safety in Egypt. A year of survivor’s guilt.  

The Weight of Survival 

Noor’s voice tightens as she speaks. “I live here while my family, friends, and colleagues starve under bombs. Moving on? Impossible.” She’s among over 100,000 Gazans who escaped to Egypt, grateful for refuge yet tormented by what—and who—they left behind. Their shared existence is a paradox: relief for their own safety, anguish for those still trapped.  

The Ghosts of the Exodus Road 

Her reporting takes her to Al-Bureij refugee camp’s gates, where families recently walked for hours under scorching sun to reach southern Gaza. “They passed Israeli tanks on both sides,” Noor recounts. “Walking past corpses, terrified.” The echoes of her grandmother’s Nakba stories haunt her: “Will my exile become another ‘Catastrophe’?”  

The Border That Governs Hope 

Ceasefire talks flicker and fade. For Noor and thousands like her, only one question matters: When will Rafah reopen? Even returning to rubble and tents, she insists, would heal the heart. “We know homes are gone. We’d fight for flour, water, Wi-Fi. But we’d be home.”  

A Pot of Sage, a Pact with Memory 

The meramie plant is Noor’s rebellion against despair. It anchors her when Gaza’s trauma floods her days—from waking thoughts to nightmares. “This smell is my childhood,” she says. It’s also a promise: her children will know where they come from, even if home remains out of reach.  

The Unanswered Question 

As truce negotiations stall, the border’s fate hangs in limbo. Will Israel control it? Will Egypt? For Noor, geopolitics crystallizes into a single ache: “I refuse to believe I won’t return.” Her sage grows stubbornly in Cairo’s soil, a fragile but tenacious symbol of resilience. Like 100,000 displaced Gazans, she waits. Not for normalcy, but for the right to walk back into the broken heart of home.