What Fits in a Flight From Gaza?

Omar Abdel Hakim Hamad carried about 200 books when he left Beit Hanoon in northern Gaza on October 30, 2023, Al Jazeera reports in its October 8 account of possessions Palestinians took into displacement. Hamad, 30, had received a displacement order at about midnight. Despite heavy bombardment, he stayed longer to collect belongings because he feared he might never return.

His personal library held about 500 books. Hamad selected old and rare volumes that he felt could not be replaced, including a 1933 edition of Kalila wa Dimna. His love of reading began at 15, well before the departure that turned choosing books into an urgent decision. “They are part of who I am,” he told Al Jazeera.

Before departure, the books belonged to an ordinary reading life. During flight, their weight and replaceability became conditions of keeping them. A count of 200 records what Hamad managed to carry, but it does not tell us the fate of every volume left behind. The inventory is competent at arithmetic and poorly qualified to describe a home.

Since leaving Beit Hanoon, Hamad has been displaced 13 times, moving first to Gaza City and later south to the Maghazi refugee camp, where Al Jazeera says he remains displaced. The books connect these interrupted places with a life that preceded them. That continuity belongs to Hamad’s account; it should not become a claim that all displaced Palestinians chose, carried, or understood their belongings in the same way.

During what the report describes as famine-like conditions, Hamad considered exchanging his entire library for one or two kilograms of flour. He says he is grateful that he kept most of it. The contemplated exchange puts a limit on any comfortable account of cherished possessions: attachment did not remove hunger, and keeping the books was not a choice made outside material need.

Al Jazeera also reports that Hamad’s Phoenix Library in central Gaza City now contains about 7,000 books. About 3,000 came from libraries destroyed during the war, and another 4,000 were bought. Those figures describe work that extends beyond preserving a private collection. They do not establish that Hamad has recovered a secure home, nor does the library’s growth cancel the repeated moves documented in his account.

Hamad can still keep much of the collection he carried, including the old edition he selected when departure became urgent. The books leave reading available and preserve something he explicitly identifies as part of himself. What their preservation cannot supply is the home he feared losing, or the freedom to keep a library without weighing it against flour.