SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Last month, on the first day of the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, I got the chance to talk with a Palestinian journalist and student from Gaza City. Her name is Nour Elassy, and she was displaced with her family for 15 months due to the fighting there. But after the ceasefire deal, Nour saw hope. Here she is from that January interview just after the fighting paused.
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NOUR ELASSY: I am just so excited, so excited to be over with this nightmare.
DETROW: Since then, she has been sending us voice notes of her dayslong journey back to her childhood home.
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ELASSY: Finally, Hamas decided to release this one specific hostage. And Alhamdulillah, the people were allowed - we were allowed to go back to the north. Finally, after 470 days of displacement in the south and the suffering and the struggle we have endured, we are finally allowed to go back to our homes. Well, I did not get to go back home today. But my brother went, and my sisters and their kids went. They went back to their homes, and my sisters got reunited with their husbands after 470 days of not seeing them. And I mean, my sister gave birth to her little one during this war, and her father never got to see her. And now I just cannot imagine how their reunion looks like. The streets and everything was so full of joy and relief. Today was a really historical memorial day.
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ELASSY: Returning back home was a truly a lifetime experience. It was traumatizing at the same time. As we kept, like, moving forward in the car, I kept asking, where am I? Where am I? Like, I could not recognize anything. They have altered everything in the north, and I just could not recognize anything.
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ELASSY: So the first time I walked into the neighborhood, the streets where I saw every day the sights, it was so different. Like, there was a cemetery near our house that I could not recognize that it's a cemetery. They have turned it into just sand. Like, even the dead could not escape them. That's one of the sights that really broke my heart.
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ELASSY: When I entered the front door and walked straight to my room, I just opened the door, and I just saw everything so full of dust, like, layers of black dust. But everything is still the same. It's like nothing happened while everything happened.
Finally, after 15 months of displacement, I am back. We are back to the home where I was born. And it's obviously not the same, but I'm still so grateful that it's still standing.
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DETROW: That was Nour Elassy discussing her journey back to her childhood home after 15 months of displacement.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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